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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: 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.

Enterprises are often unwilling to release their projects freely, and given that I did not see myself having any ability to nudge them to fully join the free software side, I wanted to avoid being needlessly incompatible with the approach they already had and would not give up. I dislike the idea that two people privately sharing bits of data between each other can be perceived as committing a crime against a third party whom they are not touching or even communicating with and are not taking anything away from (no, "not paying" is NOT the same as "stealing"). Explicitly releasing to public domain is legally complicated for various reasons, and so a permissive license is the cleanest and safest way to get as close as possible to not copyrighting your works.

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