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Why I used to prefer permissive licenses and now favor copyleft

vitalik.eth.limo · 1,734 words · saved by 1 readers

Within free open source software (and free content more generally), there are two major categories of copyright licenses: In summary: permissive licenses freely share with everyone, copyleft licenses freely share only with those who are also willing to freely share. I have been a fan of, and developer of, free open source software and free content ever since I've been old enough to understand what these things are and build things that I thought other people might find useful. Historically, I was a fan of the permissive approach (eg. my blog is under the WTFPL). More recently, I am warming up to the copyleft approach. This post explains my reasons why. One style of software freedom, promoted by the WTFPL. But not the only style. First, I wanted to maximize adoption and distribution of my work, and releasing it under permissive licenses facilitates that, by making it clear that there is nothing anyone needs to worry about if they want to build off of something I make. Enterprises are of

Dark Mode Toggle Why I used to prefer permissive licenses and now favor copyleft 2025 Jul 07 See all posts Why I used to prefer permissive licenses and now favor copyleft Within free open source software (and free content more generally), there are two major categories of copyright licenses: If content is published with a permissive license (eg. CC0 , MIT ), anyone can take it and use it and redistribute it for any purpose with no restrictions, perhaps with minimal rules requiring attribution . If content is published with a copyleft license (eg. CC-BY-SA , GPL ), anyone can take it and use it

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