Licenses in open-source software’s guide how the community and contributors can modify and use the product. The different ways you can use the main code depend on the type of license the software is using. Developers can choose which license to use in their projects according to their needs and restrictions they want to apply (Horcasitas, 2021).
The project I have decided to contribute to – Strudel, is using a GNU AFFERO GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE. It is a free, copyleft license (Anon, 2007). The licenses’ role is to ensure a good community collaboration. The license gives the users and the community freedom to copy, modify and distribute the code how they want. This type of license is very similar to the normal GPL but catered towards web-based projects, it was specifically built for network software (GNU affero general public license v3 (AGPL-3.0) explained in Plain English).
One advantage of using this type of license is that it ensures that every piece of code developed by the community stays available (Anon, 2020).
A reason why I think Strudel has decided to use this type of license is because it focuses a lot on the community aspect of it.
Another reason why I think Strudel would choose to use this license is because the community of people who are contributing to it is kind of small (late April there were 17 contributors on Github), because it is a relatively new project. I think this way they are encouraging people to try and experiment with it, as the user can modify and choose what to do with the project.
Bibliography
Horcasitas, J. (2021) Understanding open-source software licenses, DigitalOcean. Available at: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/understanding-open-source-software-licenses (Accessed: 10 May 2023).
What is AGPL license?: Top questions answered (2020) Snyk. Available at: https://snyk.io/learn/agpl-license/ (Accessed: 31 May 2023).
GNU affero general public license v3 (AGPL-3.0) explained in Plain English (no date) TLDRLegal. Available at: https://www.tldrlegal.com/license/gnu-affero-general-public-license-v3-agpl-3-0 (Accessed: 10 May 2023).