> if I thought some government or company was going to use stuff I develop to launch the nukes or control a robot fist to punch cute little puppies right in the snout then I’d start using a more restrictive license
A more restrictive license wouldn’t help in that case. They would just have to publish any changes they made to your code. The primary benefit of restrictive licenses like the GPL is to prevent someone from using your code in a proprietary project without contributing anything back.
How enforceable (or whether I would actually have the resources to do something) these are is another problem, but it still might give some entity pause. Just generally though, using a restrictive license like GPL is pretty likely to make Puppy Punching Worldwide Inc look for other alternatives as well. Odds are, their puppy punching software isn’t going to be compatible with a license like the GPL.
> if I thought some government or company was going to use stuff I develop to launch the nukes or control a robot fist to punch cute little puppies right in the snout then I’d start using a more restrictive license
A more restrictive license wouldn’t help in that case. They would just have to publish any changes they made to your code. The primary benefit of restrictive licenses like the GPL is to prevent someone from using your code in a proprietary project without contributing anything back.
> A more restrictive license wouldn’t help in that case.
Well, it depends. Elsewhere in the thread, people mentioned licenses that have ethics clauses:
How enforceable (or whether I would actually have the resources to do something) these are is another problem, but it still might give some entity pause. Just generally though, using a restrictive license like GPL is pretty likely to make Puppy Punching Worldwide Inc look for other alternatives as well. Odds are, their puppy punching software isn’t going to be compatible with a license like the GPL.