Elegant Chaos

Unless otherwise stated, any open source Elegant Chaos software is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

Choosing exactly which license to use has been tricky, and I may revisit this decision at a later date (but any change will not affect the software that I am distributing now).

Politically I agree with the aims of the GPL, and I understand why it imposes the restrictions that it does.

I did have a couple of concerns with it:

First, as someone who has worked on lots of commercial software, I do understand that the GPL can be a monumental pain in the arse. It is often totally unrealistic to expect a product to be open sourced when selling it is the raison d'être of the whole company, and a programmer is often left in no doubt how their boss would react to such a suggestion.

In these cases the GPL license may have some long-term evolutionary effect, killing off such commercial narrowmindedness, but in the short term the programmer quite likes their job, so has to forgoe a nice clean public implementation and attempt to re-invent the wheel. This is a shame as it works against standardisation and encapsulation of common code, both of which are desirable processes that all programmers benefit from.

For now, I can live with that effect of the GPL on my software, because the things I'm releasing are so small that the standardisation argument is irrelevant.

My second concern was that I didn't prejudice any future need that I might have to commercially exploit my own work!

This is perhaps selfish, but it's also a pragmatic concern, because I don't know what the future will bring. Until I reach the enviable position of being financially secure for the rest of my life (looking extremely unlikely from where I sit right now), there is always the possibility that I'll need to use some of my code to pay my rent, so it seems unwise to preclude that!

I think that this concern is answered positively by one of the GPL frequently asked questions.