4 Your source publication *needs* a license. In the US, if no license is
5 specified, users have no legal right to download, modify, or
6 distribute. Furthermore, people can't contribute to your code unless
7 you tell them what rules to play by. It's complicated, so here are
10 Open source. There are plenty of `open source licenses
11 <http://opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical>`_ available to choose
14 In general, these licenses tend to fall into one of two categories:
16 1. licenses that focus more on the user's freedom to do with the
17 software as they please (these are the more-permissive open
18 source licenses such as the MIT, BSD, & Apache).
20 2. licenses that focus more on making sure that the code itself —
21 including any changes made to it and distributed along with it —
22 always remains free (these are the less-permissive free software
23 licenses, for example, the GPL and LGPL).
25 The latter are less-permissive in the sense that they don't permit
26 someone to add code to the software and distribute it without also
27 including the source code for their changes.
29 To help you choose one for your project, there's a `license chooser <http://three.org/openart/license_chooser/>`_,
34 - PSFL (Python Software Foundation License) -- for contributing to python itself