Your license, or mine?

Here's an excerpt from a comment on software licensing by Joerg Moellenkamp

..as everyone tends to have their own targets and needs, there is no right and wrong about licences. There is only a "does-the-license-fit-or-not". When you look from an economic standpoint CDDL is surely the more sensible license. For a joint development on a open source project, that existed before it´s relicensing (perhaps even with licensed 3rd party code), CDDL is the more sensible license. But to prevent the take over of a code base developed by a community from almost the first line of code, GPL is definitely the license of choice.

I think that states the question every software developer faces when considering license choices: "does the license fit or not?", and raises the possibility that there may be some generic set of circumstances in which one kind of license is clearly preferable to another -i.e. that each license carries within it an implicit definition of the business structure to which it's appropriate.

As I mentioned on Wednesday, the free software foundation differentiates 32 licenses "GNU compatible" licenses from over a hundred other open source licenses mainly on whether or not they allow the commercialisation of intellectual property - with the GPL holding all rights within the community, the BSD people inviting use by anyone, and a hundred or more others compromising between these two extremes.

On the surface, this makes the first part of the licensing question fairly easy to answer: the type of business implied by a GPL compatible license is one in which somebody else pays the bills - and, conversely, businesses in which software development helps pay the bills, should use non GPL compatible licensing.

More subtly, take another look at the last sentence quoted from Moellenkamp above:

But to prevent the take over of a code base developed by a community from almost the first line of code, GPL is definitely the license of choice.

In effect what he's saying. and I think he's right whether he meant to say this or not, is that the GPL asserts intellectual property rights in a negative way: explicitly trying to prevent the commercial exploitation of community effort -and that the FSF is therefore exactly what it is most opposed to: an intellectual property rights organization.