Moving from MIT to ISC

While watching this week's unveiling of GitHub's new package registry, the speaker demoed creating a new npm package. In his package.json I spotted ISC as the license. I had never seen that identifier. My curious mind couldn't deal with the emptyness, so I went on to do some research.

I had done a brief review of licensing earlier in the week because I've been creating new repositories lately and I considered I possibly should give licensing a deeper look---I've been using the MIT license since my first serious attempt at sharing code.

I like MIT because it's simple and straightforward. Well, it seems that ISC is even more so:

Just a matter of words; the two are basically identical for all intents and purposes. The ISC license simply removes certain phrases that were no longer deemed necessary, now that almost all nations have adopted the Berne Convention.

If you're publishing code and want to give some thought to your licensing, I recommend you check out Choosealicense.com, a site mantained by GitHub to make licensing more approachable.

Apparently, these identifiers we use in package.json files are defined by the Software Package Data Exchange (SPDX) project.

And if you're publishing non-code creative works, check out Creative Commons 😉.