Comment by dbcurtis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dbcurtis | Hacker News Reader

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I've said for a long time that people should choose a license they way the choose a screwdriver, not the way they choose a religion. Your comment touches on both parts of that.

Want code to be open forever, and for you and your contributors to not be taken commercial advantage of? GPL could be a good choice. Do you desire total world domination (for a new protocol, for instance) then go with something like MIT that allows both open and commercial implementations to interoperate easily, without a lot of license drama.

And yes, some people may "feel" as you say, that they only want to contribute to GPL projects. Sometimes for religious reasons, sometimes other reasons.

For my part, there are some kinds projects that I would not contribute to under MIT/BSD style license, because I would want my work to be available to some community without being taken advantage of. Certain pet hobbies of mine fall in that category. OTOH, there are many BSD license projects where I am happy to send a patch or two because I benefit from the ecosystem in numerous ways, including commercial support for said BSD software.

Somewhat off topic, but I've noticed people using the word 'religious' in arguments like this to mean more or less 'positions that one holds that are not based on logical reasoning but strong personal preference'.

Wouldn't dogmatic be the more appropriate word choice?

I'd argue that being dogmatic is a subset of being religious, and the superset of the term "religious" is applicable to the analogy at hand.

Of course, if you have a more favourable view of religion than me, you might disagree.

I think there's a subtle difference. While dogmatic is often used when in context of religions it's not exclusively related to religion.

Google's definitions of religion:

>the belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, especially a personal God or gods.

>a particular system of faith and worship

>a pursuit or interest to which someone ascribes supreme importance

and of dogmatic:

>inclined to lay down principles as incontrovertibly true

I think the most precise use of religion is in connection with faith or a core belief system and lifestyle (which some open source advocates certainly fit), while strong positions in a particular topic or narrow scope, e.g. the GPL, tend to be better described as dogmatic.

Which, reading back to the parent comment and the scope of the thread, I guess either could be used fairly appropriately.

A better place of where I think dogmatic would be the preferred wording would be in reference to tabs vs. spaces or vim vs emacs.

I would call it religious, because they (including some I know personally) attribute strong moral value to the whole thing. It is not just that they strongly prefer certain license, it is that they see close source developers as morally less worthy and inherently less "good" (whether professionally or ethically).

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