&gt; very special circumstances.<p>my experience is that these &#x27;special&#x27; circumstances are pretty much &quot;you need to use it in a proprietary production environment&quot; and &quot;you don&#x27;t want to stop people using your software&quot;. this is close to what the FSF say so I don&#x27;t think i&#x27;m far off the mark...<p>the problem with GPL imo is that it is manifestly not free. you must abide by severe restrictions to use the code, which for a lot of software development would incur impractical costs.<p>even if i want people to use my code for free I never use the full GPL license. i don&#x27;t see any good reason to becasue i never want to dictate what other people can or can&#x27;t do with their own software by virtue of having helped them out with mine. i really don&#x27;t understand the sentiment...<p>for example, the choice of GPL here means that nowhere i have ever worked would touch this officially. i can tell you that most of those places are also not thorough enough to stop some random wannabe hotshot programmer from stealing large swathes of code from this repo and using them anyway... (i do not endorse this practice - but i am perhaps a little bitter because i am usually the one who spots these things and has to deal with them).