I had several discussions with fellow students in Uni about GPL vs. BSD licensing and BSD licensed code is, IMO, more free and more accessible - it really depends on what you want out of your code. Is your goal to provide a useful tool as a one-off that anyone can pick up and use? Then BSD is for you - otherwise, if you have expectations around self-maintenance of the code by consumers then you want to lean more toward GPL. The thing you get out of GPL that you lack with BSD is the ability to pull back changes and bug fixes from users - usually by explicitly excluding those parties which for legal/whatever reasons aren't comfortable re-sharing bug fixes.
GPL is about freedom for the user, BSD/MIT is about freedom for the devs. Not all users are devs, but all devs are users. GPL is the better license for net freedom.
It baffles me how many people fail to understand this.
> GPL is about freedom for the user, BSD/MIT is about freedom for the devs.
Both are about freedom that is only directly meaningful for developers or people that can employ developers on their behalf; permissive license are about simply providing that freedom rather directly, with limitations that tend to be focussed mainly on avoiding unexpected costs to the original provider of the software (liability, reputational, or otherwise). Copyleft licenses compromise direct provision of freedom to acheive broader but less direct social goals which relate to that freedom.
If you both agree with the goal and agree with the pragmatic judgement involved in the design of the detailed mechanics in a particular license about how to acheived that goal, its quite possible that a copyleft license is better for your interest.
Personally, whether the goal is (and these are two very different goals I've seen cited by GPL proponents) promoting development of free software or inhibiting development of nonfree software, I'm not sure the GPL family (or any other copyleft license) does that better, in practice, than permissive licenses.
The GPL is better at inhibiting nonfree direct descendants of a particular code base, but I don't generally see that as a valuable goal.
"GPL is about freedom for the user" - define what do you mean by freedom, it's different for different people.
GPL is the better license for net freedom. - it's not, because of it's virality, it pollutes other code and then demands everything fall into it's license, which is ethically wrong.
> GPL is the better license for net freedom. - it's not, because of it's virality, it pollutes other code and then demands everything fall into it's license, which is ethically wrong.
Nobody has a gun held to their head and are forced to use GPL code in their code.
