Thanks for the reply and your future consideration. I'm glad you seem to have taken the question as it was intended. I certainly didn't mean to imply that one license is superior to another.
Can we please stop calling out nearly every project that uses GPL (3) and call it restrictive? I know there are different opinions and arguing which is "better" nearly always leads to a philosophical debate on principles that gets us nowhere.
Sorry if this sounds snarky, and I do not blame you in particular, but it is just a theme I have encountered here the last years that I find toxic as it portrays the GPL (and FSF) as some evil organization that would restrict "developer's rights".
I don't think that the GPL or the FSF is bad or evil. I've released and maintain several projects that are GPL licensed.
GPL is by definition more restrictive than Apache and BSD, since there are more requirements to use the code, so asking if the developer is willing to consider a less restrictive (not "better") license shouldn't be met with hostility.
My motivation for asking is simply because the project looks interesting and potentially useful; however, the proprietary nature of my current work means that GPL licensed code isn't really an option for me. I absolutely wouldn't hold it against the author if they chose GPL for this or any other reason.
Licensing GPL software can be a nightmare. Using Apache, BSD, MIT, LGPL means I don't have to give licensing a second thought.
And speaking as someone who writes software for a non-profit, we figure we should just give away the code we write rather than put our own political license on it, especially considering we don't pay taxes in order to make it easier for us to benefit "the people".
They probably want to use it, make money off it, and give nothing back to anyone. The same as most people who complain about it, IMO. Or, just as likely, they'll integrate it into their own BSD software, which will then be used by someone else to make money, and give nothing back, which might as well be the same thing. (Countdown until 1 person shows up and retorts "Well, my company supports the OSS we use..." as if it's meaningful at all, vs the massive trend of corporations ripping off FOSS and returning nothing)
I don't GPL license a lot of my software (I used BSD/MIT/Apache most of the time, and my company revolves around and writes BSD-licensed code), but IMO, having seen this tired argument over and over again, I'm pretty sure 90% of all GPL complaints come down to this, even if the people don't come out and say it: "I can't make money off of your free work as easily, and that isn't fair to me. Please reconsider." Given this is Hacker News where half of everyone is in a rat-race to make money, I speculate this is a strong part of it.
People just like to wrap it in words like "restrictive" and "viral" to make themselves sound more palatable and reasonable.
And of course, there are also many reasonable alternatives to this library, many which are BSD or permissively licensed, which these people could also use instead -- but that won't stop them from complaining that GPL is unfair or "bad", of course, even though they could pick from a dozen alternatives...
It's harder for me to agree with a library being licensed under GPL than if it were an entire application being licensed under GPL.
If someone's licensing an entire application that's usable in its own right, like an SQL server or emulator or game or kernel, then it totally makes sense that anything you build around it should have its code be accessible.
But if it's some smaller part of your entire codebase, I feel it's a little less reasonable for people who aren't working on something that's already *GPL licensed. Especially when you have middlewares or other proprietary pieces of code linked with yours. That, plainly and simply, will prevent you from using the library. (Except if it's the LGPL, which I've never had problems with. I personally like it the most, and I'd use it if I really cared about people upstreaming their changes.)
I'm not going to say "this library is bad because it's GPL'd" but it does mean I would avoid baking it into a programming language runtime, for example.
And it really bothers me that you have such a low opinion of people who comment here, and of people who disagree with you. Maybe it's just an exaggeration for argument's sake, but I feel like there are plenty of reasonable arguments against use of the GPL.
> They probably want to use it, make money off it, and give nothing back to anyone.
They do the same shit with the GPLv3 as well. Piko Interactive recently backed out of a licensing agreement with me, and just released my GPLv3 emulator in their Steam application without even telling me. When someone called them on it, they said to e-mail them for a link to the code (not enough to take my work for free, they have to play games with their obligations under the GPL.) Which by itself is useless, as it's just a UI modification. The value is the ROM image they don't include in their source, which gets you into a nasty gray area of the GPL.
It's part of the Faustian bargain all open source devs have to make: if you add a non-commercial clause, FOSS proponents will label your work "non-free" and "not open source", and you'll be banished to obscure disabled-by-default nonfree repositories on Linux distros. Which I was until I caved and moved to GPL to avoid punishing my users.
If you don't add that clause, you'll get taken advantage of. We have to rely on people being fair and sharing their profits off our work, and very often, they don't.
