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Comment by josephagoss | Hacker News Reader

I always thought that the best license was the MIT one. Can someone enlighten me as to why choosing GPLv3 is a better choice?

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Well, the question is, best for what? If the goal is to maximize the amount of Free (as in libre) software, then the GPLv3 is arguably the best choice. If the goal is to provide liberty, as in letting people choose what to do with the code for themselves, then MIT might be a better choice.

The GPL is infectous by choice: If some part of your project is under the GPL, the whole has to be licensed under GPL. This is not the case with the MIT license.

If the goal is to provide liberty, as in letting people choose what to do with the code for themselves, then MIT might be a better choice.

This really depends on whose liberty and what kind of liberty you have in mind. From a GNUish perspective, the MIT license gives you the liberty to... restrict downstream users' liberty to modify the software and distribute the modified versions. The GPL restricts your liberty to restrict other people's liberty in that manner.

Which is more free in some kind of libertarian sense probably depends on what you consider the status of copyright in the first place. If you think the ability to restrict downstream users through the copyright system is a kind of natural right (perhaps by analogy to property), then the GPL is adding restrictions on your ability to exercise that right, and MIT/BSD licenses are freer. If, on the other hand, you think the ability to restrict downstream users' distribution through copyright is an artificial privilege granted by the State, then the GPL constraining your exercise of it is not really a loss to liberty.

The GPL is not "infectuous" or "viral" or any of that nonsense. The GPL does not spread on its own. Your code isn't going to catch copyleft by sitting next to some free software.

Ah, sorry for being unclear, I wasn't aware that this was such a loaded term. I am not against the GPL, and I don't mean that in a negative way. I meant that in the sense that it dictates conditions for the "combined work", not only the source code directly under the license.

It's okay. It's just most often used as a pejorative term by people who dislike copyleft.

We can't argue whether GPLv3 is better if we don't know why you considered MIT the best license.

It may be better for commercial users, because they don't have to give back their improvements, but it's worse for the project itself for the same reason.

> It may be better for commercial users, because they don't have to give back their improvements, but it's worse for the project itself for the same reason.

OTOH, another perspective is that the GPL is worse for the projects because the restrictions it imposes may make people less likely to touch it at all, and those who don't touch it aren't going to give anything back whether they have to or not, and commercial users demonstrably do give back to projects that are under licenses that don't require them to do so -- and even pay people to work directly on the projects.

but having commercial users "altruistically" contribute back means having to trust in them. Had lightable not been GPL, commercial entities could easily have just taken it, make a nice derivative (e.g., make it into a game dev IDE), but never contribute that back at all. TLDR; they got a free lunch.

With GPL , said commercial entity either have to provide their derivative's source (thus contributing back via more features/code), or pay the owners of lighttable a fee for not revealing the sources. Neither way allows them to get a free lunch. This is a good thing imho.

That isn't actually the case, just the rational used to make the choice. Actual experience has shown that commercial users simply avoid restrictive licensed projects, and frequently give back contributions to liberally licensed projects. Ogre3d for example switched from LGPL to MIT and got more contributions from the commercial software world.

Maybe, but the counterpoint would be that you don't necessarily know about companies using MIT projects and similar because they don't have to announce it at all.

That is not a counterpoint, it is an assumption. A counterpoint would be actual experience of getting less contributions with an MIT/BSD/ISC project. Saying "but in my imagination it doesn't work that way!" does not counter actual real world experience.

The difference is that the GPL is designed with users in mind. The idea being that if you have the right to run code, you should have the right to modify that code.

I'm sure you've used software that has frustrated you, knowing full well that you could easily fix the problem, if only you had the source. I expect every programmer has had that thought at least once. That is what the GPL is designed to resolve.

The MIT license, on the other hand, grants no rights to the users.

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