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Discussion on: License, what did I just do to my software?

 
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Ben Halpern

There are licenses that would restrict commercial use or restrict use on really any terms. An yesβ€”licenses are essentially created on the back of a napkin. You can create them out of thin air. The questions tend to be around are they legally enforceable? And in that regard it's nice if they've been around long enough to stand up to scrutiny or evolve based on challenges.

Not all legal documents are truly enforceable, and you never really know until you wind up in court. But this is why people tend to try and choose licenses that a bunch of other people are also relying on. It's sort of like strength in numbers. If the whole world decided on a shared understanding of something and nobody really challenged that for a while, it holds a lot more weight than if you whip something up out of thin air and say this is the way things are.

Soooo you probably don't want to go totally on your own, but if you poke around you can find a license for pretty much any use case and you're best off picking stuff that other people are using for a bit of strength in numbers.

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Adam Crockett πŸŒ€

A bit off topic but when you react to my posts I tend to get floods of reactions, do you have super admin powers? I'm not licensed to know I guess. Thank you for taking the time, I have certainly got some jumping off points and I hope this helps other people too, great answer.

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Ben Halpern

Well as a mod, I can send an extra "thumbsup" which gives the post more visibility. Most likely has to do with that?

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Adam Crockett πŸŒ€

Ah yes I can do that too. Thanks for clarifying.

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Ben Halpern

And as a super admin, when I or other folks take these actions, they have more impact. It's a complicated system, but you can see in general how it works in the code πŸ˜„