Coming To a Decision on Licensing

There are a boat load of already existing and vetted licenses to choose from, and aside from a small amount of zealots there isn't any real push for a developer to choose any one license model over the other.

I've considered several licensing schemes - including developing my own or extending one of the existing licenses to push for further restriction so that my software is expressly not used in environments that I am ethically averse to.

As far as extension, I haven't come to a complete decision yet, but I have decided that GPL v3 is the license model that I will be using.

There are other licenses that present more freedom for my end users and philosophically ultimate freedom should be pursued whenever possible. However, without the GPL, open source software would not be where it is today, nor would it have much of a future. One of the intrinsic GPL principals is that bodies of work based on GPL'ed work must also be GPL'ed.

I've seen many instances where open source work was repackaged and commercially sold over the years - where the only evolution of the product was re-branding and in some instances they didn't even do a good job of that. There are countless instances where original authors are not given full credit for their work. There are countless instances where developers who have written code enormously valuable to the community at large have had their code stolen from them so that a third party could profit while leaving the original developer with no money and few choices for recourse.

These kinds of things are killers to the open source community and philosophy.

The GPL and the Free Software Foundation are in place not necessarily to protect developers but to encourage open source development. Yes, the license is viral. In many situations your legal recourse in the event of stolen code is minimal.

The licenses viral nature silently encourages OSS in such a strong way though. Some of the best building blocks are GPL'ed, and as a result some of the most useful and best coded software is also GPL'ed. Apache and Mozilla, although they use different licensing, would not be where they are today without the foundation layed out by the GPL and GPL developers in building a committed and bonded community that proves the open source model works.

GPL v3 is a new generation of the GPL designed in large part to protect free software from loophole exploitation models utilized by both Tivo and Microsoft. While you can argue in favor of Tivo's or Microsoft's behavior on many levels, what they have done is harmful to the basic nature and continued lifespan of OSS and it is admirable that the license developers actively recognized these exploits and worked hard to come up with a way to curtail that kind of behavior.

So I'm going with the GPL. It's my license of choice because I believe in the philosophy behind open source software and it is the license model that I perceive works towards sustaining the open source philosophy long term.