Open-source licenses 101: which one to actually pick

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