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GPL is only “viral” if you think freedom is a disease.
Licenses like GPL are reciprocative licenses. If you take, you must also give back.
Licenses like MIT are parasitic licenses. You can take without giving back.
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@aral
GPL is a jealous license: If I can't use your code, you can't use mine.
BSD/MIT/X are generous: If you want to use this, you can.
Which follows from where they were made. RMS was upset nobody from SAIL wanted to be near him, and they had printer drivers and he didn't. It's a license for petty people.
BSD was heroic Berkeley hippies giving away their hackery, liberating UNIX from AT&T. It's for heroes.
#license #gpl #bsd
@aral MIT is great if your primary goal is bragging rights about some startup using your code
@aral@mastodon.ar.al I prefer MIT for what I consider 'trivial' work, e.g. if someone wants to re-use my shell script and GPL for more substantial works. Mainly because the GPL seems overkill in that case and it is more likely to be that it's convenient for them, rather than that it's actually work that demanded substantial creative effort.
@aral I think this is an unfair representation of MIT(etc) licences. After all, the licence is chosen by the people actually doing the development. It's not like the parasites are forcing people to use MIT. (Though the parasite do obviously prefer when it is used, and maybe even encourage it.)
Not going to argue about whether GPL or BSD/MIT is better, but people pick BSD-style licences for valid reasons, just as people pick the GPL for valid reasons.
@aral@mastodon.ar.al One thing I wonder whether people realise about GPL, is that you only have to share your modified source if you are distributing your derivative work (possibly with Affero also if it's being used for a public-facing service). So it's not technically forcing you to disclose anything.
@aral I made my latest thing GPL partly because I haven’t mustered up the activation energy to leave GitHub yet, and I figure the one thing that might make Microsoft pause before blending my code into goo for the plagiarism bot is the idea that a court would declare the whole model a derivative work. Probably just wishful thinking, but given how big tech seems to treat GPL as a contamination, it seems like decent armor 
@yusef AGPL is even better for that. None of it is perfect. Not least of all because once you’re large/powerful enough the only law that applies under capitalism is the law of the jungle.
No version of the GPL acts as a virus, as copyleft doesn't "infect" merely aggregated software like a virus would - rather it's like a spider plant - if you make the explicit choice to take a piece, the freedom grows.
@aral Linux can't be GPLv3 it speaks about its virality. Also LibreOffice and many other projects use Modified A/GPLs or have an extra added restrictions besides original licence which is sad. At least BSD/MIT don't have these problems. And see what RedHat does for commoners with GPLv3?
@aral IANAL
The GPL isn't infectious at all. Linking to GPL-covered code doesn't mean you have to license your code under the GPL. But it does need to be under a GPL compatible license so that the combination as a whole can be distributed under the terms of the GPL.
If you choose to distribute your code separately from the combination, it is still covered by your chosen license, the GPL hasn't infected your code, it doesn't spread anywhere.
@AilesGrises @aral It is infectious in that it infects dependencies with freedom, not with GPL itself :)
@carmenbianca @aral I haven't thought of it that way before, good point! I suppose you can see it that way, but if we're sticking to the "infection" metaphor I would rather say the GPL cures the dependencies.
@aral People should have the right to control their own devices and no one should be able to take that right away from them. GPL is designed to protect that right. Proprietary shills don't like that, so they have to make it sound like it's a bad thing.