Zed Shaw’s Why I (A/L)GPL
Zed Shaw has posted a well written discussion of why he uses the GPL series of licenses.
I have to say I agree with his reasoning on all counts. I have licensed software under the BSD or MIT series of licenses in the past, but often for small little utilities that I don’t think contain much intellectual worth or don’t represent new concepts or major time investments. Anything “big” comes under the GPL.
This is a good point to discuss the applicability of the Affero GPL license. If you are developing software which will likely never offered or downloaded to a client machine (the “distribution” step in the GPL, which is absent in most web applications and SaaS), but would like to force users to offer the modified source code to your product, this is the license to use. There are very few pieces of software which carry the AGPL license to date, however with the growing trend of cloud computing, it is well worth considering.
The only downside to the AGPL are libraries, which carry the full force of the GPL license. There is no “ALGPL” version, allowing linking of code into other products without bringing the requirements of the GPL with it.
