this post was submitted on 02 May 2025
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Programming

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Licenses are boring but you really need one! (distractedmind.home.blog)
submitted 3 weeks ago by snaggen to c/programming
29 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

It seems people have a hard time understanding the implications of licenses, so I have written a something to help with that.

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[–] JackbyDev 40 points 2 weeks ago (17 children)
  1. AGPL. Strictest. You want a strict license. Don't let people take advantage of you. I see no good reason to pick GPL when AGPL exists.
  2. LGPL. If you want people to be able to use it (but not modify it) without their code having to be FLOSS as well. Still quite strict relatively with everything below.
  3. Apache. Permissive license. If you really want a permissive license, this is the one to go for.
  4. MIT. Permissive but less explicit. Okay for super short code.

Avoid at all costs CC0. CC0 explicitly does not give patent rights. MIT implicitly does.

[–] snaggen 3 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Well, for specific licenses there are use cases for MPL, which is weak copy left. LGPL is trying to state that statical linking is not allowed, while MPL does. Also, EUPL have simmilar advantages over AGPL, plus that it have very clear defined legal juristiction. So, when it comes to specific licenses there are many reasons to use whatever licence you use. Just make sure you use a license that reflects your expectations.

[–] JackbyDev 2 points 2 weeks ago

You can statically link LGPL code so long as you provide the end user instructions on how to use a different version of the LGPL portion of your code.

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#LGPLStaticVsDynamic

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