I’m still a student so I’m not exactly the target audience of this question, but still: It’s either MIT or no license at all, because it’s not like I’m going to enforce the license or something. People can do whatever they want with my code
No license at all means that no one can use it. Even if you aren’t enforcing it the person who wants to use it doesn’t know that.
I mean, that’s not stopping people from copypasting or something, and, as I said, I’m not going to try to enforce it so I just don’t bother
It is if they want to do something academic or commercial with it.
Couldn’t you just put “use what you want” on your profile or something where you upload instead of wasting time with licenses?
no license at all
I think the point of a license is to affirm user freedoms, and to make explicit that it is free to use.
If something public has no license, I would probably assume that it’s proprietary (but not necessarily closed-source) and therefore is illegal to use without getting the author’s permission. The default is that you in general can’t use copyrighted material without the copyright owner’s permission, save for fair use. In my view, this position is stupid and bad because it impedes freedom of information, but unfortunately this position is the law.
The default is that you in general can’t use copyrighted material without the copyright owner’s permission, save for fair use
More like the default is you can do whatever the fuck you want with copyrighted material as long as the owner isn’t made aware
I sympathize with that attitude, but I cannot guarantee an employer or my customers that the owner won’t be made aware by some goodie two-shoes.
I’m not saying you shouldn’t ever use copyrighted material without permission. Actually, my view is that copyright is stupid and needs to be abolished, and that the entire purpose of FOSS licensing is to protect against the quirks of copyright and actors powerful enough to abuse them. However, just because you can (and arguably should) pirate copyrighted material doesn’t make it always a prudent choice.
I am an anarchist, so I’m not interested in complying with the law for its own sake. However, I am interested in how the (thugs who enforce the) law could clamp down on me or my customers for reusing other people’s work. Unfortunately, that requires either using FOSS, or going through the dog-and-pony act of setting up a licensing agreement. It is absolutely plausible considering my field that an employer might force me to use proprietary software or even allow my product to be proprietarily licensed, as much as I loathe proprietary shitware.
I usually use MIT, partially because my current interests (AI/LLM stuff) involve interfacing with some other projects that are MIT and partially because it’s just a simple “do whatever” license and I don’t really care to enforce terms. Of course, if I thought some government or company was going to use stuff I develop to launch the nukes or control a robot fist to punch cute little puppies right in the snout then I’d start using a more restrictive license but the odds of that are… pretty much nonexistent for everything I’ve ever created.
if I thought some government or company was going to use stuff I develop to launch the nukes or control a robot fist to punch cute little puppies right in the snout then I’d start using a more restrictive license
A more restrictive license wouldn’t help in that case. They would just have to publish any changes they made to your code. The primary benefit of restrictive licenses like the GPL is to prevent someone from using your code in a proprietary project without contributing anything back.
Always MIT, I want to be able to use my own (and others) software in my commercial ventures.
