Why I’d like a “license type” setting for GitHub projects

For "GPL type" licenses, it would probably be better to use the term "copyleft" rather than "restrictive" since their copyleft nature is really what's particular about them.<p>That said, I'd almost prefer a setting that lets you specify the exact license. The problem is, what do you do about dual/multi licensed projects, or projects which contain code that's under a mixture of licenses? I suppose you could argue that it refers to the "dominant" or "main" license, but - to be pedantic - you can't always describe a project as being under one single license.

More annoying than people that choose licenses in an uneducated fashion, are people that do not choose a license at all. Under the Bern Convention, your work is copyrighted by default. If you don't add a license, I cannot use it. Period.<p>At the very least, it would be nice if Github could provide a warning to that effect. Github is doing a wonderful job of growing the open source movement from an infrastructure angle. I would love to see them also grow the movement from a community/education angle as well.

&#62; Don’t you just hate it when you find some great piece of code on GitHub and then you realize that somewhere at the end of the README the frightful acronym GPL is ruining your good mood?<p>Yes. But what I ‘hate’ even more is not finding <i>any</i> license info. Adding this would probably help in that area as well.

Why on earth would the GPL ruin your day? What's with all the fear mongering?<p>The only practical difference is you're forced to put up your patches somewhere… which you've probably already done when you hit 'fork' on Github.

I think having a hard-coded drop down for actual licenses is a good idea, because then we can do the searching and filtering you suggest.<p>I don't like grouping them into 'types'. I think that's too much of a value judgement. Any enterprise's legal department is going to approve or disapprove of specific licenses, so that's what developers like me will be looking for.<p>Potential issues: * Modified licenses (eg: JSLint's MIT + "do no evil" clause)

I was actually rather surprised when switching from Google Code to Github that they didn't have a license option. Especially if you need code for a business licenses are pretty crucial.<p>I don't like this idea however. It's too general. I would make the license an input field with autosuggest with 10 or so of the most popular licenses (like Google Code). If you have something funky you can still enter it.

GitHub already parses README files of various formats. I wonder how hard it would be to just parse a LICENSE/COPYRIGHT file if it's available. This would make sure the licenses are distributed with the code. If the license file couldn't be parsed, a "Custom License" link to the corresponding license file could be a good general fallback too.

If I could only spend all my karma on upvotes for this, I would.<p>I regularly look at various projects that I can use. And the <i>first thing</i> I check is whether the license is MIT/BSD/Apache/EPL. If it's GPL I won't even look at it, if it's LGPL I <i>might</i> consider it, but it would have to bring huge benefits. If there is no license, I have to contact the author and ask him to include one.<p>I'd love to be able to just set a filter "never show me any projects which do not have a license in my preferred set".<p>Please note that I am not editorializing here, nor am I discussing any values. This post is about facts and about what would make my life easier.

tl;dr: the author dislikes the copyleft nature of the GPL, and shoehorns his dislike into what could be a useful feature request.

And when the drop-down disagrees with the COPYING or LICENSE file...?

I've been thinking about this for a while, because I write about several open source projects a week and like to mention the license in my articles. It's often hard to find the license: it might be in the readme, a license file, or in a boilerplate comment at the top of a source file.<p>Sometimes a license file is included, but the name of the license is not, so I have to try searching for fragments of the text to figure out what license it actually is (I have quite a few memorised now).<p>It's possible GitHub could solve this by interpreting files intended for packaging systems like package.json. For example, I occasionally find authors of Node modules actually include a 'licenses' property in their package.json but don't mention the license anywhere else.

For that matter, perhaps Github could just treat the LICENSE file like magic the same way it does README. It would have the added benefit of convincing me to add a LICENSE like it did for README.

How about a tool that gets authorization from your github account and let's you automatically upload LICENSE files to your project. The particular license is based on user input, similar to [1]. Does something like this exist?<p>[1]. <a href="http://creativecommons.org/choose/" rel="nofollow">http://creativecommons.org/choose/</a><p>*edit - this way it could just be an open source project instead of waiting for github to implement it.

The problem is: there are Open Source projects that are a compilation of works of different licenses that are sometimes more permissive in one term but less in another one (see for example the table on <a href="http://www.osscc.net/en/licenses.html#compatibility" rel="nofollow">http://www.osscc.net/en/licenses.html#compatibility</a> to see what kinds of problems can occur).<p>How would you solve this problem?

I started a project on GH with a starter python implementation:<p><a href="https://github.com/tantalor/detect-license" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/tantalor/detect-license</a><p>Looking for contributors to add more implementations (JavaScript, Ruby, etc), examples license files, and tests.

Google code has a license type setting long ago. Github should get one too. It definitely helps everybody, no matter you are a GPL hater or lover.

I would love this, but there are at least a thousand open source licenses. Even if you limit it to licenses that have at least 1% adoption rates, you still have at least 40 (there are more, i just stopped counting).<p>As such, this would be a confusing dropdown. A free form text field with autocomplete (and synonyms, so if you typed "general public license", it would still autocomplete GPL.

so many different versions of free. let's just have two licenses free and non-free.

I like this idea.

The unnecessary editorializing is annoying. The point, which I agree with, could have been made without the self-centered snipes at licenses you happen to dislike.