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?
How would you feel if Microsoft (for example) took your research code and turned it into a proprietary software product that made them billions of dollars a year, which you could buy and run, but could not modify, inspect its operation, or make use of the modifications that Microsoft made to your work outside of their proprietary product?
Your answer to that question is what determines which license you should use.