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RE: Open Sourcing my Steem Apps, Columns for Steem & Steem Observatory
MIT is good, I would prefer that to GPL and variants. However what I recommend is CC0! Why hold on to intellectual property rights at all?
CC0 doesn't work in Germany, we have no concept of public domain here, you are automatically granted an "Urheberrecht" (which roughly translates to right of the creator) when you create something and you cannot transfer that right or give it up, it's very different to the concept of copyright.
But licenses like MIT and Apache 2.0 are as close as you can get to that, and that way you also at least get a minimal form of attribution. Apache works better under German law I believe so I might choose that, it's very close to the MIT license but better worded and more detailed. The MIT license has language which disclaims any liability which isn't allowed in Germany because of strong consumer protections, so the license should say something like "disclaim any liability to the extent possible by applicable law" instead, which Apache does if I remember correctly, I only used it once many years ago. But I would assume that the MIT license still works for the most part, it's such a popular license after all, but that depends on the judge, Open Source licenses haven't been tried in courts that often I think :)
That's interesting, I'll have to research that.
This is the point though, not requiring that.
It's probably required so that people know who to hold liable. Germany is sadly an extremely bureaucratic country :) But requiring attribution is a good thing anyhow I think, if someone ends up forking your project instead of contributing to it and then takes all your hard work for free and potentially even ends up making tons of money with it, the least they can do is give credit to you.
Although I'd happily take donations as a thank you as well, I don't work for a big software company with a huge salary so I can use every cent :) Really could use a faster computer one of these days, compiling Columns for Steem takes 80 seconds on here for the first compile and then 8 seconds for consecutive compiles, would be a second or less on a modern computer which makes the live programming a lot more fun, but I had to move back to an old Chromebook after my desktop computer stopped working recently (CPU fan broke off, only noticed it a week or two later when it kept overheating with random reboots and then finally stopped booting completely). Ah well, it works for now :)