I recently wrote a little breakout clone that I want to post online for other people to comment on and to learn from. I was wondering what software licenses to use, and exactly how can I use them? To be more accurate - I know of all the lists (like OSI's one) but there are so many, and no explanation about how to use them / what they are that it's confusing. So what do you suggest?

A license describes how your code is to be used. All code you write is protected by copyright and cannot be copied without authorization, and a license is an authorization to copy the code under certain circumstances. You include a file describing the license in the software bundle, and usually a small notice at the top of each file asserting your copyright and the license type.

The main ones I use are:

• public domain, which is a full no-limit authorization more or less equivalent to giving up any pretense of ownership over the code
  
• New FreeBSD, which lets anyone use the code as long as they mention you as the original author
  
• GPL, which lets anyone use the code, as long as they let anyone use anything they do with the code. To summarize imperfectly, if someone gets GPL code, their code becomes GPL as well.
  

So, you get to choose...

Quote:Original post by Palidine
The only way to know for real is to consult a lawyer.

I'd why, for a breakout clone, you care about having a license at all? I'd be surprised if there was anything truly worth protecting with a license in something like that. I'm not suggesting you shouldn't be proud of the accomplishment, but there are a million breakout clones all over the web.

-me

Well, it's not like I think my clone is the best breakout in the world, it's just that I'm planning on doing other stuff later on, and maybe even make the code's sprite lib the basis for an SDL_Sprite like pygame's sprite lib, so I wanna know stuff like that now...

ToohrVyk - First of all, you signature is sooo true (Python is way better than Perl! Lol at the octopus!)
Second thanks for the reply, you cleared it up a bit. But a different question arose - I'm using SDL which is licensed LGPL. Does that mean my code needs a GPL - compliant license? Is FreeBSD GPL - compliant? Hmmm, you see why was I confused :) So many types...

Mikle

1° Linking to LGPL libraries has no impact on what you can do or not with your code. The only constraint is that you must provide a way for people to change the library version if they want to (which is possible by definition if you're using SDL as a DLL).

2° FreeBSD adds no constraint on how the program may be used, except for mentioning the author — in particular, someone may redistribute it with added constraints, such as closed-source. GPL has the additional constraint that no other constraints may be added (everyone must release under GPL or a GPL-compliant license). Because of this, FreeBSD is not restrictive enough to be GPL-compliant. Yes, it's quite ironic that you can be too free to be free software [wink]