GitHub's Wild West Approach To Licensing Has Hidden Costs

The GitHub generation doesn't seem to like the bother of licenses, but is it prepared to stomach the costs?

The younger generation of developers increasingly eschews formal licensing requirements for their GitHub projects, a trend Redmonk analyst James Governor calls "post open source software." While some will celebrate a full 77% of GitHub projects going commando on licensing, new research from Black Duck Software suggests that this license-free approach comes with as much as $59 billion in hidden costs.