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I'm not so sure that liberal licensing leads to popularity. One obvious counter-example of your supposition is GNU/Linux vs. BSD. Incidentally, the last thing

by big-j 19y ago

I'm not so sure that liberal licensing leads to popularity. One obvious counter-example of your supposition is GNU/Linux vs. BSD. Incidentally, the last thing the FSF is worried about is popularity, yet look at how popular GCC, Emacs, bash, and other GPL'd software is. Licensing your software with a very liberal license may help make your software more popular with some large companies who are in a position to take advantage of it (and I suspect timing is important here as well), but I'm not so sure it makes your software popular with the developer community.

davidw 19y ago
It's certainly complicated, and depends on several factors. One thing that's important for languages like Tcl is that they can be embedded within other projects, and for that reason a liberal license was very important. Of course, it's certainly not the only thing you need. The GPL is probably ok for "finished product" sorts of things that you don't need to link against to utilize it.