Many of us geeks don’t really care about users, tractions, etc. when we spam GitHub with our little toy projects. I mean, who knows if we really have the time to maintain them? Certainly, there’s almost no money in it anyway, so we might just as well give it away for free (e.g. jOOX).
Nonetheless, you should choose a license to show your intent. But which license to choose? Jeff Atwood says “Any License”. He then goes on to recommend the WTFPL or Do What The Fuck You Want Public License. I mean, this is just like arbitrarily throwing software around you in the streets:
But we claim that there is another, much better license for this kind of useless little toy project. It’s called Beerware. The license text reads:
/* * ------------------------------------------------ * "THE BEER-WARE LICENSE" (Revision 42): * wrote this file. As long as * you retain this notice you can do whatever you * want with this stuff. If we meet some day, and * you think this stuff is worth it, you can buy * me a beer in return [Your Name Here] * ------------------------------------------------ */
So, when you’re in for some street credibility, give this some serious thought!
Increase your street credibility, use the beerware license
… just kidding. Use the ASL 2.0 and/or the CC-BY 3.0
