Category Archives: open source

Choosing the Right Open Source License

Choose an open source license

For this week’s self-directed professional development, I explored the topic of choosing open source licenses, which is a fundamental but often overlooked part of releasing software. I based my reading on ChooseALicense.com and supporting resources that explain how permissive licenses, copyleft licenses, and public domain-style licenses differ. What I found most interesting is how a license doesn’t just define legal rules — it reflects the values, intentions, and goals of a developer or a team. Software licensing shapes how a project evolves, how a community forms, and how contributions are handled over time.

Open source licenses fall into a few broad categories. Permissive licenses like MIT or Apache 2.0 give users almost complete freedom to reuse the code, even in closed-source commercial products. Copyleft licenses like GPL ensure that any derivative work must remain open source under the same license. And options like the Unlicense or CC0 place code essentially in the public domain, allowing anyone to use it with zero restrictions. Before this week, I assumed licensing was just a legal formality, but now I understand how strongly each license type influences collaboration and long-term project direction.

I chose this topic because licensing is directly connected to the work we do in Software Process, especially when we talk about transparency, collaboration, and project ownership. As future developers, we will eventually publish our own tools, libraries, or contributions. Knowing how to license our work is part of being a responsible member of the open source community. Many people assume that posting code publicly means anyone can use it, but without a license, nobody can legally copy, modify, or reuse it. That detail alone made this topic worth exploring, and it helped me rethink how important explicit permissions are.

One thing I learned is that choosing a license is really about choosing a philosophy. If a developer wants to share knowledge broadly, enable commercial use, and reduce friction for adoption, a permissive license makes sense. If the goal is to ensure the code stays free for everyone and cannot be closed off by others, a copyleft license protects that intention. The reading made me think carefully about what I would want if I released a personal project. Personally, I lean toward permissive licenses because I want people to build on my work without worrying about legal constraints. But I also understand why larger community-focused projects might choose GPL to preserve openness.

Going forward, I expect licensing to be something I pay more attention to in both school projects and professional work. As software engineers, we’re not just writing code; we’re shaping how others can interact with it. Licensing is part of that responsibility. This topic helped me better appreciate the intersection between technology, ethics, creativity, and law — and it reminded me that releasing software is more than just pushing code to GitHub; it’s about defining how that code fits into the larger ecosystem of open source development.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Life of Chris by Christian Oboh and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

A License to Develop Software

I read a blog titled “Software License Management” by Samantha Rohn of Whatfix. It dives into the complexities of software licensing, explaining the different types of licenses and their implications. Since I’ve been learning about open-source projects and legal considerations in software development, this blog felt like an essential read. I picked this blog because software licensing is a topic that many developers, including myself, often overlook or misunderstand. In my coursework, we’ve briefly touched on the importance of licenses, but I never fully grasped the differences between them or their real-world applications. As I start working on team projects and open-source contributions, understanding how to navigate licensing is crucial to avoiding legal issues and contributing responsibly to the developer community.

The blog provides an overview of software licensing, emphasizing why it’s critical for both developers and organizations. It categorizes licenses into two main types:

  • Permissive Licenses: These allow more flexibility. Developers can modify, distribute, and use the software with minimal restrictions, often without the need to release their modifications.
  • Copyleft Licenses: These require derivative works to retain the original license terms. For example, modifications to a product under a copyleft license must also be distributed with the same license attached.

The post also introduces the concept of software license management, highlighting the need for organizations to track, organize, and comply with licenses to avoid legal and financial risks. It concludes with best practices for effective license management, such as inventorying all software assets and ensuring compliance with usage terms.

This blog was an eye-opener for me. One thing that stood out was the explanation of copyleft licensing. Before reading this, I didn’t realize how restrictive some licenses could be in terms of sharing modifications. For instance, if I modify software with a copyleft license, I’d have to release my work under the same license, which might limit its use in proprietary projects. This insight made me rethink how I approach licensing for my own projects.

I also found the section on license management practices especially relevant. As developers, we tend to focus solely on the technical aspects of coding and ignore legal considerations. However, knowing how to choose and manage licenses is equally important, especially as I start collaborating on larger projects.

This blog gave me a clearer understanding of how to responsibly use and share code. Moving forward, I’ll make sure to read and understand the terms of any license attached to the libraries and frameworks I use. Additionally, when I create software, I’ll carefully select a license that aligns with my goals, whether for open-source contribution or proprietary use. If you’re new to software licensing or want to understand how to manage licenses effectively, I recommend reading thisblog. It’s a straightforward guide to a topic every developer should know.

Resource:

https://whatfix.com/blog/software-license-management/#:~:text=For%20the%20most%20part%2C%20copyleft%20licensing%20is,with%20the%20source%20product’s%20copyleft%20license%20attached.

