Open Source Licenses: GPL vs. BSD
Despite being aware of the open source movement since the mid-80’s when RMS spoke at my university, I’ve never bothered to pay more than a couple of minutes of attention to the licenses. I guess I’ve just never been in the position of releasing any of my code to the public before, oddly enough. Anyway, now I am releasing some small programs so I thought I should take a more detailed look. The first thing I noticed is that much of the code I was using specifies GPLv2, so I started with that and was immediately dug in on the differences between GPLv2 and GPLv3. It stands out however that many people explicitly specify GPLv2, so I was curious about why that might be. However when I asked the question on twitter all I got was: “Why not BSD”. Sigh…
So now I’m reading the arguments behind GPL vs. BSD. The articles listed below are all helpful and instructive reads. They are all high quality enough to have caused my opinion to sway back and forth.
I’m still not sure where this leaves me. I may end up going with GPL simply because a large percentage of code out there is under GPL. In particular the code I’m releasing is dependent on GPL code. Please comment if you have constructive advice.
The best GNU GPL vs BSD comparison ever
Linguistic Problems of GPL Advocacy
GPL vs BSD, a matter of sustainability
Why you should use a BSD style license for your Open Source Project
