People do get confused by licensing in general, and even more so about the consequences. Developers are not lawyers.
There are plenty of guides, but most are written by people arguing for a particular license so do not come across as impartial.
IMO people need to ask questions such as whether they want to allow proprietary forks, whether they want anti-tivoisation, whether people using an install over a network need access to the code, etc. and then decide on a license. If you know what you want then it should not be hard to narrow down the choice.
> I don't personally know enough about licensing to say whether a sentence in the README.md (saying it can't be sold) is enough to override the LICENSE.md (which says it can be sold).
It is very likely to depend on jurisdiction, and may well need a court case to clarify.
> People do get confused by licensing in general, and even more so about the consequences
> It is very likely to depend on jurisdiction, and may well need a court case to clarify.
Is it any wonder that people are confused when this is the only valid response to most of their licensing questions?
> It is very likely to depend on jurisdiction, and may well need a court case to clarify.
Is it any wonder that developors don't understand licensing very well when this is the response to majority of their licensing questions?
How could you be anything except confused and uncertain?
The solution is to stick to well known and well understood licences and not tinker with them.
They could just use the MIT license, or GPL of whatever they like. Using MIT and then modifying it in the README is the problem.
This is only the response to the majority of (or even very many) questions if you decide to use a DIY license.