As anc84 said, it&#x27;s about guaranteeing future freedom.  Like making sure that the code I spent hours on to contribute to your project for free isn&#x27;t going to be taken by another company and incorporated into their closed-source product to compete against the project I&#x27;m working on or just contributed to without the company contributing anything back.  That&#x27;s one of many reasons someone may take issue with you choosing a more permissive license and not wanting to contribute as a result.<p>Like lots of open source folks I know, I&#x27;m personally a fan of the underpinnings of apps&#x2F;servers as well as libraries being permissive (BSD&#x2F;MIT) so that everyone can contribute&#x2F;benefit but full applications being GPL.  To each their own, of course, and there are many rationales for differing views.  But please don&#x27;t belittle others&#x27; takes on what they choose to do with the effort they put in.