I’m not an academic. I do not use the GNU GPL for my code (unless required to by other licences because I am deriving my work from someone else) and I do what I

I’m not an academic. I do not use the GNU GPL for my code (unless required to by other licences because I am deriving my work from someone else) and I do what I can to discourage people from choosing it “by default”. My dislike for the GNU GPL comes mostly from the dishonest marketing (“free”, “freedom”) and dissembling about the licence (it is “viral” and that’s a feature). I also do not particularly care to replicate the FSF’s peculiar political rant when I distribute software. However, if you want to enforce “share-alike” semantics for what you write, and you want the widest composability of your software with other “share-alike” software, by all means choose the GNU GPL (prefer locked to v2 unless you really care about “TiVo”-isation, then lock to v3—never choose the “at your discretion, a later version” clause). If you want to discourage SaaS companies from forming around your software, choose the GNU AGPL. If you want to enforce limited “share-alike” semantics at the link boundary, choose the GNU LGPL•. • Warning to people using GNU LGPL software, though: it doesn’t mean what you think it means. You still have to provide recipients of your combined software the means to relink your software with modified versions of the GNU LGPL libraries. If, however, you write software to scratch your own itch and don’t care what people do with it after you’ve written it? Pick a different licence: MIT, BSD, Apache, Artistic, whatever. You can even pick the GNU GPL family of licences if you really want that, but at least know why you’re picking it.