I’ve never really thought of enforcement of the GPL as being “a little step along the road of proprietary paranoia”, it is certainly an interesting take. One does need to pick which battles to fight when enforcing a licence and the GPL with its “viral” stipulation does increase the number of potential battles you may need to fight.

Of course, the fundamental believe of the FSF that all software must be Free is key to the GPL and that is why the FSF are willing to assist with enforcing the GPL.

I also agree that there are problems with the language used in the rather complex GPL licence. All legal documents are open to many different interpretations. I agree that the simpler a licence can be the less likely it is to be misinterpreted, this is why many people, who are not concerned with enforcing software freedom through the licence, prefer the simpler “permissive” licences.

Your point about using a permissive licence to get stuff like assistive technologies into the wider environment is a very important one. For the same reasons, many people claim that permissive licences for reference implementations of open standards help ensure that that standard is more widely adopted.

I guess your first point is a new one, to translate it to the open content question that this post addresses I guess content authors need to consider whether they are ever likely to pursue commercial use of their content. I’d guess that unless someone were making considerable money from your content you probably wouldn’t bother. So the question then becomes, “just how much is my content really worth?” (very few people get rich from selling books for example).

1) GPL like licences make the decision about whether to use Free software non-trivial. For example what exactly does ‘link’ in the viral clause mean? Plus GPL rights protection starts to take energy in worrying about enforcement and that is a little step along the road of proprietary paranoia.

2) Jambu is assistive technology and the real value add is that people with disabilities get a better deal. So if someone takes it as the basis for a commercial proprietary product I’m happy as long as in the big picture that causes a better deal for users. Hopefully they will feed back to me anyway, either explicitly or implicitly by raising expectations.

OK so there is a danger of proprietary ’stealing’ or hijacking but I think that is minimal.