Picking a license

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Fri, 07 May 2010 23:40:22 -0700, Patrick Maupin wrote:

> Personally, I believe that if anything is false and misleading, it is
> the attempt to try to completely change the discussion from MIT vs. GPL
> to GPL vs. no license (and thus very few rights for the software users),
> after first trying to imply that people who distribute software under
> permissive licenses (that give the user *more* rights than the GPL) are
> somehow creating a some sort of moral hazard that might adversely affect
> their users

If encouraging third parties to take open source code and lock it up 
behind proprietary, closed licences *isn't* a moral hazard, then I don't 
know what one is.

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.


> So which is it?  GPL good because a user can do more with the software
> than if he had no license, or MIT bad because a user can do more with
> the software than if it were licensed under GPL?

Good or bad isn't just a matter of which gives you more freedoms, they're 
also a matter of *what* freedoms they give. Weaponized ebola would allow 
you to kill hundreds of millions of people in a matter of a few weeks, 
but it takes a very special sort of mind to consider that the freedom to 
bring about the extinction of the human race a "good".

I consider the freedom granted by the MIT licence for my users to take my 
source code and lock it up behind restrictive licences (and therefore 
*not* grant equivalent freedoms to their users in turn) to be a bad, not 
a good. But in some cases it is a cost worth paying, primarily because 
not all people who use MIT-licenced software go on to re-publish it under 
a restrictive licence, but nevertheless won't consider the GPL (possibly 
due to misunderstandings, confusion or political interference).



-- 
Steven