GPL3 means it's not very reusable in any projects that aren't GPL3. Have you considered a BSD or MIT license? or CC0 if you want to get code reuse? Or at the very least LGPL2
Which of the four freedoms (ignoring that only freedom #0 and #2 apply to users) is violated by using more liberal licenses like MIT or CC0? Freedom #0 is clearly violated by GPL projects: GCC for years tried to be prevent to be run as a library or in combination with other programs. Running ZFS or the better proprietary graphics drivers on Linux is a bit questionable legally.
GPL being incompatible with app store rules kind of breaks freedom #2 and #3.
> Which of the four freedoms [...] is violated by using more liberal licenses [...]?
None of them [which, as you probably know, goes without saying because they're both free software licenses]. The problem is that a project using a lax/pushover license is that the project can be used as a tool for violating user freedom. For examples of this, see the PlayStation and other such products which were developed thanks to the existence of free software under lax/pushover licenses.
As an aside, the thing that personally made me care about the prolonged effects of copyleft is that I realised that if I wanted to contribute to a world without proprietary software, every non-copylefted program that I wrote was potentially acting against my intentions. You might not see it that way (and I didn't see it that way for a long time), but that's why I made my decision.
> Freedom #0 is clearly violated by GPL projects: GCC for years tried to be prevent to be run as a library or in combination with other programs.
That is simply not true, and is a non-sequitur to boot. It _is_ true that the GNU project decided to make it hard to create proprietary modules [or otherwise external modules] for GCC, but nothing stopped a user [in principle] from doing either of those things. The GPL doesn't require a project to make themselves usable as a library.
> GPL being incompatible with app store rules kind of breaks freedom #2 and #3.
But "app stores" are acting against user freedoms, which is why you can't distribute GPLv3 software [without additional permissions] in most "app stores".
In fact, I would argue the GPL is doing its job well here. It's preventing the re-distribution of free software in a way that harms user freedoms. That's sort of the whole point. Just because you don't care about how "app stores" treat users doesn't justify claiming that copyleft is acting against users here...
Thanks, that's a fair point. I do value user freedom and also come from the R language where GPL rules among packages. It's true though that Rust crate culture leans much more to MIT.
I think GPL3/MIT as a dual license should be a decent compromise.
> It's true though that Rust crate culture leans much more to MIT.
This is a fairly worrying trend I've noticed in new languages. In general it seems that they are systematically creating ecosystems where copyleft is much less modularised than in other (older) languages.
For example, in Go and Rust, LGPL is effectively as strong as GPL because it's non-trivial to make packages/crates replaceable for an end-user with a binary. This results in a general distaste towards LGPL even though it's objectively _the language's fault_ that LGPL isn't as friendly as it is in C. This causes everyone to license things as Apache or MIT (or _maybe_ MPLv2) and as a result the ecosystem of copylefted software is reduced.
All technical discussions will end in license arguments. Put simply, I don't agree (obviously). What I don't understand is this viceral hatred of copyleft to the point where you will make even weak forms of copyleft unfriendly in a language ecosystem. Aren't languages meant to be agnostic to license arguments...
At the end of the day, I don't care either way. I make all of my standalone Go and Rust code GPLv3. It's just a shame that people are willing to stunt their own languages just to make a point about licensing.
Right. That's reasonable. The point of my comment was to express disagreement with something that seems obviously true to you. I'm happy about the decrease in copyleft for its own sake. I dislike copyleft because I dislike intellectual property, on which, copyleft relies upon. (There's no need to debate this further. I've done it many times already.)
> It's just a shame that people are willing to stunt their own languages just to make a point about licensing.
You say "stunt," I say "free." Mischaracterizing this into a group of people indulging in some trivial holy war is absurd.
Others are more practical than me. Languages are permissively licensed to drive adoption. Regardless of the theory of copyleft, and regardless of rationality, people are afraid of it and stay away from it.