I’m active in circles associated with FSF and I often hear them saying research or academic software or programs must be licensed under GPL to prevent the work from being used in proprietary software.

But as a researcher I think that’s just involving politics in scientific work. I like BSD or MIT for research because it gives more flexibility for the users to use my work in anyway they see fit.

I think restricting my research work removes the point of it if it can’t be used freely by any person for any kind of work.

What do you people think?

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[–] FishFace@piefed.social 3 points 9 months ago

I don't think it's a "bad" license for research; I just think a person's ideals as far as open source licensing is concerned are their own business. It's not like if you pick one over the other people are gonna die. So let people choose it according to their principles instead of fighting them on it.

But if a researcher wants to use GPL because they want anyone who uses the code to be forced to distribute the source code wherever they distribute the program, then that's OK too. If the research is impactful enough, it'll still get used.

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