6 Reasons To License Software Under the (A/L)GPL

Henry V .009 writes with a link to Zed Shaw's "newest rant," which gives a cogent description of his reasons for choosing the not-always-popular GPL for his own code: "Honestly, how many of you people who use open source tell your boss what you're using? How many of you tell investors that your entire operation is based on something one guy wrote in a few months? How many of you out there go to management and say, 'Hey, you know there's this guy Zed who wrote the software I'm using, why don't we hire him as a consultant?' You don't. None of you. You take the software, and use it like Excalibur to slay your dragon and then take the credit for it. You don't give out any credit, and in fact, I've ran into a vast majority of you who constantly try to say that I can't code as a way of covering your ass."

Comments

Not really for that

[vivaoporto]

Licensing as BSD, MIT or Creative Commons Attribution is as much valid as a way to get recognition for your work as licensing as GPL. The only thing the later adds is that not only your work can be freely (as in the 4 freedoms) distributed but also the improvements on your work must also be.

If recognition is all you want, by all means, just choose any attribution license. If having your work used by the most people is more important, use a BSD style one. Now, if your goal is to assure that your code will be always free, use GPL, LGPL or AGPL.

Re:Not really for that

[Enleth]

I guess I have some 30 seconds now before heavy airborne objects thrown by the GPL and BSD advocates bring this thread into a total mayhem, but I'll try to make an unorthodox argument there, anyway.

IMHO, both GPL-like and BSD-like licenses protect the freedom equally. The question is, whose freedom it is. Roughly speaking, GPL protects the freedoms of users by restricting the coders, while BSD protects the freedom of the coders, which might result in restricting the rights of the users. Which is more important, that's a whole new problem, but it's not about one license being "better" than the other.

Another, no less interesting way of looking at the problem is asking who do we exactly mean by the "users" of the code - the people "using" the resulting binary, or the people taking the code and "using" it to create new code? Or maybe both? This question alone puts the issue in a new light, and it's not an obvious one.

Many times I've seen people fighting over the GPL/BSD issue here and not ever once they agreed beforehand what do they mean by "users", "freedom", "better", etc. - heavy object throwing took over.

Re:Nobody hired you?

[FishWithAHammer]

Actually, having met Zed once, I was surprised at how personable the guy was--I'd be surprised if there was a group he couldn't work with. I chalked it up to the Maddox Effect: Maddox writes as a bombastic douchebag, but is a pretty shy and soft-spoken dude in person.