How should I protect copyright and license my free software?

Question

I'm all new to open source software, but somehow I get into it pretty well (I think !!).

Now the thing is that in order to distribute my program I will have to distribute the source code, so it will (.gz) with the installer for sure, or maybe (.deb).

My questions:

• (I know this is stupid, but I'm new here). How can I make sure that no one will take my source code and use it as their own, I mean that the program is free, but I need some proof that this thing was written by me?

• What open source license should I use in the program? (considering that I am using Debian, Ruby, Cron, Partimage, Qt4)

Answer 1

There are many different open source licenses, and many have minor differences. You need to decide what is important to you in how your code is used and distributed by others.

There is a good comparison of some of the available Wikipedia licenses .

From this list, you should also check the wikipeida page on each license for detailed information about their specifics.

The main ones you should take a look at the GPL, LGPL, MIT, BSD, Apache and Mozilla.

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Answer 9

You can use the source code obfuscator to make decompiled code difficult to read. This is useful in situations where you do not want the source code to be publicly available and you want it difficult for people to reverse engineer the code.

The point of using an open source license is that you distribute the source code with the program, so the two requirements are difficult to reconcile.