Driver licensing

View blog reactions Written on April 4, 2007 by Chris Heald

Jeff Atwood has a good article today about the various open-source licenses. It’s definitely worth a read, especially if you don’t want to spend excessive amounts of time trying the decipher lawyerese (which is similar to programmerese except it reads like it’s written on a pay-per-word basis) when trying to figure out how you want to license your code.

He also touches on why developers should always license any code they release for others to read and possibly use, which is a rather important piece of the whole puzzle. He says:

Because I did not explicitly indicate a license, I declared an implicit copyright without explaining how others could use my code. Since the code is unlicensed, I could theoretically assert copyright at any time and demand that people stop using my code. Experienced developers won’t touch unlicensed code because they have no legal right to use it. That’s ironic, considering the whole reason I posted the code in the first place was so that other developers could benefit from that code.

Lots of developers - myself included - tend to not think about that kind of thing when we publish some code somewhere. We assume that because we published it without indicating any restrictions, there is an understanding that it may be used freely. This isn’t the case, though, and the lack of a license can actually hinder the progression of knowledge by preventing legality-aware developers from using your code.

Posted in Software Development