Well, I decided to drop GPL for my indieweb projects and go with pretty much the polar opposite (simplified BSD). Legality, patents, copyrights, CLAs, etc. are not likely to ever be applicable to me, but I am fascinated by the ethical issues around copyleft licenses. Do I care more about “free” (take this do whatever you want with it) or “open” (the ethical position that code should be available for study)? Would we have Linux without the GPL? There are huge commercial gains to be made by using Linux, but corporations are not allowed to change or improve it without contributing their changes back. But at the risk of massive understatement, I’m not writing Linux. I’m writing really boring code that uses interesting, experimental protocols. So it came down to:
- There’s no good reason for me to try to protect code that literally anyone could write.
- I WANT people to dink around with it at home, with no expectation that they need to release their code.