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Creative Commons licences and software
Creative Commons licences are everywhere. Photos, articles, music, documentation and educational material all use them.
So you have written a program. Why not slap a Creative Commons licence on that too?
Because, generally speaking, Creative Commons itself recommends using established free and open-source software licences for software rather than its CC licences.
Code is a slightly different beast
Software licences often deal with things that matter specifically to code, including source distribution, modification, linking, patents and compatibility with other software licences.
Creative Commons licences were designed primarily for other kinds of copyrightable work.
What about documentation?
This is where Creative Commons can make much more sense. Your source code might use MIT or GPL while your written manual, tutorial, artwork or other material uses an appropriate Creative Commons licence.
Different parts of a project can have different licences, provided you make the boundaries clear and you actually have the rights to license each part.
What about CC0?
CC0 is a public-domain dedication and fallback licence rather than one of the normal CC licences. You may encounter it around code and data, but you should still understand what it does and whether it fits your project before using it.
The simple rule
If you are licensing software code, start by looking at software licences. If you are licensing documentation, audio, images or other creative material, Creative Commons may be exactly the family you wanted.
Further reading and external resources
Want to dig into this a bit more? These are good places to go next. If anything here ever disagrees with the official documentation, trust the official documentation.
Back to choosing a software licence