Why GPL for BigBang?

This explanation of why the project is GPL licensed was prepared 2016-10-20 by sbenthall. It is intended as an expression of rationale for the initial choice of license, not as a community policy. The license may be changed at any time according the processes our our community Governance.

When we started the BigBang project years ago, we had to address the question of software licensing. For Free Software principles, I wanted to copyleft the software. This got push back from some potential contributors in industry and people interested in partnering with the project commercially.

In the end I decided to stay with the GPL license because of a project mission that is related to Free Software: the educational mission of open and reproducible research. One reason to build BigBang is to create a platform for data science education that is available to everybody. Open data from the projects that are foundational to the Internet, including standards and protocols, as well as software, are part of the historical record of how our world has become what it is. As much as any legal or cultural history, an understanding of this technical history is essential to our competence as world citizens. It is our shared inheritance. BigBang is designed to make this technical history available to scholars and students in the interest of an informed digital citizenry.

The GNU copyleft philosophy is aligned with this educational mission. My hope is that as contributors to BigBang, we will be conscious of our work being a contribution to global, civil, and collective self-understanding. This self-understanding cannot be proprietary; it must be held in common. GNU licenses prevent "forks" or downstream development work on the project from being incorporated into proprietary systems. This will give us peace of mind: our work will be harder to coopt for the kind of private interests that would make our civil understanding of technology even more difficult.