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?
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.