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Typical content-free FUD and link bait from ZDNet (who still reads that crap anyway?), stopped reading soon when I encountered the utter BS:

> If you don't have a license, you're leaving the door open for people to fool with your code.

IANAL, but the author has apparently never even heard of the existence of copyright law. Nothing this guy writes about licenses should be taken seriously.

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Towards the end of the article he discusses how a project falls under copyright law if no license is provided. Furthermore, he points out that by making a project public it will fall under the hosting site's terms of service; in particular he notes that GitHub allows forking of public projects, which wouldn't normally be the case under default copyright.

That still shouldn't give the forker any other permissions not already granted by copyright law.

Forking is copying, and by making a project public on a platform where the ToS mean that includes permitting forkng, there is a good argument that there us an implied-in-fact license; the question then becomes what the bound are of that license. One of the reasons you probably want an explicit license is to avoid that issue. There are lots of things you can do without an explicit license that can give rise to implied license.

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