Sweet! So basically there are three types of software licenses, at least as I see it.
Commercial licenses
These are your standard "pay for it, use it" licenses. They can have lots of different conditions and are as numerous as the companies that use them.
Open, but ideological
These licenses open the source and the use of software, but with extra protections around derivatives or use cases. All GPL variants fall into this - the require any software that uses GPL code to also be GPL licensed. It's a literal viral license - using GPL code makes your code GPL.
Fully open
These licenses exist to share software far and wide, with very little restrictions. I personally believe these to be the only true "free" software licenses. Social cost is still a cost! MIT, WTFPL, BSD, and a lot of others fall into this. Often the protections in these are around copyright (you can't just take this software and claim you made it) and legal protections for misuse (if you use this software and it causes damage to your business, you can't sue the creator). Apache also falls into this category for me, but includes protection for patents.
There are tons of variants on these licenses, for pretty much anything you want to do. For some real world context, here is a great piece on the React license changing from BSD+Patents to MIT.
My recommendation is this: unless you have a great reason to use something else, you probably want MIT. It's the most permissive, has good protections, and is widely used.
If you want to see what other licenses do, check out TL;DRLegal. It is a great site for all things TOS, license, EULA's and TOS.
The Saturday before we went open source with DEV, I had the sudden realization of all the last-minute details with our license to get right. I knew enough to know we had to settle on some things, but we had punted on nailing down the details and nobody in our company had a better understanding than me.
And I was at a wedding that weekend. No environment for a lot of last minute research.
And then someone walks into the the wedding ceremony wearing a GNU t-shirt. It's a bold fashion choice for a wedding. Nobody wears a GNU t-shirt to a wedding without also being seriously willing to talk about open source licenses. I knew we wanted to go GLP but I had a lot of questions.
I don't believe in god, but when that man walked into that church I felt some belief wash over me.
Sweet! So basically there are three types of software licenses, at least as I see it.
Commercial licenses
These are your standard "pay for it, use it" licenses. They can have lots of different conditions and are as numerous as the companies that use them.
Open, but ideological
These licenses open the source and the use of software, but with extra protections around derivatives or use cases. All GPL variants fall into this - the require any software that uses GPL code to also be GPL licensed. It's a literal viral license - using GPL code makes your code GPL.
Fully open
These licenses exist to share software far and wide, with very little restrictions. I personally believe these to be the only true "free" software licenses. Social cost is still a cost! MIT, WTFPL, BSD, and a lot of others fall into this. Often the protections in these are around copyright (you can't just take this software and claim you made it) and legal protections for misuse (if you use this software and it causes damage to your business, you can't sue the creator). Apache also falls into this category for me, but includes protection for patents.
There are tons of variants on these licenses, for pretty much anything you want to do. For some real world context, here is a great piece on the React license changing from BSD+Patents to MIT.
My recommendation is this: unless you have a great reason to use something else, you probably want MIT. It's the most permissive, has good protections, and is widely used.
If you want to see what other licenses do, check out TL;DRLegal. It is a great site for all things TOS, license, EULA's and TOS.
Hope this helps!
The Saturday before we went open source with DEV, I had the sudden realization of all the last-minute details with our license to get right. I knew enough to know we had to settle on some things, but we had punted on nailing down the details and nobody in our company had a better understanding than me.
And I was at a wedding that weekend. No environment for a lot of last minute research.
And then someone walks into the the wedding ceremony wearing a GNU t-shirt. It's a bold fashion choice for a wedding. Nobody wears a GNU t-shirt to a wedding without also being seriously willing to talk about open source licenses. I knew we wanted to go GLP but I had a lot of questions.
I don't believe in god, but when that man walked into that church I felt some belief wash over me.
I'd love to know more about the decision to use AGPL over MIT! What was the primary motivating feature of AGPL that made you go with it?