Without a license, a company can take your code, compile it into a program, publish that under a different name, slap their own proprietary license on it which prohibits free use, and then sue you, the developer, for copyright infringement.
Applying a license such as GPL to your open source code makes that legally impossible.
Actually, without a license, they can’t legally do that but nobody else can use your code either!
(Nothing’s stopping them from doing it illegally, license or no. Which is why I personally tend to default to permissive licenses myself. I’m more concerned with open-source cross-license compatibility than about corporations stealing the code for our little projects.)
Without a license, a company can take your code, compile it into a program, publish that under a different name, slap their own proprietary license on it which prohibits free use, and then sue you, the developer, for copyright infringement.
Applying a license such as GPL to your open source code makes that legally impossible.
Actually, without a license, they can’t legally do that but nobody else can use your code either!
(Nothing’s stopping them from doing it illegally, license or no. Which is why I personally tend to default to permissive licenses myself. I’m more concerned with open-source cross-license compatibility than about corporations stealing the code for our little projects.)
– Frost
No. All rights reserved is default. And as copyright is mostly harmonised around the world, I doubt there is any country where that is not the case.
Not sure what corporate hellscape you live in but that is not how it works at all.
If you left it as a public git repo you just have to point to the commits in your repo as existing before their product and the case falls flat.