My wife and I have been reading a lot of graphic novels recently. One the graphic novels that we've been reading is Marvel's "Civil War" series. It's all about the U.S. passing a "Superhero Registration Act" which requires all superheroes to register their "secret identities" with the government. The superheros then naturally either choose to register or not, which results in a superhero civil war, with Iron Man fighting against Captain America. Hopefully you get the idea

Today I had a rather interesting conversation with a few "friends" of mine in the #django channel of irc.freenode.net about choosing between GPL and BSD. While this is a personal preference, my preference was the GPL, mostly because I have this feeling deep inside that it's almost morally wrong to modify an existing piece of free software and then sell it as a new product. Initially, it felt a lot like those graphic novels I've been reading, where each side is insisting they are "right" even though both sides were asserting that is was merely a preference. Eventually, we all came to an agreement that neither was necessarily superior to the other, but more of an answer to the question "What do I want to do with this?"

I've had conversations like this many times with other developers, sysadmins, managers, and the like. None of them has persuaded me as did those few other developers in #django tonight. I'm actually very seriously considering releasing all the source code to this site (which I will do in a few weeks anyway) under the BSD license instead of the GPL. Why? Well, I figure that the only people who would probably want to see my source code would be developers, not likely end-users (because nothing I've done is incredibly useful). Since it's more in the name of education, I don't really care what someone does with it. If they want to modify it and make money, be my guest.

While I'll continue to use Linux (GPLv2) instead of switching to *BSD, I feel like I had someone give me valid arguments for the BSD license, and like anyone who is willing to learn and grow, I'll accept and understand it.