Software License Management: An Enterprise Guide

Software License Management: An Enterprise Guide

Software License Management: An Enterprise Guide

From the blog Computer Science From a Basketball Fan by Brandon Njuguna and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Is Open Source Best?

https://medium.com/chiselstrike/why-open-source-is-a-terrible-way-to-build-products-yet-most-great-products-use-open-source-c3bf9e201648

This post by Glauber Costa, an entrepreneur and former open source developer, discusses why open source is a horrible way to develop products but the best way to develop technology required for products. Technology and product are differentiated as product being something that uses technology to achieve some end market goal. I’ve always thought that open source was the best option for the vast majority of developers, with little exception outside of larger businesses where proprietary licenses would be best. This post challenged that notion.

When I look around the modern tech industry, I constantly see open source. I’ve known more people than I can remember who’ve used Godot, Shotcut, Krita, and Audacity; I’m writing this post on WordPress. However, the blog makes a great point: none of these products are better than their proprietary counterparts for general users. I always saw the community of open source developers and the possible self-customization of the works as the greatest strength of the licensing; I never for a moment considered how this lack of centralization in development is also Open Source’s biggest weakness. 

In ligth of this post, when I look around the Open Source world, I see very few products that my non-developer friends would ever use. For example, while I think Linux is great, I think all of them would prefer to stick with their Windows machines even if they had experience with Linux. I never thought to disconnect the impressive feats of community development as they pertain to the amazing innovations they’ve made to technology from the products that are released with said innovations, but in reflection, it makes perfect sense.

Open source development allows people to work on what they want when they want, and it gives individuals the chance to use their passion as an opportunity to solve problems they deeply care about. Proprietary development, on the other hand, gives people explicit goals aimed at creating the best end-user experience for everyone, with typically a strong centralization that ensures the product is polished, easy to use, and accessible to a wider audience. When you put it like this, it’s only logical that open source would result in the most innovative pieces of technology created by people with the drive to do so, while proprietary would result in the best products as they have an explicit focus to create something that would be best for the general user even if it comes at the loss of niche features for small groups of users.

From the blog CS@Worcester – CS ZStomski by Zachary Stomski and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Software Licenses

Telling the Do’s and Don’t of your own code

Photo by RDNE Stock project on Pexels.com

Hello Debug Ducker here again, and it’s time to talk about legal stuff involving software. Now I am not a lawyer but I am a coder and this is related to that. It still may require some independent research on your behalf but what I have to say is still important. Copyright, love it or hate it is here to stay. Copyright is involved in a lot of things such as movies, products, and even software. Yes, software can have a copyright applied to it, how can this be the case? Well, it is rather simple, if you make the code, as in you wrote it , you are the sole copyright holder of that code. “So why does this matter”, which is what you are probably thinking. It matters because then copyright laws would apply meaning that their are restrictions on someone using your code. “Well, I don’t care, let them use it”. They can’t cause copyright won’t allow them to do so, and some don’t want to risk legal issues. So this is where licenses come in. 

License are a set of guidelines on how a person can use and redistribute the software and it is an essential tool for the field. Now licenses are something you can grab, and put in a section of your software and not something you make yourself.  You shouldn’t make your own license yourself, ever, as that can cause legal troubles. If you want your code to be free to use with almost no restrictions, there is a license for that, if you want a bit of restriction on what they can use it for there is also a license for that. You can pick what suits your needs and should be all set. I won’t go too in-depth about all the licenses cause there are quite a bit, but there are a few resources I can share that can help you find the right license for your work

https://choosealicense.com/

The site above can help guide you on the many different licenses that are out there and can give a gist of the guidelines in the licenses. It is helpful too for developers who just need a quick way to find the right license for what they want to achieve with their software. I can see myself using such a tool in the future. Hope you enjoy this talk about the use of licenses, I hope this was helpful. Thank you for your time.

From the blog Debug Duck by debugducker and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

End Of the Semester

For Jon and I this is the end of the road for undergrad.  This Android project was a great way to end it.  All three of us want to continue to work on the app after school ends, we still have plans for it.

 

I’ve learned quite a bit over the course of the semester, not just coding with Android but how to work with a team.   We all became pretty good at using git, although sometimes the project still hates me and doesn’t want to work but that’s ok.  We have hundreds and hundreds of emails over the past few months talking about the app.  We also took advantage of the library TVs and did a bit of code review at our (bi)-weekly meetings.  Of course, we all learned Java for Android quite a bit, too and attempting to use the GUI for XML.

 

This was a great experience and a great way to end my undergraduate degree.

