Hosting GPLv3 Projects on CodePlex

Brian Harry

I’ve been a bit quiet here recently about what’s been going on with CodePlex.  I don’t blog every time we do a release otherwise I’d be blogging about the site every week, but we made a change today that I thought was worth mentioning – the GPLv3 license has been added to the list of open source licenses available when creating a new open source project on CodePlex.

On CodePlex we’ve always asked you to specify what license you are releasing your source code under before you publish a project.  It’s important that whenever you publish code on the internet and you want that code to be freely used by people that you give it a license.  Just putting the code out there doesn’t really make it Open Source http://opensource.org/osd.  We want to make sure that when people visit a project on CodePlex and download the source they are able to use that source under the terms an Open Source license that is readily discoverable.

But picking the right license can be intimidating.  Rather than giving a drop-down listing of every single possible open source license we’ve always include a pragmatic list containing the most popular licenses in use by the community, from permissive licenses like MIT, Apache 2.0 or MS-PL through to different copy-left licenses like GPLv2.  Recently the team reviewed the list of licenses project owners can choose from and compared it against the licenses people were wanting to use.  It was clear we had a gap and that some developers wanted to publish their projects under GPLv3 https://codeplex.codeplex.com/workitem/14272

So today, GPLv3 has been added as one of the available options in the quick and easy license picker for new projects created on CodePlex. 

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We want to keep the licensing of projects on CodePlex as simple as possible which is why we keep the drop-down list of licenses short and simple.  But it was clear that GPLv3 is important enough and there was enough community demand that it deserved a place in the list.  If the license you want isn’t supported by our drop-down then you can always contact the CodePlex team <https://www.codeplex.com/site/contact> to request a custom license.  As long as it is an open source one they are usually able to help.

Brian

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