Context:

Permissive licenses (commonly referred to as “removed licenses”) like the MIT license allow others to modify your software and release it under an unfree license. Copyleft licenses (like the Gnu General Public License) mandate that all derivative works remain free.

Andrew Tanenbaum developed MINIX, a modular operating system kernel. Intel went ahead and used it to build Management Engine, arguably one of the most widespread and invasive pieces of malware in the world, without even as much as telling him. There’s nothing Tanenbaum could do, since the MIT license allows this.

Erik Andersen is one of the developers of Busybox, a minimal implementation of that’s suited for embedded systems. Many companies tried to steal his code and distribute it with their unfree products, but since it’s protected under the GPL, Busybox developers were able to sue them and gain some money in the process.

Interestingly enough, Tanenbaum doesn’t seem to mind what intel did. But there are some examples out there of people regretting releasing their work under a permissive license.

  • TheImpressiveX@lemmy.ml
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    5 months ago

    Not an expert by any means, but it depends.

    Are you okay with people potentially making a closed-source fork of your code? If yes, then choose a permissive license like MIT, BSD, or Apache. If you do not want people to make closed-source versions of your code, and want all forks to remain open-source, then go with GPL.

    Remember that choosing the GPL means other people, especially businesses, will be less likely to consider your project because that would mean they would have to make their versions open-source, which some people may not want to do.

    EDIT: As always, this is not legal advice and I am not a lawyer.

    • AlpacaChariot@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Just a small note that the businesses only have to open source their version if they release it. If they just use it internally then they don’t have to distribute the source code. So it depends on the use case.