 

 

Thanks to everyone who helped along the way,

 

James Celona

From the blog jamescelona » WSU CS by jamescelona and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Using 3rd Party Libraries

Task Butler uses two open source third party libraries: ActionBar Sherlock and AmbilWarna

ActionBarSherlock is an excellent library that emulates the Ice Cream Sandwich action bar in older versions of Android. This was crucial for our app because we were developing for 2.2+, and having to design an entirely different UI would have been inelegant and a massive amount of extra work. Jake Wharton’s ABS uses the same API calls as Android’s official library, so one can follow Google’s API specification to use his library. Google has its own support library with limited features available, but ABS is a much more complete solution. It was critical to the design of our UI and I thank him for developing it and releasing it for free.

The AmbilWarna color picker dialog is a neat piece of code that provides a color selector for users. We needed a way for users to pick colors for their categories and this seemed like a much nicer solution than giving users limited choices like other apps do. Picture attached.

ColorPicker_1

From the blog Code Your Enthusiasm » WSU CS by Jon and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

QA Testing

The release candidate is ready to go and so starts the crazy amount of bug testing we will need to do.  We need to assure we check all the edge cases and all the scenarios in which the user could break our app.  It reminds me of the last time working before a Mahadev assignment is due and checking if anything could go wrong.  We need to make sure things like:

repeating alarms actually set to the proper date.

what happens if you delete a task right before it’s due, does the alarm still go off? What about deleting it before looking at the notification? (we corrected this one earlier)

What happens if you set something to go off in the past, how will our app handle it?

Do the notifications stack correctly if it repeats frequently?

Does the app do anything about SQL injection?

Does anything happen if a task has all the same information?

what about categories, does the name matter?

If you create a category in a different activity can you use it in addTaskActivity?

———

The list seems to be endless and ones where we need to create like 20 tasks to make sure everything works at that high of a load is up to Jon/Dhimitri since my VM doesn’t really play nice.

Questions like these are a great way to test to make sure the app is functional.  I’ll doing another write up about what google would like our app to.

From the blog jamescelona » WSU CS by jamescelona and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Great Meeting the Other day

Synergy! haha, Jon Dhimitri and I met up on Thursday to discuss the final process in the app.  I figured since Dhimitri has that little netbook that he can’t do much with that I would bring a VGA cable to the library and set my laptop up on the big screen.  I’ll remember not to listen to Dhimitri though because the VGA cable wouldn’t fit so I had to run back and grab an HDMI, the result:

Look at him pointing, Synergy!

It actually worked out really well, and I wish we had started doing it earlier.  We used My/Jon’s laptop and were able to solve a problem in Dhimitri’s ViewCalendarActivity which turned out to be some weird problem with using .get__() (it was a call to a different class outside the package) which it didn’t like and wouldn’t allow the calendar to move more than a month away.

The meeting lasted a pretty long time where we discussed where the app was going and who was testing it.  I suggested we use r/androidDev from Reddit considering we would definitely get some feedback from knowledgeable app devs who are happy to help.  I think it might be a good idea to get some freshmen CS students into the testing too, I’ll email whomever is doing 101/140 this year and ask.

The app is looking awesome, excited for these next few weeks.

From the blog jamescelona » WSU CS by jamescelona and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

First Meet With Dhimitri

Jon, Dhimitri and I had a meeting today to catch Dhimitri up on what we have been doing and the plan for the next few months.  We met in the library and discussed how to set up Action Bar Sherlock and demo’d the app again.  We plan on following the style guide very thoroughly so the app will flow how normal Android apps work.  We also talked about trying the app done to a point where we could start field testing the app with students around campus and get a feel for what works and what will need improvement.

 

Everything seemed to go pretty well, I’ll be working on editing a task that has been previously made using ‘add task’ and I think I may just have the edit copy the old task and replace the new data instead of just updating, not too sure yet.

 

We talked about doing SQLite a little bit but the point still stands about leaving it out until later (if we want/need it).

From the blog jamescelona » WSU CS by jamescelona and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Working on a facelift

Howdy all,

Jon and I aren’t graphic designers, actually I just ran into this problem at work,  and it’s pretty obvious this app isn’t going to be the prettiest bell at the ball.  Whatever, form follows function.  Right now I’m working on making the ‘create activity’ section contain everything we’re going to need Calendar style date picker, notes, title, priority radio buttons and that should be it for now.

I’ve ran into a bit of a problem with saving the tasks and I can’t figure out why they aren’t being recreated on restart for now I’m just leaving it alone (which is why nothing has been committed yet).  Since Jon built most of the onRestart() I’m sure he’ll know what’s wrong once we meet THIS SUNDAY FOR SURE so I’m not too concerned.  I found out today that the GUI for android dev is terrific, it really is.  I was fussing around with all the ugly xml and switched over only to see the GUI version was so smooth and easy to use.

From the blog jamescelona » WSU CS by jamescelona and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.