About basic software Licenses

How should we choose whether or not to apply one or many SW License to our work?

Below a few description of the basic ones:

Originally posted at: https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT

The MIT License (MIT)

Copyright (c) <year> <copyright holders>

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal 
in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights 
to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell 
copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished
to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in 
all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR 
IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, 
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE 
AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER 
LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, 
OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE 
SOFTWARE.

Originally posted at: http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Apache License

Copyright [yyyy] [name of copyright owner]

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
You may obtain a copy of the License at

    http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
limitations under the License.

Originally posted at: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.

license
.html

GNU General Public License

 <one line to give the program's name and a brief idea of what it does.>
    Copyright (C) <year>  <name of author>

    This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
    it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
    the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
    (at your option) any later version.

    This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
    but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
    MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
    GNU General Public License for more details.

    You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
    along with this program.  If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

Also add information on how to contact you by electronic and paper mail.

If the program does terminal interaction, make it output a short notice like this when it starts in an interactive mode:

    <program>  Copyright (C) <year>  <name of author>
    This program comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY; for details type `show w'.
    This is free software, and you are welcome to redistribute it
    under certain conditions; type `show c' for details.

In addition I just want to say that above are descripted only the basic of applying the license in your work, please feel free to visit the pages used to read all the license points. This can be useful to apply at any code/work you do.

 

Personally, I will set first some projects using the GNU General Public license, this seems to be a more complete one. For example, Apache has clauses about the Redistribution and contribution to the content, However, GNUPL covers an specefic topic about Patent related with the autor and the redistribution of modified copies of his/her work.

For even more info about this and another licenses visit:

https://tldrlegal.com/license

where you can find info like this:

 

license