Licensing for people who publish things

The first time I published code, I skipped the licence file — it felt like paperwork for projects bigger than mine. That was already a decision: no licence means all rights reserved, which means nobody legally can use what I published for them.

What a licence actually decides

A licence is the answer to one question: what may strangers do with this? Run it, study it, modify it, redistribute it — and under what conditions. Everything else is detail.

The short field guide

• MIT — the handshake licence: do almost anything, keep the notice, no warranty. The default for small tools that want maximum adoption.
• Apache 2.0 — MIT plus explicit patent grant. For projects where patents could matter.
• GPL family — the viral licence: users get freedom, and derivatives must pass it on. A philosophical choice, not just a legal one.
• CC-BY — for content (like writing), not code.

How I choose

For tools I want spread widely: MIT. For anything where I want downstream work to stay open: GPL. The specific answer matters less than making one deliberately — a repo without a licence isn't neutral, it's closed, published by accident.

One more practical point: licence files belong in every repository, including small ones. Especially small ones. That's the version of you that will be grateful.