Open Source Licenses: Which One Should You Pick? MIT, GPL, Apache, AGPL and More (2026 Guide)

You just finished your side project. You push it to GitHub, hit "Create repository" and there it is — that dropdown you always skip: Choose a license. MIT, GPL, Apache, BSD... does it really matter? Short answer: yes, a lot. Pick the wrong one and a big company can take your work and never give anything back. Pick none and technically nobody can legally use your code at all — even if it's sitting there in a public repo. This isn't a theoretical problem. Let me give you a real example that shook the industry. HashiCorp is a company behind some of the most widely used tools in cloud infrastructure. One of their flagship products is Terraform — a tool that thousands of companies (from startups to Fortune 500) use to manage their servers, databases, and cloud resources. Think of it as the "remote control" for your entire cloud infrastructure. It was open source for years, with a massive community building plugins, writing tutorials, and integrating it into their workflows. In August 2023,