Hmm good point. Well I suppose I was asking in a general sense, but they are 2 separate questions:
what is your preferred license for software you use (but didn’t write) as an end user?
what is your preferred license for releasing your own software you wrote?
Summary
Personally I have used MIT, Apache, and Unlicense for various things as I have a sort of Laissez-faire attitude. I don’t own math or algorithms.
As a simple end user just trying to do work: “I don’t care as long as it works and doesn’t spy on me”.
I’m a big fan of the Unlicense in spirit due to its simplicity and anti-legaleeze wording that basically says: “here’s some code, leave me the f alone”.
Apache as I understand it is very similar to MIT but provides additional protection from patent trolls (not that anything I create is worth patenting but for example libGDX is Apache so I simply matched the license for my game for compatibility. (i need to update my blog soon, large half written post, busy busy…)
GPLv3 is however growing on me, and I’m debating switching over to it as I think its might be better for the end users long term as I try to wrap my head around all these concepts.
I think I will copy the Mindustry model. It’s also libGDX, but uses GPLv3 itself. Pay what you want on itch.io, and fixed price on Steam. I think this provides the best of both worlds for the end user choice and freedom.
edit: on second thought, ill leave it alone at Apache but still copy the Minustry model:
Regardless of licensing, I make my own stuff open source as its the best way I can give back to open source in a non-financial way. It’s also the best way I can fight back against enshittification. My entire stack is now open source from OS to end-product.
When you say:
Or, they can do it, but need your name in the list of contributes (apple are good with this in their regular OS patches)
Are you being sarcastic? Because apple has stolen:
Good point on apple, I was being mistaken. On the mobile is updates, it did list contributes and such, which I hadn’t seen on android. But of course Apple are gonna apple, so yeah, I take it back, and they probably don’t credit all the projects they incorporate
