My personal favorites are the MIT and BSD licneses -- both are similar, and basically grant people the right to do whatever they want provided that they preserve attribution in source code (so called "permissive licenses").
MIT is marginally simpler to read and is unambiguous, since there's only one version. For this reason, it's my personal favorite. There's actually 3 versions of the BSD license: 4-clause, 3-clause, and 2-clause: - 2-clause is functionally identical to the MIT license. If you want to go with this, just use the MIT license to prevent confusion. :) - 3-clause adds the restriction that the original author's name can't be used in advertising. - Avoid the 4-clause version -- it has an annoying advertising clause that I've never heard anything good about. There's also the Apache license, which is similar to BSD. However, it's a much stronger document from a legal perspective, and adds a patent grant. This comes at the expense of readability. (Roughly 3 paragraphs vs 25 paragraphs) Avoid public domain -- as has been mentioned, some jurisdictions don't recognize an author's right to place a work into the public domain before copyright expires. For this reason, it's legally ambiguous, which is bad for the people using your code. There's also no warranty disclaimer, so somebody could (theoretically) take you to court if your code has bugs and something breaks. I recommend reading this PDF, which goes into a lot of detail on these three licenses: http://oreilly.com/openbook/osfreesoft/book/ch02.pdf -- Trevor On Wednesday, May 2, 2012, Jenna Fox wrote: > A few of you sounded interested in using it. I haven't explicitly put a > software license on it, so I guess it's not technically FOSS yet. What > licenses are good? BSD? Public Domain? > > > — > Jenna > >
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