What license for my own web application so its forks can be closed source?

Question

As my graduation work I'm working on a simple web application. I read a bit through documentation for licenses but my head hurts from it. All I know is that I don't want GPL

I plan on making the initial work open source. But I also want to be able to fork it and distribute that fork as a closed source program (someone else or even myself). Aka be able to use it as a template. I'm writing it from scratch (with occasional help from stack overflow) and (since I'm a beginner) am writing it in basic PHP, HTML with Mysql/MariaDB and a tiny bit of JS (the less javascript the better, no nodejs or bootstrap etc)

What would be the best license to release it under?

Answer 1

First of all you should check if your university/school has put up any rules about the licenses under which students can publish their work.

Then you need to check for license compatibility with any of the OSS components you are using. You are mentioning databases, but there might be other libraries you are using and you need to make sure that you respect the requirements of these licenses.

After having considered the first two items you can pick any license that matches these requirements.

As long as you are the only author of the software you can later use the code with any other license, even proprietary or commercial. Having said that, you will have to respect the licenses of any 3rd party code you are including. For example, if you are using a library which is under the GPL license, then it is unlikely that you will be able to turn your own code into a closed-source project.

The original publication of your code with the original license does not go away, other people will still be able to use your code once published under an OSS license, even after you have decided to re-use your code for a proprietary/commercial project.