Licensing confusion is great! (for lawyers)

I want to heartily unendorse Simon Phipps’ Infoworld article about Github and licensing. Simon’s article makes it sound like no one benefits from sloppy licensing practices, and that is simply not true. Specifically, lawyers benefit! I regularly get calls from clients saying “I have no idea if I’m allowed to use <project X>, because it is on github but doesn’t have a license.” When that happens, instead of money going to developers where it could actually build something productive, instead, I get to spend my time and the client’s money fixing a problem that the original author could have easily avoided by slapping an Apache license on the thing in the first place – or that github could have avoided by adding default terms.

So, support your local open source lawyer today – publish source code without a license!¹

1. Tongue firmly in cheek, in case that isn’t obvious. Seriously, lawyers are the only ones who benefit from this situation, except for that handful of seconds it took you to “git add LICENSE”. Always license your code, kids! [↩]