My view is: if you don’t care what people do with your software and just want anyone who finds it useful to use it, including anyone from Stallman-esque ideologues to cogs in the FAANG machine and everyone in between, then use BSD, MIT or similar.
If you care about “free software” as an ideological movement and only want to give your software to people who are, in exchange, willing to help advance it, then use copyleft.
I am sure that some copyleft fans will have different interpretations or motivations. I’m just giving mine :)
(This all applies to contributions done in an individual’s free time. Companies contributing to open source for strategic reasons might think about these decisions in different terms).
I use the GPL because I want every user of my software to have the right to use, examine, modify and create derivative works. Every user, not just programmer and entrepreneurs making products.
I want to live in a world where software, which plays an increasingly important role in our lives, can be modified by anyone. Imagine if only google could fix your plumbing
I've found that programmers tend to frame licenses in they way you have, placing emphasis on how the GPL affects them and describing the GPL as a way to enforce tit-for-tat but software is such an important part of everyone's life now that it's worth considering how licenses affect non-developers too.
> I've found that programmers tend to frame licenses in they way you have, placing emphasis on how the GPL affects them and describing the GPL as a way to enforce tit-for-tat but software is such an important part of everyone's life now that it's worth considering how licenses affect non-developers too.
That's the point people keep forgetting. GPL wasn't created to benefit developers, it was created to benefit end users.
My iPhone has a BSD-licenced kernel. Having that kernel under that licence benefits me as an end user of the product. Maybe having used another kernel would've resulted in a less stable mobile that would not have taken off.
> I doubt any licensing makes your phone more stable
Sure it does. Without open-source software to base their work on, Apple would have had to start from scratch and possibly never get the project into a usable state. (In fact, they did actually try several multiple times to replace Mac OS 9 with an in-house-developed OS, before eventually buying NeXT, whose OS was rebranded as OS X and ultimately became iOS).
"if you don't care what people do with your software and just want anyone who finds it useful to use it, including anyone from Stallman-esque ideologues to cogs in the FAANG machine and everyone in between, then use BSD, MIT or similar. If you care about "free software" as an ideological movement and only want to give your software to people who are, in exchange, willing to help advance it, then use copyleft."
It's really not about advancing ideologies but advancing your software. For software under with a Free license, the source code to any improvements someone else made to your software would have to be distributed along with it. Without it, they could keep any improvements they made to themselves.
So using a Free license provides a tangible, non-ideological benefit to your software, in so far as the source to any improvements will be distributed and can be integrated back in to it to make it better.
The one wrinkle is that the traditional GPL was not designed for situations where the software is never actually distributed -- ie. "web services"/SAAS and the like. In that case, even software under the traditional GPL that companies like, say, Google uses could be improved by them without having to distribute the source, as the software only runs on their servers and is never distributed anywhere.
This is where the AGPL comes in, and why Google forbids using AGPL software inhouse.
This is also why I license all my own software under the AGPL.
Exactly the same for me. For most personal creations, I seriously do not care at all what happens to it. I just don't want to be successfully sued over it.
If you care about “free software” as an ideological movement and only want to give your software to people who are, in exchange, willing to help advance it, then use copyleft.
I am sure that some copyleft fans will have different interpretations or motivations. I’m just giving mine :)
(This all applies to contributions done in an individual’s free time. Companies contributing to open source for strategic reasons might think about these decisions in different terms).