Wich free software License do you prefer?

**ember** · June 19th, 2006

I voted LGPL - basically for the same reasons as BFW89.

**eriqk** · June 19th, 2006

GPL, because freedom is a strange and paradoxical thing (and Sharing Is Good).

Groet, Erik

**BWF89** · June 19th, 2006

I don't see what the appeal of public domain is, under public domain anyone can use your work and they can claim that they wrote it. Under the BSD licence you get basically a public domain licence only they include a clause that says 1. You must give us credit if you make a fork off of it (like Sony and the PSP) and 2. You can't sue us if you install this in a nuclear power station and it causes a meltdown.

**FISHERMAN** · June 19th, 2006

LGPL.
Altough Free Software is great ideal, I don't think it is realistic to think that everybody can/wants to live without proprietary software. There will always be niche markets(eg. games, professional/scientific software) that will buy proprietary software. So you shouln't completely lock out proprietary software if you want more people using GNU/Linux
For non-niche markets(OS, Office, Internet,...) free software is preferable.

**raublekick** · June 19th, 2006

Originally Posted by BWF89

I don't see what the appeal of public domain is, under public domain anyone can use your work and they can claim that they wrote it. Under the BSD licence you get basically a public domain licence only they include a clause that says 1. You must give us credit if you make a fork off of it (like Sony and the PSP) and 2. You can't sue us if you install this in a nuclear power station and it causes a meltdown.

Well, in my post I did mention the ideal world, and in the ideal world people wouldn't just take your code as theirs

But really, I know what you mean. However, code is code. That's it. Code doesn't have a rich history behind it, detailing the painstaking hours that a single programmer put into it. Software is easy to copy and steal, and in the case of open-source, take credit for. This is unfortunate because it somewhat forces programmers to ensure that they get credit. But is that because they don't want their project getting botched by someone who doesn't have a personal stake in the project, or is it because they want to ensure recognition for their work? Any liscense is basically a means for the programmer to feed his ego and say "look what I did" while still allowing people to do something with the code.

In the ideal world, people would just respect other peoples' works and not take advantage of them, but in the real-world, certainly public domain will never work.