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I'm still a student so I'm not exactly the target audience of this question, but still: It's either MIT or no license at all, because it's not like I'm going to enforce the license or something. People can do whatever they want with my code
No license at all means that no one can use it. Even if you aren't enforcing it the person who wants to use it doesn't know that.
I mean, that's not stopping people from copypasting or something, and, as I said, I'm not going to try to enforce it so I just don't bother
It definitely stops anyone who is at least a little bit serious about what they're doing.
It's not so bad if companies don't use your project. Normal people won't care.
Other FOSS projects can't use it, either. The only other "normal people" would be, like, tiny private projects and bad actors. Maybe clueless students, but my university project classes required us to appropriately follow licenses when using other people's code, or we'd get marked down.
The ability for FOSS projects to use your code is the best part about the FOSS movement. They can generally all copy from each other to improve efficiency, especially since many FOSS licenses are compatible with each other.
If you want to stop corporations from using your project, use a license that does that. Most typically, the GPL will do that (while still allowing some FOSS projects to use the code). It doesn't prohibit commercial usage, but for the vast majority of projects, the license is basically a poison pill and thus no closed source project will generally use GPL licensed code. But I personally strongly recommend against the GPL, as it goes too far. Most FOSS projects can't use GPL code themselves. It's a rather extreme license.
If you don't care, just use something like the MIT, Apache, or BSD three clause licenses, which are all super simple licenses that have broad compatibility. Doesn't really matter which you use. I kinda like the BSD three clause because I like the "no using us to promote yourself" clause.
I don't think any license stopped Microsoft from training Copilot on any public Github Repo. And people usually don't bother with licenses if they just want to copy a few lines of code. I doubt my whole projects are going to be of much interest to the public anyway
It is if they want to do something academic or commercial with it.
Couldn't you just put "use what you want" on your profile or something where you upload instead of wasting time with licenses?
That's basically what the MIT license is lol. And it's not "bothering" with one, it's just a copy paste.
no license at all
I think the point of a license is to affirm user freedoms, and to make explicit that it is free to use.
If something public has no license, I would probably assume that it's proprietary (but not necessarily closed-source) and therefore is illegal to use without getting the author's permission. The default is that you in general can't use copyrighted material without the copyright owner's permission, save for fair use. In my view, this position is stupid and bad because it impedes freedom of information, but unfortunately this position is the law.
The default is that you in general can’t use copyrighted material without the copyright owner’s permission, save for fair use
More like the default is you can do whatever the fuck you want with copyrighted material as long as the owner isn't made aware
I sympathize with that attitude, but I cannot guarantee an employer or my customers that the owner won't be made aware by some goodie two-shoes.
I'm not saying you shouldn't ever use copyrighted material without permission. Actually, my view is that copyright is stupid and needs to be abolished, and that the entire purpose of FOSS licensing is to protect against the quirks of copyright and actors powerful enough to abuse them. However, just because you can (and arguably should) pirate copyrighted material doesn't make it always a prudent choice.
I am an anarchist, so I'm not interested in complying with the law for its own sake. However, I am interested in how the (thugs who enforce the) law could clamp down on me or my customers for reusing other people's work. Unfortunately, that requires either using FOSS, or going through the dog-and-pony act of setting up a licensing agreement. It is absolutely plausible considering my field that an employer might force me to use proprietary software or even allow my product to be proprietarily licensed, as much as I loathe proprietary shitware.