Software License and Rights

Provide a license with your software.

• Copyright licensing protects the ownership of original creative works. Before choosing a license for your software, review its software components for inclusion of other licensed or copyrighted software to make sure that your contribution is in compliance with the contributions of the included software. This provides the necessary attribution linkages to creative works that are built on top of the contributions of others.

• Selecting a license for your software is important. While there are many licenses available to use, the following are commonly used open source licenses:

  • Apache-2.0
  • BSD3-Clause
  • MIT

• Should you need a non-open source or require a different open source license than those recommended above, try visiting the site https://choosealicense.com/ which maintains a simple wizard for helping end users select an open source license. For a more comprehensive view of all licenses available (for both software or documentation) visit the SPDX Project which has a list of over 100 licenses to choose from. Visit https://spdx.org/licenses/ for more information.