Choosing An Open Source License

Hey indie hackers,

I'm building a fullstack job orchestration/background job platform in .NET called Didact, and it's already been an interesting journey. Didact is open source, so, of course, one of the first things that I had to figure out was how to license it in the first place. I was rather surprised how confusing this was at first glance.

So here's a few tips on what I found:

Choosealicense.com

Choosealicense.com is an awesome website to learn about how open source licenses work, I found it very helpful in gradually understanding what license to pick.

Plausible Analytics

I also found this blog from Plausible Analytics insightful and helpful.

TL;DR;

• Is it a library/module/package? GPL3.0 or LGPL3.0.
• Is it a standalone application/platform? AGPL3.0 (to cover cloud cases)

Explanation

Here is my hard and fast rule that I learned from r/OpenSource on Reddit:

Assuming you want to de-incentivize copycats and corporations from straight up copying and reselling your work with no contributions to you or the open source community (which is the case for me), here's what I asked myself:

• Is what I'm building a library/package/module that is included in a larger software work? Use GPL3.0 or LGPL3.0 for your license. For example, two very well-known background job libraries called Hangfire and Sidekiq use this licensing as their default (emphasis added to the word library because this is what makes Didact quite different from them).

• Is what I'm building in and of itself a complete, standalone application or platform? Then use AGPL3.0 for your license because - chances are - you or someone else could probably offer your product or platform as a cloud product, and you don't want to miss out on that!

For me, Didact is an entire application/platform with a pre-built web dashboard, a pre-built backend .NET web API, and a pre-built .NET console app all existing in separate GitHub repos and all completely independent.

Hope that helps you!