• moreeni@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    10
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    I’m still a student so I’m not exactly the target audience of this question, but still: It’s either MIT or no license at all, because it’s not like I’m going to enforce the license or something. People can do whatever they want with my code

    • saigot
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      21
      ·
      1 year ago

      No license at all means that no one can use it. Even if you aren’t enforcing it the person who wants to use it doesn’t know that.

      • moreeni@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        1 year ago

        I mean, that’s not stopping people from copypasting or something, and, as I said, I’m not going to try to enforce it so I just don’t bother

        • Johnny@feddit.de
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          10
          ·
          1 year ago

          It definitely stops anyone who is at least a little bit serious about what they’re doing.

          • moreeni@lemm.ee
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            1 year ago

            I don’t think any license stopped Microsoft from training Copilot on any public Github Repo. And people usually don’t bother with licenses if they just want to copy a few lines of code. I doubt my whole projects are going to be of much interest to the public anyway

          • nutomic@lemmy.ml
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            3
            arrow-down
            3
            ·
            1 year ago

            It’s not so bad if companies don’t use your project. Normal people won’t care.

            • CoderKat@lemm.ee
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              11
              ·
              edit-2
              1 year ago

              Other FOSS projects can’t use it, either. The only other “normal people” would be, like, tiny private projects and bad actors. Maybe clueless students, but my university project classes required us to appropriately follow licenses when using other people’s code, or we’d get marked down.

              The ability for FOSS projects to use your code is the best part about the FOSS movement. They can generally all copy from each other to improve efficiency, especially since many FOSS licenses are compatible with each other.

              If you want to stop corporations from using your project, use a license that does that. Most typically, the GPL will do that (while still allowing some FOSS projects to use the code). It doesn’t prohibit commercial usage, but for the vast majority of projects, the license is basically a poison pill and thus no closed source project will generally use GPL licensed code. But I personally strongly recommend against the GPL, as it goes too far. Most FOSS projects can’t use GPL code themselves. It’s a rather extreme license.

              If you don’t care, just use something like the MIT, Apache, or BSD three clause licenses, which are all super simple licenses that have broad compatibility. Doesn’t really matter which you use. I kinda like the BSD three clause because I like the “no using us to promote yourself” clause.

        • saigot
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          3
          ·
          1 year ago

          It is if they want to do something academic or commercial with it.

    • PM_ME_VINTAGE_30S [he/him]@lemmy.sdf.orgOP
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      9
      ·
      1 year ago

      no license at all

      I think the point of a license is to affirm user freedoms, and to make explicit that it is free to use.

      If something public has no license, I would probably assume that it’s proprietary (but not necessarily closed-source) and therefore is illegal to use without getting the author’s permission. The default is that you in general can’t use copyrighted material without the copyright owner’s permission, save for fair use. In my view, this position is stupid and bad because it impedes freedom of information, but unfortunately this position is the law.