Hey everyone! I have five repositories on GitHub that I developed during my university course. Now that I've completed the assessment, I'm thinking about making them public. However, I'm unsure which license, if any, I should attach to them. Most of these projects don't really have commercial potential, but there's one project that I'm hoping to improve and potentially commercialize in the future. Should I keep that one private, or would it be okay to make it public under a stricter license? Also, I'm looking for a job, so it seems beneficial to have my repos available. Any advice would be awesome!
1 Answer
Open source licenses are mostly about copyright, which means they only cover your code, not your ideas. If you're concerned about someone taking your concepts, there's no license that can safeguard you there. Patents are an option for ideas but that's a whole different ball game! The choice of license depends on what you're comfortable with:
- **MIT/BSD/Apache**: These let others do what they want with your code as long as they credit you. Great if you want freedom for developers.
- **GPL**: This one enforces that if someone uses your code, their modifications must also be open source. It's often used for projects that should remain free long-term.
- **AGPL**: Similar to GPL but even stricter—any usage, even online, must be open source.
If you're mostly using it to showcase your work for job hunting, the specifics of the license might not matter much. You could also skip a license completely and just keep copyright, which means no one can use your code without permission.
Thanks for all the info! I think I might just leave them without a license, but appreciate knowing my options for future projects.
Just to add, even people who understand licensing sometimes ignore it. It can be frustrating, but I just use the MIT license and don’t stress too much about it, since my code isn’t a hot commodity anyway.