This is a great article. One thing I would add to this is that nobody really knows what licenses like the GPL actually do. Jacob Kaplan-Moss published a fanta

This is a great article. One thing I would add to this is that nobody really knows what licenses like the GPL actually do. Jacob Kaplan-Moss published a fantastic piece called "20 questions about the GPL"[0] , and my attempts to clarify a few of them with the FSF and SFLC have so far revealed that not even two developer advocate organizations can agree on even fundamentally basic concepts about the most popular license, so isn't that a problem? The reason that I contribute to the "projects on GitHub with no license" problem is that I cannot find a license that unambiguously does what I want, after spending many, many weekends on the problem. I could write one, or get my lawyer to, but license proliferation is grounds for expulsion from the cool kids club. Since I have no good options, I take no action. Fundamentally, I believe we need a new license steward that isn't afraid to update regularly to address 1990s questions like dynamic linking and optional dependencies, and 2010s questions like app stores. Something like Creative Commons for code, where you have some options to choose from. [0] http://jacobian.org/writing/gpl-questions/ http://jacobian.org/writing/gpl-questions/