On Fri, Feb 5, 2010 at 3:53 PM, River Tarnell river.tarnell@wikimedia.de wrote:
I don't think this is a good idea. The GPL is one of the most restrictive open source licenses and using it automatically could hinder reuse later. A better choice might be something like the CDDL or MPL, which are also copyleft.
Using a non-GPL-compatible license would create problems too, since it couldn't be integrated into GPL or LGPL projects, and those are two of the most popular licenses in existence. We could use the LGPL, or another GPL-compatible weak-copyleft license. Or we could just use an MIT-style license.
Users who want to use a very strict license would still have the option of doing so.
They would not have an option of applying a strict license to already-published versions of their work, if they signed up without reading the terms carefully. On the other hand, if a very strict license is the default, users who don't like it could release their code more openly even retroactively.