Say no to corporate-friendly licensesEven though ILM had some prior experiencing with open-sourcing some of their software, we faced an up-hill battle internally. Like I said, Lucas' Empire was far more comfortable in the role of cultural vampire, and their legal team had far more experience in taking rather than giving. Their head of counsel, an IP lawyer named Jennifer Siebley, was particularly inimical to the GPL, so much as to have what I would term an allergy to it.
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Now, I realize that we are living in a material world, and we are a material girl, so I'm not relying solely on philosophical appeals. Consider the case that you wish to profit from the fruits of your keyboard. If you release your software as GPL, you are then free at any time to release new versions that are closed-source, while all your competitors would have to grovel before you in order to procure a commercial license (or you could give your friends licenses for free; the point is, that's your call). This is a pretty compelling commercial case for the GPL, and it's what, eg, Sleepycat (BerkeleyDB) or Trolltech (Qt) did before they were bought by Oracle and Nokia, respectively.
This is also what JUCE does, and they do in fact make money selling non-GPL licenses to companies that don’t want to deal with GPL.
I also have turned around on freely sharing code. Look at what ended up happening to people like Substack (the programmer, not the Nazi-friendly mailing list company). He wrote all of this foundational software, MIT-licensed it, and huge companies with goals opposite to his own used it to gather billions of dollars in revenue.
Not that anyone’s breaking down the door for my code (except A.I. crawlers, which want everything), but just in case, I use the
PolyForm Noncommercial License, which is easy to understand. Maybe I should use GPL for the scare factor, though.