Transcript for:
Essential Software Licensing for Developers

hi everyone as developers i feel like a lot of us are quite good at the coding side of things but maybe lack a bit in the business side of things so one of those things is the different software licenses available and how to avoid legal battles software license is not something you want to get wrong because it can cost you lots of headaches and a lot of money so i'm just going to focus on that today but i also wanted to comment that if you're enjoying my videos please subscribe or like um i really appreciate it i'm such a small channel and i'll get right into it now so the first type of software licensing is public domain and that software when copyright doesn't exist or is lapsed you can use it for commercial use you don't need to attribute the creator and it can be modified and redistributed it's important to note that code without a license is not automatically licensed as public domain if there is no license and it's publicly available on a site like github reach out to the developer and kindly ask them to add a license that's probably just an oversight on their behalf like i said devs are not so good at the business side more into the coding side and it's not true for everyone but for a lot of us it is one of the more common licenses is the mit license it's a reasonably permissive license and it's available for commercial use um it can be used the software can be used modified and redistributed anyway but you must include a copy of the license and its copyrights i'll show you an example of that later the bsd license is a very similar license to mit it's also available for commercial commercial use can be used modified and redistributed in any way it must include a copy of the license and its copyrights once again the apache license is very similar to the mit and bsd but it's preferred by a lot of people um it has the same terms except it includes extra clauses about patents so if you're interested in using that you can do a little bit more research but it's quite widely used one of the licenses which really promotes open sourcing code is gpl which is a copy left license so how it encourages open sourcing is it requires that software that uses or modifies its um soft software um they must release the software under the same terms as the gpl license so basically if you're using it be prepared to open source your code it can be used commercially but practically it's not used as regularly as works licensed under apache mit or bsd licenses because of the open sourcing requirements the listed general public license the lgpl license is very similar to the gpl license but it's less restrictive so it's a little bit more commonly used commercially so you can use the lgpl license software without having to license your entire source code under lgpl which is why it's more used more practically used in commercial software that you you need to if you make any modifications to the software that's licensed under gpg lgpl you must also make that available under the lgpl license and the final type of software licenses proprietary which is quite restrictive you can read the terms of each individual license but generally you'll be able to use the software but not modify or redistribute the software and often the original source code will not be available so if i created an app i might license that under a proprietary license i might grant you permission to use it but i might not um well i wouldn't let you see my source code unless i really wanted to make it available under another license so here i have a demo of how google chrome has chosen to meet the license terms it has a link to the open source libraries it's used in the about and you can click on the software and see the copyrights and which license it's used so this is how they've met the terms and it's a good way to do it you're giving credit to people who've helped you develop your software so that's really great that's about all i have for today so i hope you enjoyed it and i'll see you again soon