License-Software

How to license your software

Select License
The first step is to make sure you know which license you are going to apply to this work. Information about the various licenses available for these types of works can be found on the Open Source Initiative's list of Open Source Licenses. Open.Michigan recommends the use of either the GPL or the MIT license depending on the desired style. The reason Open.Michigan recommends those two licenses is they are two of the most popular licenses for Free/Open Source Software and they provide the option between a "viral" license (GPL) and a "non-viral" license (MIT).

Apply License
The basic steps of licensing your source code with a Free/Open Source Software license are as follows:


 * 1) Choose the license
 * 2) Create a file named COPYING with the full-text of the license, place this in the root of the source code tree.
 * 3) Put the basic license information at the top of every source code file in the source code tree.
 * For example, see this file here
 * 1) Make the source available on the project's homepage or some other project hosting service.
 * Some free project hosting services:
 * http://launchpad.net
 * http://gitorious.org
 * http://sourceforge.net