GitHub is on the vanguard and is likely being appropriately cautious with its regulations. "Hosting" is not equal to "distributing", so they have positioned themselves as a legitimate repository. As more users want to be able to use packages from the repository, and we discover that contributors have difficulty with the details of licensing, we see the need for tools like ChooseALicense.com. With better education will come better usability!

With so few projects offering a license for others to use their publicly-posted code, it seems there is a general lack of education around the distribution of open source: Using a permissive license like MIT, BSD or Apache encourages adoption by commercial software companies, which can help draw interest to a project and add development cycles; using a viral license like AGPL or MPL ensures that your code remains open when it's used by others; and using no license at all provides no benefit to the open source community. http://www.ententesoftware.com/

Third-party software is provided for use by others under a license. The only thing that differentiates open source and commercial software are the terms in such license. As many have pointed out, open source projects can come and go, dropping their projects in the process. However, this can also be true of commercial companies. As a consumer, it's important to review the terms of your inbound licenses to make sure you're comfortable with the obligations, representations, and warranties provided therein. These license details, and the use cases of the software licensed thereunder, should be tracked by software companies to maintain visibility about third-party dependencies and obligations. http://www.ententesoftware.com/