[fermienrico]

I like the spirit of open source but every time I see GPL, I feel like it is an evil license that tries to consume everything it touches - even the stuff it has absolutely no rights for. That is not the spirit of open source.

It has caused ages of headaches, law firms getting rich and unintentional business losses.

How about a license that says "You cannot use it for any commercial use or closed source projects" so then at least it doesn't claim rights to the rest of the source code. GPL goes a notch beyond and claims rights to proprietary code that so that community can enjoy the fruits of labor at the expense of a small set of people developed without anything to return.

Copy-left licenses are overarching evil in my view.

[zzo38computer]

GPL is not meant to prevent commercial uses, as long as the commercial uses are still with GPL.

What I generally do is release source code of my program as public domain, even if it links with GPL libraries (it will be GPL if I am modifying an existing GPL program though), although require that the combination is GPL even though the files that are entirely my own writing will be public domain. To distribute the combination or binaries requires distributing according to GPL. Since public domain software with source code is compatible with GPL, this is probably allowed, as long as the combination with the GPL libraries are GPL. (Since I do not generally release binaries, and rather release them as public domain source code, therefore it is probably allowed.)

[1] http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#DoesTheGPLAllowMone... [2] http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#CombinePublicDomain...

[Cu3PO42]

I would like to note that it is not possible to put works entirely into the public domain in some jurisdictions. The only such legislation that I am familiar with, is the German "Urheberrecht". In particular you cannot renounce certain "moral rights" [1] you have to your works.

Since it is not possible to actually put the works into the public domain, this typically means that you retain all rights and license no rights to user. As such you should always include a fallback license, for example Apache or MIT or whatever you feel comfortable with for these jurisdictions.

[1] https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_urhg/englisch_ur... (Subchapter 2)