Choosing an Open Source License

4 ^PM October 21, 2003

I’m in the middle of picking an Open Source License for some code that I once released commercially, but now wish to release more openly. The current favourites are the MIT License and the Historical Permission Notice and Disclaimer, because they are simple, relatively liberal and include the all important legalese paragraph that says “don’t sue me”.

Are there other, similar licenses I should be looking at?

By alang | # | Comments (3)

(Posted to Software Development and javablogs)

Comments

At 19:04, 21 Oct 2003 Simon Brown wrote:

I picked the BSD license because it's very much like the MIT one (i.e. simple) and generally well understood and recognised.

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At 23:23, 21 Oct 2003 Alan Green wrote:

I ended up going with the Historical Permission Notice and Disclaimer.

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At 02:55, 22 Oct 2003 Joe Grossberg wrote:

I go with BSD because, adding to Simon's remarks, it's so widely-used that I have confidence in it. If there were major problems with the BSD license, they probably would have surfaced by now.

That said, MIT License isn't exactly obscure.

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