I'm heavily involved in the FLOSS non-profit world. I have a Master's Degree in Computer Science that has not done all that much for me. I regret getting it.

If you don't plan to teach high school or college, then you would be better served getting a degree in another field. For example, getting an MBA or a law degree might make it possible for you to broaden the range of things you can do. (I'm against getting a law degree, but for other reasons.)

If you want to go into not-for-profit or governmental policy work in computing, getting an MPA (Master's in Public Administration) would be good.

In short, your professors want you to do what they did. Given that B.S. degrees are not as valuable as they once were, it's worthwhile to have some sort of graduate degree, but getting it in another field will expand your horizons and opportunities and also give you more perspective as a computer scientist/engineer.

Even after years of conversations with us in the FLOSS community, Matt still doesn't get it. He's completely focused on “businesses with a codebase that release it under some license”. He doesn't understand community-driven software that isn't tied to on specific corporate entity.

The GPL is specifically designed for community-driven software that is not tied to one company. Matt could very well be right about the limited, pro-corporate world he occupies; it could very well be better for them to use the Apache license.

However, individuals and very small contracting agencies benefit best when they can be put on equal footing with the big guys. The only types of licenses that do this are copyleft licenses.

Finally, declaring that people's life's work trying to make the world a better place — even if you disagree with their politics — is disingenuous at best. I've spent most of my adult life working to make the GPL and the codebases around it better. I'm sorry to hear that Matt thinks I've been busy dumping radioactive waste on his world.

I think the fundamental problem is that FLOSS community needs diversity and cannot be tied to a single for-profit entity. For a project to succeed with a healthy community, it needs individual developers or a non-profit entity (run by developers) to control it. I've written a blog post about this specific issue in response to Monty's linked in the main article.

I used to run the GPL enforcement efforts at FSF. Since I left FSF, I am involved with similar work now that I'm with the Software Freedom Law Center.

The first thing to do is a always to notify the copyright holders of the software in question. They are the only people who have the power to carry out an GPL enforcement action. Once the copyright holders want to do the enforcement, then you could have them contact the Software Freedom Law Center for help. We do pro bono GPL enforcement for community projects when we can. We can't promise to take on every client who contacts us, but I am sure a GPL enforcement case with good facts would get serious consideration.

Mentioning the EFF in this context is sheer confusion, though. EFF has nothing to do with issues related to Free Software, they don't hold any copyrights on software.