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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."
Because you'll never get recognized in a corporate environment. It doesn't matter if the GPL portion is 1 line out of a million written by paid developers, all those millions of lines have to be made available because they were so "blessed" with your greatness for a tiny portion of the project. There are no shortage of non-viraly licensed projects out there that I don't need your GPL version.
There are a ridiculous number of GPL projects that are essentially trying to copyright "hello world." And an even more absurd number of GPL projects out there that just simply don't work. You can't throw trash out there, expect everyone else to fix it for you and then demand credit for "your work."
If you license your code in away that doesn't muck with how I can license my code then I'll be happy to take a look, fix it, and if it's apparent you made a real effort to get your project to work, I'll give you credit.
Work Safe Porn
If you want to ensure your code is always free you don't use *GPL.
GPL isn't about your code, its about you wanting other people to comply with your idea of freedom by restricting them.
BSD licensed code will always be free, and I wish douche bags like yourself would stop implying that it can somehow be made 'not free'.
Just because someone can use your code in a closed source project doesn't make your code any less free. They don't get ownership of the copyright. They can't make anyone else stop using it. All they can do is make THEIR PORTION OF THE CODE not-free.
Stop acting like *GPL is more free than a BSD license. It is less free, intentionally. It adds restrictions to ensure that everyone has to contribute back to the pot. Thats roughly the same as saying 'Get a years worth of gasoline for free!!! (when you buy this new car from us)'.
Thats not free, thats a scam. You are continuing the scam.
GPL isn't the problem here, its a very valid and useful license, but douche bags like yourself are twisting it and manipulating it into something its not for your own wishes.
Use BSD/MIT if you want attribution for your work and you just want to give people something to use anywhere. Use GPL if you are more concerned with making sure no one builds an entirely new product based around/using your code without giving back to the community.
The two licenses serve different purposes and can serve them well, but using one to push your agenda by propagating falsehoods about how one is 'more free' than the other is wrong, especially when you have it backwards be pretty much every possible definition.
If you want your code to be 'free' as in 'libre' you use BSD/MIT. If you want to make sure someone doesn't just swallow your code and take all of your work and contribute nothing back then you use GPL with its added restrictions.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Sadly for you, the "I can't code" excuse was originally licensed under BSD. The rest of us really appreciate it, though.