Software
If you are a software developer, than there is no doubt, you should use GPL. There are enough Richard Stallman’s speeches out there, so I do not want to get too much into explaining why putting your software in proprietary license or even worse, patenting, is a bad choice for everyone. BSD is the one that troubles me, since it is very liberating license. It allowed Apple for example, and it will allow your competitors to make money of your product in the unethical way. With GPL, if someone uses your code, he must also put it into GPL. What Apple did is took a lot of BSD kernel which is of course under BSD license, made a lot of money and instead of sharing, they did the most restrictions on the software in terms of patents, DRM, etc. To make a comparison, let’s say you have created a fire, GPL wants you to be sure to use it only for good, while BSD allows others to burn other people’s houses with it.
Art
Here is the clear choice, that people seams not to get right away: Creative Commons licenses are the best for the artists (Public Domain is bad choice in the same way as BSD is for software). It ensures that your product can be seen, that you can restrict its use to personal, unless approved by you (or sold for commercial uses). With other closed licenses, the only good have the companies like movie studios. The artist in such companies almost always gets only a fraction of the money. Watch the video below and you will see now they work.
There are few types of CC licenses that you can chose i.e. attributes, and those attributes can be combined:
- BY – someone using your work must give you credit for it.
- SA – Share Alike – they must license the work in the same way.
- ND – No Derivative – means that no works can be made using your work. This can be useful if for example you are arguing about something, and you don’t want your opponents or people who think differently to use your work.
- NC – Non Commercial – people may use your work for their personal use, but not to sell your product, while you are giving it for free. However, if someone wants to use your, for example, cartoon for his TV program, you may give or sell him the rights to do so
There are 6 possible combinations of those licenses, and for more detail, you can see them here: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/
Please, this is open for debate. Show your agreement or disagreement.
To see a list and download links for movies under CC license go here.