Steven D'Aprano <st...@remove-this-cybersource.com.au> writes: > For the record, I've published software under an MIT licence because I > judged the cost of the moral hazard introduced by encouraging freeloaders > to be less than the benefits of having a more permissive licence that > encourages freeloading and therefore attracts more users. For other > software, I might judge that the cost/benefit ratio falls in a different > place, and hence choose the GPL.
I don't know if it counts as a moral hazard but some programmers simply don't want to do proprietary product development for free. That's why Linux (GPL) has far more developers (and consequentially far more functionality and more users) than the free versions of BSD, and GCC (GPL) has far more developers than Python. Of course the BSD license did allow Bill Gates and Steve Jobs to become billionaires off the work off the developers who actually wrote the Berkeley code and are now struggling to make their rent. But at least those developers can be proud that the Microsoft and Apple DRM empires benefited so much from their efforts. THAT's a level of self-sacrifice that I can do without. Note, "permissive license" is a Microsoft propaganda term from what I can tell. "Forbidding forbidden" is how I like to think of the GPL. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
