Picking a license

[Ethan Furman]

Brendan Abel wrote:
> While I think most of the disagreement in this long thread results
> from different beliefs in what "freedom" means, I wanted to add, that
> most of the responses that argue that the MIT license permits the user
> more freedom than the GPL, suffer from the broken window fallacy.
> This fallacy results from the short-sided-ness of the user base, as it
> is only considering the first generation of derivative works.
> 
> I agree, that under an MIT license, the first generation of derivative
> works have more freedom.  But any extra freedom gained here comes at
> the direct expense of all future generations of derivative software.

You are assuming that _all_ future generations become propriety, then? 
How pessimistic.


> Under a GPL license, it is true that the first generation will have
> less freedom to distribute their software as they would like.  But it
> also ensures that all subsequent generations of derivative works have
> the freedom to access all previous derivative works.

Just because you have the code for the _current_ version of something, 
doesn't mean you have the code for that something three versions ago... 
after all, it may have been modified.


~Ethan~