🔐Licensing

The first step to open sourcing a project is to decide which license will help meet the aims of the project in the best way.

MIT, Apache 2.0, and GPLv3 are the most popular open source licences, but there are other options to choose from.

🎒 Good to know information

When you start looking at different types of licenses, you will most likely wonder:

Why are there so many types of licenses? Aren't they all the same?

And the truth is that while they may be similar, no two licenses are the exact same. All licenses have to be certified by the OSI and meet a certain range of criteria.

License approval process:

  1. Comply with the open source definition:

Basically - have open source code, have no restrictions, allow derived works (can ask them to have a slightly different name than the original software), and not be limited to a product or type of platform.

  1. Choose one of the 3 types of licence approvals:

  • Retirement (saying bye to current licence),

  • Legacy Approval (if the licence has been extensively used unofficially by the community and you want to make it official)

  • Approval (first timers)

  1. Each license should be clearly distinguishable from current licenses. The application form to submit a new type of license for approval must include:

  • Rationale: Clearly state rationale for a new licence.

  • Distinguish: Compare to and contrast with the most similar OSI-approved licence(s)

  • Legal review: Describe any legal review the licence has been through, and provide results of any legal analysis if available

  • Proliferation category: Recommend which licence proliferation category is appropriate

Need to know information:

  1. How to choose a license

  2. How to get the license

Helpful information: Comparing licenses

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