I've always liked the idea of gpl. It's open for anyone who wants to play fair, but prevents large corporations from profiting off of your work. They can always license it from you of course, you just get to negotiate that.

I only do BSD, now.

I used to do GPL, and I still support free software and everyone's ability to modify and extend projects for new and better purposes.

When some South Koreans were jailed for upholding my license terms when they spotted their employer violating them, and the FSF did little and less to help them avoid jail - which happens sometimes in Korea - I knew the GPL was still a good idea but in practice it exposes people to risk.

I can't have that happen for my software again.

Licences are a nightmare to properly understand, I just find someone more knowledgeable than me and listen to them.

Also, OP tell me your conclusion for best hardware licence when you get there.

imo i wouldn't overlook CERN too much due to apparent obscurity. that's CERN as in WWW & LHC.

plus it's specifically designed for hw, unlike most of the others which are more likely to lean sw centric?

if your hw is very sw-heavy you could even consider splitting the license types between firmware and hardware if it helps.

not saying what the right choice is for you, just the apparent obscurity i think isn't such a big issue. but welcome correction.

The big question is how copyleft do you want to license it.

Which means, to what extend are the people building on top of your work allowed to keep their improvements and all downstream improvements for themselves and other future rights holder they might sell it to.

A copyleft license prevents someone from making an improvement and then treating the entire thing as their private property but also stop anyone else from making that improvement on your stuff and continuing progress.

So copyleft is, do you allow future devs building on your things to "pull the ladder up" on everyone else that come after them.

I'd go with no. But that means you cede control of it for yourself as well if you start including other people's improvements into your design, unless you make them sign dual license "contributor license agreement" so that you can have both a private commercial right to the entire thing while also giving copyleft version to the community.