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by ShaneCurcuru 3076 days ago
You have to have a license to attract contributors. https://choosealicense.com/ and github make it easy; there's zero excuse to not have a license.

Permissive licenses attract the broadest range of contributors, so if you're looking to build a large community, they are the way to go. GPL tends to have a smaller overall, but very strong pool of contributors, so if copyleft makes sense for your technology, by all means use it.

Just use a license, please.
1 comments
kakwa_ 3076 days ago
The chance of a personal project building a large community are quite slim regardless of the license.

Chances are a personal OSS project will only attracts a few dozen users and maybe a handful of contributors (contributing mostly small bug fixes) with the creator as the only real developer/maintainer.

There is also a good chance that the maintainer will only contribute from time to time after the initial "dev sprint", if it doesn't abandon the project all together.

Basically the bus factor for such projects is 0. If you are relying on one of them, you should be aware that you may have to maintain a fork on your own in the future.

Given this state of things, I prefer having permissive licenses (ex: MIT) on my projects. It's a way for me to give complete freedom about what you do/want to do with my piece of code (piece of code that I may have abandon but is still useful to you). You can fork it and keep the fork OSS or you can include it inside the source tree of your product and maintain it that way, the later being generally easier.

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