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by e12e 3272 days ago
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.

1 comments

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.

Apl (or rather "APL"): apache public licence :)
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".
Might be an outdated acronym: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]