[eridius]

If you don't care about licensing, MIT, or BSD, is a fantastic choice. Definitely don't choose GPL. The only people who should ever choose GPL are people who do care about licensing and have specifically made the decision that they like what the GPL does. But if you don't care about licensing, then you can't make an informed choice about whether GPL is appropriate, and it's far better to err on the side of using a permissive license (e.g. MIT or BSD) than using a restrictive viral license like GPL.

[LukeShu]

If you don't care about licensing, GPL is a fantastic choice. Definitely don't choose MIT or BSD. The only people who should ever choose MIT are people who do care about licensing and have specifically made the decision that they like what the MIT license does. But if you don't care about licensing, then you can't make an informed choice about whether MIT is appropriate, and it's far better to err on the side of using a copyleft license (e.g. GNU) than using a permissive license like MIT.

You've just said "if you can't make an informed decision, then you should make the choice that I agree with" (from other comments, you clearly are someone who does care about licensing, and don't like the GPL). It works just as well both ways. You even slipped in some loaded propaganda words ("restrictive viral"), just in case anyone had any doubt that you weren't offering objective advice.

Fundamentally, there's a choice, and there's no getting around that with "if you don't care" defaults.

[eridius]

No, I said if you can't make an informed decision, go with the licenses that are widely regarded as being the least restrictive.

> You even slipped in some loaded propaganda words

GPL proponents describe the GPL as viral, and I'd be surprised if anyone tried to argue that it's not a restrictive license, so I'd hardly call that "propaganda".

> If you don't care about licensing, GPL is a fantastic choice.

This is incredibly wrong, and it's kind of horrifying to me to see you try and trick uninformed people into picking something viral and restrictive like the GPL. You should be ashamed of yourself.

If you don't care about licensing, do not pick GPL. The license exists specifically for people that believe in what that license does, and it's literally the worst possible license choice for someone who doesn't care about the license.

[wtetzner]

> it's literally the worst possible license choice for someone who doesn't care about the license.

Why is that? Because with the GPL you can't as easily capitalize commercially on the work of others at no cost? Or because picking a more permissive permissive license means that other people can keep their improvements to the source you provided proprietary?

The GPL seems like the safest choice if you don't know what to pick.

[eridius]

It's only "safest" in that it puts a bunch of restrictions that the original developer hopefully cares about. If the original developer doesn't care about licensing, then they don't care about those restrictions and so having them in place is counterproductive.

GPL is the worst choice because it's basically the most restrictive license I can think of, and it's intentionally viral, which makes GPL-licensed software dangerous to work with (the source of) by anyone who hasn't already bought into the GPL ecosystem.

[e12e]

I'm a big proponent/believer in copyleft - to the point that I would often recommend gpl v3 or agpl. But I also think you're right - if you don't know/care, permissive is the way to go.

But I would actually recommend cc0. Especially for small, trivial projects - I guess I can see that people want attribution - but I think cc0 can sometimes makes things much easier. This is especially true for projects that are meant to be educational/example code.

It clears up any and all confusions about copy-pasting and so on. The main counterpoint is that mit, apache (Apl) and 2/3-clause bsd are all well-known.

If I had to recommend just one licence it would probably be Apl, due to the patent grant.

[eridius]

I'm agree that something like cc0 is a good idea for sample code, or code that is otherwise intended to be copy&pasted. I don't think libraries are usually intended to be copy&pasted though, so a license like MIT or BSD is more appropriate.

I'm not familiar with the Apl license.

My personal preference at this point is to dual-license under both The Apache License, Version 2.0 and MIT. The Apache license has a patent grant and it also has the nice property where it doesn't include the name of the copyright holder so you only need one copy of the license even if you're using 20 different Apache-licensed libraries. And the dual license under MIT is just because MIT is a simpler and more well-known license, so this is to avoid scaring off anyone who isn't familiar with the Apache license.

[e12e]

Apl (or rather "APL"): apache public licence :)

[eridius]

AFAIK there is no license called the "apache public license". There is the "Apache License, Version 2.0" and the older "Apache License, Version 1.1". I actually searched DDG for "APL license" and came up with something I'd never seen before called the "Adaptive Public License".

[e12e]

Might be an outdated acronym:

https://opensource.org/licenses/apachepl.php (Uses APL)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_License (Uses AL)

[Ed: Or indeed, just an old misspelling/error that I've repeated here. Anyway - I meant the Apache License v2]