[swatow]

I don't mind if other people use the GPL, but I think it's inappropriate for certain kinds of work, including most work sponsored by the government and universities.

Suppose the government sponsors a numerical software library. If that library is GPL licensed, that means that proprietary software like Matlab, cannot use it. Is this a good thing? If we think that there should be strong encouragement for all software to become open source, maybe yes. But I believe there is no reason to want most software to be open source. So releasing things like this under the GPL just means that less people can use it than otherwise, and so the effort has been less efficient.

I would choose a permissive license for everything except operating systems (which I think should be open source, for security reasons), and end user products (like emacs), which need to have the community protected from proprietary forks. Libraries should mostly be licensed with permissive licenses, because that maximizes the number of people who can use it.

[pjmlp]

Or Matlab can take the code, fork it, improve the version way better than the existing BSD licensed code and never return any changes back.

Eventually the only version containing the desired numerical algorithms with better performance will the be commercial version.