So, this video here is by a channel called Software Developer Diaries and is a quick rundown of what software licenses are and to avoid the dangers of not properly dealing with a software license. As well as going over the different types of licenses and the particulars of each type. I decided to look more into the topic of software licenses as I felt I wanted another perspective from someone in the field who was actively developing and using licenses. Also, I felt I needed a bit of a refresher on the different licenses and this quick video seemed perfect. Everything in this video is kind of exactly what you would expect aside from using a few examples of each license and then providing some use cases for each license. There were a few things I did learn from this video like permissive cases being the most popular form of license or how I forgot that copyleft licenses are freely used but can have different stipulations based on the license. Otherwise, I thought a lot of this information was nice and succinct and helped quite a bit to remember the importance of why we even use licenses and also to remember what each license does specifically. I think this video did reveal me to me some questions while I was watching it. It made me consider how in the future I will probably be constantly tangling with licenses all the time when using some kind of proprietary code or some piece of code I found somewhere and that I’ll need to remember to always look for the license file whenever I’m in github or something similar so as to avoid any kind of legal repercussions or worse. So for me this tells me to expect quite a bit of future annoyance and stress down the line but if I can just memorize the various licenses and what they are now I’ll be able to know what each does at a glance when I’m hunting for code. But otherwise this does make me wonder if there are other licenses other than the ones mentioned in this video, also it makes me wonder about why we initially started to use licenses. I understand now why we currently use them but what was the impetus for starting to use them? But that’s something to think about in the future, for now I need to concentrate on remembering the rest of these licenses.
Here’s the video:
From the blog CS@Worcester – aRomeoDev by aromeo4f978d012d4 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.