[Rails] Re: MIT vs GPL vs LGPL for open source project

[Tobias Lütke]

> > If typo was GPL you would have to release the source upon request of
> > every application which uses typo in any way shape or form. This
> > includes even just copying some lines of code from the flickr parser
> > for example. GPL taints all source code its copied into.
>
> Which, of course, is seen as a feature, not a bug, as it grows the pool of
> Free Software available to the world at large.

Its easy to make this mistake. Good programmers love sharing beautiful code.
In a GPL project you get all the code back, no matter what the
quality. That leads
to a lot of useless code for the project lead to wade through.
The beautiful code, the one you really want, you get in a MIT project.
But you even get
such code by people using your project for commercial reasons. As all
the extractions from projects such as Basecamp clearly show this is
the code a open source project lead wants to get his hands on.

To summarize this quickly: MIT licence leads to fewer but higher
quality code contributions.


--
Tobi
http://shopify.com       - modern e-commerce software
http://typo.leetsoft.com - Open source weblog engine
http://blog.leetsoft.com - Technical weblog