Picking a license

[Paul Rubin]

Steven D'Aprano <steve at 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.