

Ask HN: How to choose a license on GitHub? - rduchnik

I have a plugin up on GitHub and someone asked me for a license.txt file, which is fine, I can toss one up, but not sure on what to put in.  I looked at some samples but they are all quite different.<p>Basically I want to make it completely free to use for whatever purpose, commercial or otherwise, only thing I ask for is credit, so they can't say they built it, in their license somewhere it would have to say "build on yadda ydadda".
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notmyname
Check out <http://www.opensource.org/licenses/category>. You can probably find
something you like in the "License that are popular and widely used or with
strong communities" section.

The basic requirements that you described are probably met by either Apache2
or BSD. Others like GPL meet your requirements but add other requirements as
well (eg derivative works must be open as well).

Often times licensing can become a religious debate. Read the major ones and
choose the one that is best for you.

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tnorthcutt
I'd suggest looking at the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license:
<http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/>

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zoowar
Have a look at CC0 <https://creativecommons.org/choose/zero/>

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horsehead
The GNU license?

<http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>

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saiko-chriskun
did you not read the original post?

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horsehead
I did.

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noahc
It violates the "only thing I ask..." line because it requires that all
derivative works be GPL as well.

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horsehead
While I'm not exactly up to speed on all the details of the GPL, but i was
under impression that you could tweak licenses as you wanted .... in that
case, the GPL would give you a nice framework to start with.

That's _if_ i'm remembering licensing conventions correctly.

