Comment Few people understand the economics (Score 5, Interesting) 250
Gift-style licensing like BSD licensing is for when you want everyone to use your code so badly that you don't care what they do with it. If you have an economic reason for that, fine. But it can create harm if you don't have your economics straight. Heartbleed was an economic failure of gift-style licensing. Very wealthy companies used OpenSSL and didn't contribute to its maintenance. There was some astronomical amount of economic damage in result. I think we all would have been better off had OpenSSL been dual-licensed and paid for by some folks, even if it had fewer users that way. And maybe that way its original developers would not have had to go to work for RSA, who prohibited them from ever touching their old code again. That's why we still have Eric Young's old, old license with the attribution clause nobody else uses any longer. He can't touch it.
GPL IMO does work best with dual licensing, because people who just hate the GPL can get what they want, and pay for making more Free Software. But if you don't care about money and don't want to use dual licensing, the growth effect you get from GPL is a lot better than making yourself some very rich company's unpaid employee by giving them all possible rights except for a very limited attribution.
Some people should pay. Some should get stuff for free. They aren't in general the same people, and they self-classify.