Sooner or later, every developer runs into The License Question. You shipped something to GitHub, GitHub asked you to pick a license, and you scrolled the dropdown — MIT, Apache, GPL, AGPL, BUSL, MPL, ISC, Unlicense, "Other" — and picked whatever sounded least scary. That's how I did it. That's also how I ended up rewriting my LICENSE file three weeks later. Licenses are a dark forest for devs. We don't read legal docs, nothing in our day-to-day teaches us when each one matters, and most online advice is either a wall of legalese or someone's religious argument. Here's the version I wish someone had given me: a tour of the five licenses you'll actually meet, the mistakes that bite, and what changing my license did to my project's discoverability in the real world. What a license actually does By default, your code is "all rights reserved." That sounds like the default-est thing possible — but it means no one can legally copy, fork, run, or modify your code without your written permission.…