My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL
This may go either way for you, but I feel like the GPL is the closest thing that programmers have to a union. It guarantees that our obligations to users and other programmers always supersede the obligations that we have to our employer. They are a law hack that encodes professionalism.<p>edit: it seems obvious that a doctor&#x27;s obligations should be to the patient, then to medicine, then to the particular institution they work for. A lawyer should protect the client, protect the legal profession, then protect whatever firm they happen to work for.<p>Programmers should make sure that users have access to inspect the code that affects their lives; that other programmers can work with, learn from, and help the users to interpret that code; and that their company makes money. The only way that companies can accept being pushed to the third priority is by a united front of programmers who unambiguously swear to uphold the first two without compromise, and making what you do GPL is attaching an oath to that effect to everything you write.