Software Licensing

An open-source license is a pseudo-requirement when writing any publicly facing code or software package.

The software license is typically stored at the root of the repository, under LICENSE.md or simply LICENSE.

See opensource.org for a more comprehensive list of licenses.

Failure to write a license

By default, all software created is under exclusive copyright by the creator. By default, you have also accepted to all terms & agreements that you may have signed up for in the process.

As a software user, any software missing a license will generally mean that you cannot use it. If a piece of unlicensed software is on GitHub, you may view or fork the code, but not necessarily use it or distribute it.

In a case where you (as the software creator) want to simply opt-out of all licensing at all, you could opt for the Unlicense.

License use in Node

package.json license key

The license key in a Node project's package.json file represents to the npm repository what license your package falls under.

Its value should be set to any SPDX license ID.

{
	...,
	"license": ""
}

yarn licenses

yarn provides commands to support licenses.

# Outputs all dependency licenses to stdout.
yarn licenses generate-disclaimer > DISCLAIMER.md

Licenses

MIT

The MIT license is possible the most common one. It provides no liability or warranty for usage, and allows for closed-source commercial use. However, it requires copyright to be included in all future versions.

GPLv3

The GNU GPLv3 license provides full usage rights with no warranty, so long as all future derivative works are fully open source - and also use the GPLv3 license.

Unlicense

The Unlicense allows users to do anything with the software, and provides no warranty or liability if things don't work.