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I'm a big fan of the BSD and Apache licenses. For being "Free," the GPL sure does put a lot of restrictions on what one may or may not do with a given piece of

• spydez 16y ago
  I'm a big fan of them because they're the only ones the legal department at work will allow us to use in our products. Using a BSD license means you're being nice to developers. The GPL means you're being nice to users and telling companies/developers to move along.
• _delirium 16y ago
  I tend to usually be more worried about users than developers, honestly. The BSD license is a bit too enabling of developers who want to put restrictions on their users for my tastes. I'm not sure I take a stand as strong as RMS about what freedoms end-users should have, but imo every user should have at least the right to reverse-engineer software for personal use, while if I BSD-license code, someone can build something on my code that they slap an odious EULA on. I mean, maybe they can build it without my code, too, but I still don't really want to see something I built get tangled up in that kind of thing. In particular, it could lead to me breaking the law! If someone built something using my code that they then kept closed-source and put a "no-reverse-engineering" kind of EULA on, I'd of course be curious how they'd built on my stuff, and would want to reverse engineer it. Quite a temptation! (That said, I do use BSD-style licensing myself for some things, mostly stuff I consider as good as public domain, e.g. a fairly small bit of code implementing a well-known algorithm, even if it's imo a particularly optimized and elegant version.)