I have previously written a lot of code that is hosted on a public repo on GitHub, but it never had a license. It was written as part of my work while working for a non-commercial academic entity, and I would like to add a license before the link to the repo will be included in something that will be made public, potentially attracting one or two visitors.

This leaves me with a couple of questions:

  1. Can I just add a license after the fact and it will be valid for all prior work?
  2. Do I have to make sure the license is included in all branches of the repo, or does this not matter? There are for instance a couple of branches that are used to freeze the state of code at a certain time for reproducibility’s sake (I know this could be solved in a better way, but that’s how it is).
  3. I have myself reused some of the code in my current work for a commercial entity (internal analysis work, only distributed within the organization). Should this influence the type of license I choose? I am considering a GPL-license, but should I go with (what I believe to be) a more permissive license like MIT because of this?
  • @cyberwolfieOP
    1•2 months ago

    check your contract, you might not own the code and your organization may have a process to determine how to license something.

    Good point. I will need to double check the contract, but I believe the ownership restriction has more to do with patents and commercialization. All our output was in general meant to be made public.