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Comment by taneq | Hacker News Reader

I have to wonder what kind of developers tend to fall in each camp. The GPL-ers seem very worried about other people 'taking code and not giving it back', whereas BSD-ers seem more concerned about giving and receiving code without strings attached. Maybe GPL-ers typically tend to pick an existing codebase and work on it incrementally, whereas BSD-ers tend more towards developing their own applications and then open-sourcing them when they're done?

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The BSD license is developer-centered. It's awesome for developers, mostly avoiding any licensing headache.

The GPL is user-centered. It's not designed to be nice to developers, but to protect the user's freedoms.

So to a first approximation I expect that developers that think more of developer's freedoms favor the BSD license, while developers that think more of user freedoms favor the GPL.

> The GPL is user-centered. It's not designed to be nice to developers, but to protect the user's freedoms. *

* Unless those users are developers.

I still haven't figured out the distancing and discouraging of LGPL. A lot of software doesn't have much distinction between user and programmer. GPL is one of the worst licenses for a library.

I get the feeling that a lot of GPL-ers really want to tell somebody big to back off. I'm partial to permissive licenses because I don't want to spend any time on enforcement. I honestly think some GPL supporters hope for the day that they get to send a nasty email to a company telling them that they have to comply with some term of the license.

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