GitHub Improves Open-Source Licensing Polices

Summary: GitHub, the popular open-source development community site, is finally getting its licensing act together. It's high time since Black Duck has found that 77-percent of GitHub projects have no declared open-source license.

Simon Phipps, director of the Open Source Initiative, pointed out a problem late in 2012 with GitHub, the popular open-source development community site. Most of the GitHub-hosted projects did not have any license. By default, that made the programs subject to copyright protection with all rights reserved exclusively for the author. This means it's not open source at all! Months later, GitHub's executives have finally addressed this glaring problem by adopting a new policy to encourage developers to use proper open-source licenses.