License your application

When you write a new application or library, you will need to choose a license so that others know how they can use or reuse your work.

Libraries which are used in GNOME are usually licensed under the GNU LGPL 2.1+.

Most newer GNOME applications are licensed under GPL3+, while some of the older applications are licensed under GPL2+.

User help which is written by the GNOME Documentation Team is licensed under CC-by-SA 3.0 Unported. The documentation team tries to use this license consistently as it allows re-use of text from Wikipedia and many other reference sources.

Translations have the same license as the parent strings. For example, strings from the applications are usually GPL2+ or GPL3+, while user documentation is usually CC-by-SA 3.0.

GNOME cannot give legal advice on which license you should choose, but you may want to read information that is available from the Open Source Initiative, the FSF and Dave Neary's blog post about choosing a license. You may also find the GStreamer licensing information of interest, as GStreamer uses plugins.