Picking a license

[Robert Kern]

On 2010-05-08 22:12 , Paul Rubin wrote:
> Steven D'Aprano<steve at REMOVE-THIS-cybersource.com.au>  writes:
>> For the record, I've published software under an MIT licence because I
>> judged the cost of the moral hazard introduced by encouraging freeloaders
>> to be less than the benefits of having a more permissive licence that
>> encourages freeloading and therefore attracts more users. For other
>> software, I might judge that the cost/benefit ratio falls in a different
>> place, and hence choose the GPL.
>
> I don't know if it counts as a moral hazard but some programmers simply
> don't want to do proprietary product development for free.  That's why
> Linux (GPL) has far more developers (and consequentially far more
> functionality and more users) than the free versions of BSD, and GCC
> (GPL) has far more developers than Python.

Post hoc ergo propter hoc? Show me some controlled studies demonstrating that 
this is actually the causative agent in these cases, then maybe I'll believe you.

-- 
Robert Kern

"I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma
  that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had
  an underlying truth."
   -- Umberto Eco