What license should I use for making my project open source?

Hi all,

I am finally thinking of putting the Infix to postfix coversion and evaluation API as open source on sourceforge.net (I already got permission from their support).

I was reading some groups about how to make software open source and I saw that basically I need to do two things,
1. Include my copyright statement in code
2. Include license agreement I want to choose

I saw on http://opensource.org/licenses/ that there are many kind of licenses like GPL, LGPL, BSD, and MIT etc.

I am having question that "should I be putting GPL license for my software?". I want to make my software available for modification/redistribute/extension and all those things (basically w/o any so called big copyright issues)...

Anybody can help me identify this one?

I am reading some project registration guidelines from SourceForge and I think I just have to follow the following steps. Please correct me if something more is required from me to do (or I need to ask SourceForge support for anything)...
1. Put copyright in all files
2. Put GPL license in all files (I just copy and paste that from Opensource.org right?)
3. Upload zip file

Thanks
Maulin

Originally posted by Maulin Vasavada:
I am having question that "should I be putting GPL license for my software?". I want to make my software available for modification/redistribute/extension and all those things (basically w/o any so called big copyright issues)...

GPL is a viral license, which makes it a bad choice for an open source project if you want to let commercial companies use it. I'd suggest BSD or LGPL instead.

Then again, I'm definitely not an expert with these license issues so you'll have to take my advice with a grain of salt.

yea .. I was reading GPL and LGPL so I think I would go with LGPL.

Thank you very much.
Maulin

Hi all,

The project is up at,
http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/ji2pccae

Regards
Maulin

For anyone else that is choosing an open source license, this link should be very helpful:

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/perens.html

Regards,

Dave Gilbert
JFreeChart Project Leader