I’m active in circles associated with FSF and I often hear them saying research or academic software or programs must be licensed under GPL to prevent the work from being used in proprietary software.

But as a researcher I think that’s just involving politics in scientific work. I like BSD or MIT for research because it gives more flexibility for the users to use my work in anyway they see fit.

I think restricting my research work removes the point of it if it can’t be used freely by any person for any kind of work.

What do you people think?

    • illusionist@lemmy.zip
      8·
      2 days ago

      It does not promote freedom as much as gpl.

      You can always publish your code under gpl now and add a note that you are open to relicense your work. You can then later add the L to gpl or switch to MIT if you want to.

      You can not switch from MIT to GPL.

      My first packages were gpl. Then I got to know MIT and thought, wow, that is real freedom! Following that, I published my code under MIT until someone told me that gpl promotes freedom. If a project uses MIT, i may contribute but I won’t be the main author.

      MIT is much better than proprietary. sometimes MIT is much more favorable than gpl. E.g. If you are a company and want to collaborate with others, you release your base code under MIT and anyone can just not release their additional contribution but everyone contributes to the base code.