Business Success with Open Source

Select a License

Thanks to decades of fixation on licensing, “Let’s pick a license!” is usually the first thing people think when they decide to release a FOSS project. In reality it’s one of the final steps in the entire releasing process. That’s because choosing the correct license depends on everything that we’ve covered up to this point in this chapter as well as in Chapter 19, ​The Strategy of Releasing FOSS​. Now it’s time to pull all of these previous decisions together. Doing so usually makes the choice of the correct license for your company’s business needs obvious.

As you’re pulling these decisions together, do so in collaboration with your legal team. Remember, licenses are legal documents that help to manage some of the complexities ...