When thinking about creating an open source project, starting with the question which license to choose is the wrong approach. Rather, you should ask yourself: Why am I creating this open source project and what do I want to achieve with it? Once you have settled this question, you can use the following simplified cheat […]

In 2009, half of open source code was licensed under the GPLv2 license, the canonical copyleft license. Every other license had less than 10% market share. Over the years, the MIT license and other permissive licenses kept climbing at the expense of the GPLv2. As of today, the MIT license is the leading license with […]

In a well-working community open source project, many people contribute. In particular, software developers will submit code contributions. As a consequence, without further measures, the copyright in the project’s code will be widely shared among its contributors.  To ensure that a project can be used without fear of violating someone’s intellectual property rights, all project […]