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 see it this way: by choosing BSD or MIT over GPL, you’re just protecting someone’s freedom to take your work and prevent people from using a continuation of it. They can still use it and change it, they just need to give their version to everyone, making even more tools available to everyone to use however they want. When it comes to science, too much is paywalled and restricted already. I wouldn’t want to let someone paywall any more stuff if I can help it.