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Choosing An Open Source License

When releasing code as open source for the first time, you'll need to choose a license.

Don't try to do it alone. Instead, please mail the appropriate development list and ask -- the licensing of related projects may be relevant, due to license compatibility issues. For example, we released two LAZR packages, lazr.config and lazr.delegates, under the LGPLv3 partly because the most related community, Zope, uses a BSD-ish license.

Given that, here are some general guidelines:

• use the AGPLv3 if it's server-side code

• use GPLv3 for anything else

• but consider LGPLv3 if for some reason the component needs to be useable in proprietary programs or there is a license incompatibility with the AGPLv3 or GPLv3.

Note: Don't use the "or later" versions of these, just use an exact version number of the license.

How to apply the license to the code

• Put the text of the chosen license into a file called LICENSE at the top level of the distribution.
• At the top of each file in the distribution, put text like "Copyright (c) 2009 Canonical, Ltd. This file is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 3. See the file LICENSE for details."