We do already have a flowchart - Paul Miller's, linked in the head post. Can you say how your flowchart differs?

I avoid GPL, and stick with licenses that have much less baggage associated with them (perceived or in fact).

Also, if I may abuse sci-fi somewhat, "there are many like it, but this one is mine."

OK, understood, we all have our personal choices. I like the LGPL, for when the GPL is too heavy. But I do advise everyone to add a license to their projects, with a strong preference that it should be a standard one. That's more important for the future than which choice you make.

>"it's generally better to just be clear about 'free to use for whatever purpose' straight from the start." /quote

If you think so, then you have not studied copyright law. Copyright law demands that you are explicit about, as a minimum, four distinct cases in order to cover all of what you think you are covering with that phrase. The word 'use' does not cover 'copying', for example. And that's why this thread is about selecting a proper, already evaluated, legal license instead *for your projects* (as BigEd said in the 2016 post above yours), and the thread is definitely not about companies or monopolies.

"Public Domain" is not a license, and is not a universal concept internationally.

"No License" defaults to base copyright, which is quite restrictive being effectively limited to "fair use".

An explicit license, bundled with the project artifact is best way to ensure that your wishes as a publisher are communicated to potential users. (in contrast to a random blog or forum comment.)

It does not matter that you "chose" to not enforce or prosecute or anything like that. The fact that you can, and chose not to, means that you can go back and chose to again. Or, as in the earlier case, your estate can potentially choose. Which just entwines the whole kit in to a potential big mess, regardless of the outcome. A license, again, bundled with your project, is much more explicit claim that better protects everyone.

Using common, vetted licenses vs your own license is helpful as the license does not have to be individually vetted by those who may want to use your project in their work and can therefore encourage adoption. Several places have a list of licenses for OSS that are acceptable. Not on that list, then it's not even going to be considered.

There are many licenses that have been vetted that are as "public domain" as a license can be. There are, of course, other, more restrictive licenses as well.

I need some advice.
I recently rewrote a version of Forth for the Commodore 64 that I originally wrote in the nineties, I no longer have the original equipment or source files, and I would like to make it publicly available when it is finished. It works, it just needs some rough edges sanded off and the documentation written.
I'm just not sure which license to go with. I'm thinking LGPL but I don't know. It's a programming language but the Forth system needs included with whatever application is written in it. Basically, I want it to be freely available and to stay freely available and although I am somewhat familiar with the GPL ( I run linux at home ), I just don't have a lawyer brain, if there is such a thing. Advice would be greatly appreciated.

Well, what do you NOT want people to do with it?

If you use GPL, then the software authors are obligated to make available the sources of their application to anyone they distribute the application too.

With LGPL, they're only obligate to distribute changes to your system. That is, if they changed any of your runtime to support their application, then those changes would have to be made available to those they distribute the application to, but the application sources themselves would not be under the same guise.

There's also the AGPL, which is essentially GPL for services that are not distributed in the conventional way. Many folks use GPL software on computer servers, but are under no obligation to make the source code available, since they never release (and thus distribute) the software. AGPL handles that use case to promote source code release of these kinds of systems.

There are other "forced source" licenses (MPL, CDDL, etc.), but they're tied to the actual licensed code and changes to it (like LGPL).

If you want something more "I don't care what you do with it", then the BSD, MIT, and Apache licenses are available. These are about as close to "public domain" as you can get with a license.

The "I don't care" licenses are easily embedded in other applications and impose no burden on them whatsoever outside of, perhaps, an acknowledgement that they're being used.

So, anyway, it comes down to what you want from others with respect to your software. Expand on that, and I can give a more nuanced response.

I found the "Simplified BSD License" to be to my liking when I released VTL02, and have received no complaints or hostile reactions from it over the last six years or thereabouts. Oh, yeah ... I am definitely NOT a lawyer ...

_________________
Got a kilobyte lying fallow in your 65xx's memory map? Sprinkle some VTL02C on it and see how it grows on you!

Mike B. (about me) (learning how to github)

P.S. I saw someone else use the WTFPL license, but I fear that the crude language contained within could offend the more sensitive among us.

_________________
Got a kilobyte lying fallow in your 65xx's memory map? Sprinkle some VTL02C on it and see how it grows on you!

Mike B. (about me) (learning how to github)

Thanks, I'll need to give this some thought. I've got time, I still need to write the documentation and I don't have a website so nowhere to host it yet.

Definitely not going with the WTFPL license.

Jim, it doesn't sound like you want a complete free-for-all, which is where CC0 comes in (no need for WTFPL.)

You say you want your code to be free and stay free. That's certainly the point of LGPL and GPL. It means if someone uses your code, finds and fixes a bug, or adds a feature, and then ships something with that improvement, they are obligated to provide the improved source. That's the sense of 'staying free' that these licenses offer. The likes of BSD and MIT mean that versions of your code will stay around and be reusable, but other versions may be improved and products shipped but the source for the improvements can be secret and retained by the author. That's a different sense of free.

Between GPL and LGPL it depends on what freedoms you want the end user to have - a third sense of free. With GPL, the idea is that the end user always gets the full source to the system they got, from whoever wrote it. If your software is a component of that system, and you chose GPL, then you've helped the ecosystem of products which must come with source.

I have in the past chosen LGPL a few times. It means - as noted above - that the source to my component must be shipped with the system, but other components, no matter how tightly integrated, might have different licenses and might not come with source. By choosing LGPL I'm making it easier for the system designer to use different types of software with different licenses. But I'm not helping the end user quite so much. It's still true that any fixes or extensions will be accompanied by source. I've given a little more freedom to the system designer and a little less to the end user.

I use a Creative Commons license with my public domain work.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/

_________________
Andrew Jacobs
6502 & PIC Stuff - http://www.obelisk.me.uk/
Cross-Platform 6502/65C02/65816 Macro Assembler - http://www.obelisk.me.uk/dev65/
Open Source Projects - https://github.com/andrew-jacobs

What about any documentation I provide? Would that be covered or would I need a different license for publications?

Usually you license a project as a whole, but it's not uncommon to choose different licenses for individual files - and sometimes it's necessary, for example if the files came from elsewhere.