Comment by kelnos
> Respectfully, I think you have it completely wrong.
Whenever someone starts a sentence with "respectfully", it's usually because they're about to say something disrespectful. Definitely the case here.
GP doesn't have it completely wrong. There is no wrong or right. The person who is doing the building gets to decide the license, and any reason or motivation they have for picking a particular license is by definition correct, because that's what they want to do.
> If you publish your library under a permissive licence, you screw the other small libraries that have a copyleft licence (that would be an argument for a permissive licence)
No one releasing something under an open source license has any sort of responsibility or obligation to some random other open source project they may not even know about.
> There is no wrong or right.
Only alternate facts?
I answered to a comment that said "I don't use copyleft because I don't want to have to pay a lawyer", which to me is a completely invalid point. It's like saying "I don't use copyleft because I don't want to eat bananas". You can use copyleft and not sue, just like you can use copyleft and not eat bananas.
> No one releasing something under an open source license has any sort of responsibility or obligation to some random other open source project they may not even know about.
I meant that permissively-licensed libraries tend to be favored, so that's an advantage when competing with similar libraries. If you care enough to choose a license but you are not trying to compete with other open source alternatives, then it would be nicer to go for copyleft.
I know permissively-licensed projects that were inferior to copyleft alternatives but got more traction because... well because companies could freeride on the permissive license. In that case those who chose the permissive license knew exactly what they were doing and decided to compete this way instead of technical merit.