Licensing

Information on which license to choose for you repository

Summary

• Licenses prevent code theft and inappropriate redistribution of code.
• Review common open-source licenses
• License types vary depending on repo goals

General License Info

Below is a list of common open-source licenses.

There isn’t a one size fits all license, so thankfully there are a variety of options. Here are two common ones:

GNU GPL licenses

1. These are the strong licenses
2. Prevents someone from taking our code and privatizing it (and making money off of it)
3. Someone can still use our code, they just need to ensure that what they’re doing with it is open-source
4. “Copyright and license notices must be preserved.”
5. “Contributors provide an express grant of patent rights. When a modified version is used to provide a service over a network, the complete source code of the modified version must be made available.”

MIT license

1. I think this is the most commonly used one
2. “short and simple permissive license… only requiring preservation of copyright and license notices”
3. “Licensed works, modifications, and larger works may be distributed under different terms and without source code.”
4. Someone could basically do whatever they want with the code.
5. Nextstain/ncov repo is currently using this

And here are a couple of youtube videos that were helping in explaining licensing