In the discussion around Richard Stallman’s speech at Purdue and my subsequent blog post about it, there was a great focus on the philosophy of various licenses. On Twitter, the point was raised that the GPL restricts the freedom of those making derivative works. The implication being that it imposes selfish restrictions. As a response to that (and because I told “MissMorphine” that I would write on this), I thought it would be a good idea to write about my own license choices and the personal philosophy behind them. Never mind the fact that it’s five years late.

First, my general philosophy. I am a proponent of the free sharing of information, knowledge, and software. I’m also aware that producing these things requires effort and resources, so I’m sympathetic to people who prefer to receive compensation. For myself, I generally opt to make things available. In exchange, I ask that people who would build off my work not restrict the freedoms of others. In order to do that, I must restrict the freedom to restrict freedoms. This is the choice I make for my own work.

Open source licenses (and I use the term broadly here to include the Creative Commons licenses and similar) maximize freedom in one of two ways: they maximize freedom for the next person downstream or they maximize freedom to any level downstream. It’s shouldnt be a surprise to learn that the former is often favored by developers and particularly by commercial entities, as it allows open source code to be used in closed products.

My default licenses are the GNU General Public License version 2 for code and Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 for non-code. The gist (and to be clear, I’m hand waving a lot of detail here) of these licenses is “do what you want with my work, but give me credit and let others have the same rights.” However, I’ve licensed work under different licenses when there’s a case for it (e.g. contributing to a project or ecosystem that has a different license).

The important thing to remember when choosing a license is to pick one that matches your goals.