Best source code license for limiting/restricting a Google Code project?

Question

What is the best license for limiting/restricting a Google Code project?

Here are Google's Options:

• Apache License 2.0
• Artistic License/GPL
• Eclipse Public License 1.0
• GNU General Public License v2
• GNU General Public License v3
• GNU Lesser General Public License
• MIT License
• Mozilla Public License 1.1
• New BSD License

The reason for my question is, "How open is Google in sharing hosted code"? There is some code that I would like to use. My boss (who he and I) are not very knowledgeable of these License restrictions. Also I wanted to post some code as well, does this fall under the current projects license as well? or do/can I give my contribution a different license?

Answer 1

The one with the most complex restrictions is the GPL. If you reuse GPL'ed code in your project, your code MUST be licensed under the GPL. This may or may not work for you depending on how you distribute your project.

If you want to contribute to a GPLed project your contributions must also be GPLed, but this may vary depending on the exact nature of the type of contribution (contributions to documentation may require a different license)

MIT and BSD licensed code are the easiest to understand: You can reuse the code in any way you like, but you may not modify the copyright notice in the code you reuse.

Contributions to BSD/MIT projects will probably also require contributions to use the same license as the project.