What issue could possibly exist for using a GPL editor? It's not being shipped from a company...
The GPL sacrifices developer freedoms for end-user freedoms. I don't think it's any inherently more or less free. But then you get into discussions of what 'freedom' means...
I have written a ton of software licensed as each, and the tide is certainly turning toward the BSD. It just bums me out.
For the end-user it's irrelevant what license a product uses. They buy a polished, boxed product; they don't download source code, set up the code's build requirements and then compile it.
The only practical benefit of open source products for the end-user is that there may be forks of it which could have an impact on the price (although a product is more than just its source code, so they may not even be interchangeable). Or that someone could pick it up if the original developer abandons it. But these are theoretical long-term benefits, not immediate ones like those for developers or the code itself.
I'm not saying the GPL is bad. Just that people often misunderstand its motives. The GPL is about code in the same way PeTA is about animals. If the humans benefit directly from it, that's great, but the primary motivation is an ethical absolute: code should be free, locking it behind proprietary licenses is against its nature.
This separation between "developer" and "end-user" is common, but by no means absolute; there are many examples of non-professional developers adjusting their own tools such as scientists, business analysts, financial advisers, etc.
Besides, the GPL also grants the right to share the binaries with other people, which is definitively something that every end-user does.
GPL and BSD/MIT-style licenses are not equivalent in this regard, because code under BSD/MIT-style licenses is not obligated to be either easily attainable or modifiable. You can ship binaries and not release source code.
You can profit from GPL code. MySQL is perhaps the best example but there are others.
Keeping the source open is a big deal, because communities and projects can die otherwise. More than a few game mods, for example, have died because the developers closed the source to mitigate cheating, and then stopped developing the game altogether. Under the GPL, this could never happen.
I've been in discussions about problems with the GPL in several companies already. The real problem is not (as most people tend to think) the requirement to provide source code and the rights to modify and redistribute it. The problem is the patent claim landmine that is considered to be dangerous by many lawyers (see GPLv2 Section 7, LGPLv2 Section 11). I don't want to go into excessive detail here, but in brief: the danger is that you might have to immediately stop redistributing the software if you become aware of a patent that would restrict the rights provided by the GPL.
A library project which is under GPLv2 or GPLv3 gets immediately rejected in many (most?) commercial settings. Note that I'm not judging here — just stating a fact. We ourselves reject a lot of interesting options because of licenses and I know most other companies do so as well.
Now, LightTable is not a library project, but I can imagine how companies would like to bundle it, or bundle a modified version of it. The moment you "redistribute" it, the GPL applies, and if you build a business on this software, that business might have to suddenly fold some day because of patents.
Please don't respond along the lines of "you might get a patent lawsuit anyway". Yes, you might, but then it's a lawsuit, which you can defend against.
Please understand that the license change is a really big deal for some people.
While this also may be true, I'm quite familiar with the patent issue. And I am not even really criticizing Light Table for this decision, just expressing a tinge of sadness that yet another project has switched to a non-viral license.
> Please understand that the license change is a really big deal for some people.
Yup, I'm one of them.
Also, if you make a web-based product based on this, and a customer insists on hosting it in its cloud (many do because they do not want to, or in practice aren't allowed to, let their data out of their systems), can you sell it?
In both cases, did your patents just get free for all to use?
The moment you let in GPL code, you either give up having non-GPL code in your company, or you have to start spending time keeping the GPL and non-GPL code apart. If you do the latter, it also affects your flexibility.
The general argument in favour of the GPL and similar restrictive licenses is that it's not possible to extend GPL code without distributing your extensions under the same license (where the exact definition of "distribution" and "extension" is the main difference between LGPL, GPL and AGPL). It's largely about "us" (the Open Source community) vs "them" (the corporations, who historically don't contribute to open source).
In practice there is a vast body of open source code licensed under permissive licenses like MIT, BSD or Apache already and companies are releasing their open source projects under these licenses all the time. Even without the GPL, open source is here to stay.
On the other hand many companies now dual-license their projects under the GPL and a commercial proprietary license, with the GPL version being often intended as a "demo" to advertise the often very expensive but non-viral proprietary license (see Sencha for a perfect example of this approach). The ability of other GPL projects to make use of these projects under the GPL license is more of a side-effect (and free advertising) than an altruistic intention.
I think this has to do with the general shift in how we think about copyright today. Restrictive ("Copyleft") open source licenses subvert copyright to create a shared commons (which everybody can use but nobody can own). Permissive open source licenses abandon most of the copyright by just limiting it to an attribution policy and some basic cover-your-ass legalese (thus creating something everybody can use and own).
The goal of having a CA was to leave us the option of selling commercial plugins in the future. We no longer plan to do that so we got rid of it.
Separately, we kept hearing that the GPL is a hurdle to adoption at some companies so we switched to MIT.
Does Light Table's new MIT license insulate developers from EPL-GPL compatibility concerns that might arise from the EPL'd pieces (Clojure/Script, et al.) used to build it?
The MIT license is compatible with almost everything - it's really very minimal, comparable to a 2-clause BSD-style license. There is no problem combining MIT licensed components with EPL licensed components, or with GPLed components. (Of course there is still a problem if you want to combine with both at the same time)
Obviously this also means we can't move from MIT now either, but it wouldn't really make sense to, since you can't practically add restrictions to already published code. (Strictly speaking I think you could still use LT under the GPL if you wanted).
From the perspective of someone contributing code to an open source project, there is no difference between a MIT-licensed or GPL-licensed project -- your contributions are covered under the same license as the project as a whole.
Secondly, Mike Innes (http://junolab.org/) is one of the big contributors to Light Table and has told us that many of the commercial users of Julia are uncomfortable with GPL code and that changing to MIT would help adoption.
And what does that even mean, "uncomfortable with the GPL"? I have this picture in my head of developers programming with GCC, sweat dripping from their brow, looking over their shoulders for Richard Stallman to come and steal their laptops out from under them. Using GPL software does not have any impact on the work you do. It's only modifying GPL software and distributing those modifications that matters.