Choose a licence, comply with the licences you depend on, and keep attribution correct as a project grows. Use when publishing a project, adding a dependency, or answering whether a licence permits your use.
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---
name: open-source-licensing
description: Choose a licence, comply with the licences you depend on, and keep attribution correct as a project grows. Use when publishing a project, adding a dependency, or answering whether a licence permits your use.
---
# Open source licensing
A licence is the terms under which others may use your work, and the
terms under which you use theirs. Most projects get this wrong in one of
two ways: publishing with no licence at all, which grants nothing, or
pulling in a dependency whose terms conflict with how they ship.
## Method
1. **Publish with an explicit licence or nothing is granted.** Code
without a licence is under exclusive copyright by default, so
omitting one is the most restrictive choice rather than the most
permissive.
2. **Pick by what you want downstream.** Permissive licences allow use
in closed products; copyleft requires derivative works to carry the
same terms; weak copyleft sits between and applies at the library
boundary. Choose by the outcome you want, not by popularity.
3. **Check dependency compatibility before adding, not at release.**
Some combinations cannot be distributed together, and discovering
that after building on a library is the expensive path.
4. **Preserve attribution and notices.** Most licences require the
original notice to travel with the code, which means a notices file
in your distribution rather than a link (see
dependency-management).
5. **Know how distribution changes obligations.** Some terms trigger on
distributing binaries and some on providing a network service, so
how you ship decides what you owe.
6. **Record contributor terms up front.** Whether contributions are
under the project licence by default or need a signed agreement is
far easier to settle before the first outside contribution.
## Boundaries
- Licence interpretation is a legal question and this is not legal
advice; anything commercially significant needs counsel.
- Automated licence scanners identify declared licences and miss
vendored code and mixed files.
- Changing a project's licence later requires permission from
contributors who hold copyright, which is often impractical.
