than the choice of license. In particular, it's a matter of record that, had BSD not been embroiled in its lawsuit with AT&T, Linux would not exist. If that were the case, the Stallmanites would be voices in the wilderness, instead of having bamboozled a large number of developers. &gt;&gt;Eric, would you consider turning off the automatic "smart" quotes in the comments? What's the problem? There are very few browsers that can't handle unicode these days, those that are should be IMO considered a bug in the browser rather than in the content. Typographically correct quotes get a bad reputation because Microsoft implemented them in Word [reasonably, for the purpose of preparing documents to be printed, where interoperability isn't a concern] before support for them was ready in the rest of the software ecosystem, but now it _is_ there. @Jay Maynard I strongly disagree with that opinion. The GPL protects my contributions against future use in closed-source products. While licenses like BSD and MIT may lead to your code being used in a closed-source product where you have no rights whatsoever. Further, forcing others to release their own code is coercion. Note the word "force". You've not established that he's _actually_ forced anyone to release their own code. If they don't want to release their code (in fact, it doesn't require distributing to anyone, it only restricts distribution without source code, but that's hairsplitting since I know what you meant), they're free to not take advantage of the terms offered