A while back Simon asked me to explain my preference for MIT license (as opposed to GPL) for my projects and keep it civil.
https://twitter.com/simonwheatley/status/480357565730402304
Despite the hardship of latter condition, I managed to put together illustration of how popular software licenses play with each other (or don’t).
Compatibility of licenses
| code | |||||||
| GPLv2+ | GPLv2 | GPLv3 | MIT | BSD | Apache v2 | ||
| project | GPLv2+ | yes | no | no | yes | yes | no |
| GPLv2 | yes | yes | no | yes | yes | no | |
| GPLv3 | yes | no | yes | yes | yes | yes | |
| MIT | no | no | no | yes | yes | yes | |
| BSD | no | no | no | yes | yes | yes | |
| Apache v2 | no | no | no | yes | yes | yes | |
TL;DR
I prefer MIT because it has affinity for code to drift around, without strings attached. GPL doesn’t play well with other licenses, including the different versions of itself.
I have projects which I can’t release sources of, because of GPL compatibility issues. Sad panda.