| I used to develop free software exclusively under GPL or AGPL. But at some point, for things like, a very small-but-useful library or utility, I had a change of heart. I felt that it's better for the project to use non-copyleft licenses. I do this as a rule now for projects where the scope is small and the complexity of a total rewrite is not very large for several engineers at a large company. For small stuff, the consideration is, I want people to use it, period. When devs look at open source stuff and see MIT / Apache, they know they can use it no questions asked. When they see GPL etc. then they will be able to use it in some cases and not others depending on what they are working on. I don't want to have that friction if it's not that important. For a lot of stuff I publish, it's really just some small thing that I tried to craft thoughtfully and now I want to give it away and hope that someone else benefits. Sometimes it gets a few million downloads and I get feedback, and I just like that experience. Often whatever the feedback is it helps me make the thing better which benefits my original use case, or I just learn things from the experience. Often I'm not trying to build a community of developers around that project -- it's too small for that. I still like the GPL and I have nothing against it. If I started working on something that I anticipated becoming really large somehow, I might try to make it GPL. And I feel great about contributing to large GPL projects. I just feel like even though I'm friendly to the GPL, it's definitely no longer my default, because I tend to try to publish very small useful units. And somehow I've convinced myself that it's better for the community and for the projects themselves if those kind of things are MIT / Apache / WTFPL or similar. I hope that makes sense. I realized that I can be seen as one of those that treats the GPL as weird or not normal, because I don't really use it anymore. But I'm not trying to be an enemy of the GPL or enable embrace-extend-extinguish tactics. It's just that it a very nuanced thing for me I guess nowadays. Your comment caused me to reflect on this. |