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

Why to not use GPL

[KalvinB]

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.