How do I find the open source license that is right for my project? [closed]

Question

I am about to host my first open source project. I will be hosting it on codeplex where I can choose between the follwing licenses:

Apache License 2.0, Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL), Eclipse Public License (EPL), GNU General Public License (GPL) v2, GNU Library General Public License (LGPL), Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL), Microsoft Reciprocal License (Ms-RL), Mozilla Public License 1.1 (MPL), New BSD License, and The MIT License

Now I am totally new to all this licensing stuff. Not only I do not know what license I should choose but also I don't really know what kind of rights I should grant and deny. Any help on the process of finding a license is appreciated. What kind of things need to be considered? What question should I be asking myself?

Also: Do I loose any rights when I put the code under any of those licenses? Do I need to adhere to the chosen license too?

Answer 1

There are three main families of free software licenses: permissive, weak copyleft and strong copyleft.

Permissive licenses (MIT, BSD and Apache in your list) allow use of your code in proprietary projects without sharing back either their code or your code, if they modified it.

Weak copyleft licenses (LGPL, MPL in your list) allow use of your code in proprietary projects, but they should share back your code under the same license if they modified it.

Strong copyleft licenses (GPL) require that they distribute their own code under the same license (GPL here).

I recommend against choosing other licenses in your list in order to fight license proliferation. You can read more about free software licenses in Wikipedia, FSF and OSI.