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My choices of software licenses
#&summary Which licenses do I use, and why? #&
My choices of software licenses
I like strong copyleft, the stuff found in the GNU General Public License, the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike, and others. I like how people cannot take the code or culture I contributed to the world and turn it into something non-free. I have used those licenses a lot.
For cultural works, it seems to me that the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike has a strong following; of course some people dislike it for being a long, legalese text, but my general impression is that people who want to create sharable and modifiable cultural works like it just fine. If there was a large resistance towards the BY-SA, making something available under that license would mean excluding many people from remixing that something, just because of their dislike of the license. Since that doesn't appear to be the case, I'll happily continue to use the BY-SA license.
For software, on the other hand, there are many loud voices against the GPL. This article explains the arguments well. As much as I like to copyleft my code, I find it even more important that it's not lonely; and if so many are against the strong copyleft in the GPL, I feel I must concede and release my software under BSD3 or something on that level of lack of user freedom.
I only see two reasons to not use strong copyleft with a program (and they overlap):
- If the main objective of the software is to become widespread (like how the Ogg Ogg/Vorbis codec uses a lax license — which, by the way, RMS agrees with)
- If so many people dislike strong copyleft that too few are willing to contribute to a strong copyleft project (my reason)
I'm not that interested in whether GPL usage is currently dropping or rising, or that the GPL is still very widely used; what interests me is that a high number of projects simply do not use the GPL. I found the Is copyleft being framed? talk interesting, but copyleft being framed doesn't change the data at http://flossmole.org: this and this show that while GPL usage is high, so is the combined use of BSD3, Expat/MIT, Apache 2.0, and other lax licenses.
A (for me) important example of where a lax license (in this case the BSD3) is pretty much used everywhere is Haskell's package collection, Hackage. If I came along with a GPL-licensed program, it would be pretty lonely.
I must remind myself that strong copyleft was never an end in itself, but merely a help. From now on (Oct 10, 2012), I'll make new software written by myself available under the BSD3 license. If at some point in the future, the usage of a lax licenses drops a lot and the usage of strong copyleft licenses rises (I don't think that'll happen), I might switch back to using a strong copyleft license. Until then, let the BSD3 experiment begin!
The main point of it all is to share code both ways, and if that flow works better with a lax license, then I think I'm okay with the risk of someone putting it into a proprietary program, even though I find that amoral.
I'm not going to relicense past (A|L)?GPL'd programs I've written unless someone asks me to or I have to update them anyway..
I'll still contribute to strong copyleft software, but I might mention this URL.
If I were to place myself in a camp, it would be the I-like-copyleft-sometimes-but-I-like-sharing-code-even-more camp.