GPL vs Permissive Licenses

You have a fundamental misunderstanding about what the GPL license embodies, the harms it intends to mitigate and the motivations behind using such a license as a opposed to the BSD or MIT license which capture your less nuanced sentiment.https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....

I understand your argument, but there's another side of that coin. An MIT licensed piece of software can be taken by a company, improved in-house and distributed as proprietary, thereby depleting the community of improvements to the work they have made freely available under good faith. GPL also demands that all distributions contain source code so the user has freedom of tinkering with and inspecting the piece of software as they see fit; the core philosophy, as I understand it, is that si

You're not responding to the substance of my post. I said I wasn't commenting on whether or not the GPL actually promotes freedom. It just doesn't take it away. You and I are in total agreement here. If you want your code to have the widest possible distribution, use BSD/MIT licenses (I have done this). You have the freedom to do this and the existence of the GPL does not take your freedom away from you. You also have the freedom to decide not to use GPLed code.People have a sen

If you write and release open source code, the license will have no impact on your ability to do so. You can write and release your contributions as BSD, and include others BSD or GPL licensed code. You can write and release your contributions as GPL, and include others BSD and GPL licensed code. If your intention is to release source code and share your knowledge and time with others, the license is not going to effect you.If your intention is add restrictions on other peoples work, then you

"I believe a huge amount of programmers want to provide open source code to open source code projects, not for proprietary projects. Which is why GPL is such a popular licence."I really wish developers would stop calling the GNU "free". If you are restricting the end user (IE: you can't use this in proprietary projects), it's not freedom.The BSD license is true freedom.

There are two freedoms of different people (or rather different roles) that are in conflict here: the freedom of developers to do whatever they would like to do with code that they have access to, and the freedom of users to be able to change and control the software they use. MIT/BSD/etc prioritise the former, while GPL prioritises the latter: free software advocates generally believe that proprietary software is immoral, and that _all_ software should be open to users to modify, even

There are people that license software under MIT or BSD licenses that gets upset when someone else runs with it or makes it proprietary. If you don’t want someone else to just dump you and run with your code without upstreaming contributions, you should at least use GPL. It won’t prevent them from forking it and never giving back, but at least you can take their contributions and merge them back into your own.

GPL forces code others write for your project to also be GPL. that is a loss of freedom for that contributor.if I license something with the MIT license, anyone can use it for any purpose, and they can take my code with their modifications private if they want, meaning those entities are free to do what they want, and the code I released is still freely available just like it was before. I lose nothing, and no freedoms were taken from anyone who uses my code.

The GPL is extremely permissive WRT users. It allows people to obtain, modify and distribute the code, provided that they keep it GPLed and provide the source with binaries.Contrast this with proprietary software.There are restrictions for developers, namely that you can't link GPLed code to non-GPLed or GPLable code, and that you can't close the source.Liberal licenses are easier on developers, but they don't guarantee that the source will remain open. Software is ubiquitous nowadays,

Copyleft licenses are more about the freedom of users in the future, instead of now. If all software was mit/bsd licensed, there wouldn't be any need for gpl as anyone could modify and redistribute any piece of software freely. Gpl is intended to force us toward that state in the future.