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?

  • SpaciousCoder78@lemmy.mlOP
    15·
    2 days ago

    Yeah I find GPL to be ironically non-free because it removes the right for anybody to use the code as they see fit, basically adding a restriction on the developer.

    I find it absurd when people force me to use GPL for my research work and they aren’t even in the field to know that adding restrictions on something thats good for the scientific benefit is foolish. RMS isn’t funding research or building any kind of quantum computer, it’s the big corporations that do that. This is just involving politics in science.

    Forcing GPL for research is foolish because nobody would be interested in implementing your work. After all, it’s those big corporations that have enough funding to take up on bigger ideas and research.

    GPL is fine for basic software for consumers and I’d argue it should be used more but for research, its just a bad license.

    • emergencyfood@sh.itjust.works
      7·
      2 days ago

      Yeah I find GPL to be ironically non-free because it removes the right for anybody to use the code as they see fit, basically adding a restriction on the developer.

      Sometimes, in order to protect everyone’s freedom, you have to put some restrictions on freedom. Like ‘you should not stab people’, or ‘don’t drive on the wrong side of the road’. I guess this is similar.

      But also check who legally ‘owns’ your work. It could be the government, your university, or whoever funds your work. They might have rules on licencing.

    • FishFace@piefed.socialEnglish
      3·
      2 days ago

      I don’t think it’s a “bad” license for research; I just think a person’s ideals as far as open source licensing is concerned are their own business. It’s not like if you pick one over the other people are gonna die. So let people choose it according to their principles instead of fighting them on it.

      But if a researcher wants to use GPL because they want anyone who uses the code to be forced to distribute the source code wherever they distribute the program, then that’s OK too. If the research is impactful enough, it’ll still get used.