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?
I’ve settled on publishing all researxh-related code under AGPL. My reasoning is that academic research is funded by the public, so naturally the code should be public. Taken a step further, by licensing it under AGPL, I am ensuring that companies who may use the code for profit have to keep that code public and cant just privatize it and lock the public out.
Its unlikely anyone would ever even use my code though so 🤷