Doing a lot of reading about licensing, free software, etc these days and was looking through the forum for exactly a thread like this and felt I must chime in to say: GPLs and copyleft licenses all the way from me, as much as practically possible in any case.
I discovered the Unlicense on another licensing related thread on here and while I wish that that or a MIT type license would be enough, I fear it wouldn’t be. Freedom does not mean ‘let anyone do whatever’, and it isn’t even the working definition of freedom for almost everyone, if they’re honest with themselves, I would argue. Freedom is full of constraints and obligations and responsibilities.
On a practical level, if the Safe Network takes off and is mostly or completely GPL’d it would protect against heavily funded and marketed private competitor networks that might pop up, making them an impossibility or forcing them to be open about what they’re offering, a win in both cases.
Plus there seems to me to be a historical opportunity here to ensure that the rules of cyberland are different. Imagine if the people who create things of value were rewarded directly by the people who enjoy their creations instead of all these massive, often utterly soulless, companies standing between us private individuals?
Be it video games, as @Antifragile talks of above, or films, journalism, research, music, hats, educational videos, etc etc. My point is that “serious companies doing serious business” are often in reality “copyright monopolies doing serious exploiting”, and even if it is hard to imagine what the world of, for example, gaming, might be like if it were wildly decentralised, it doesn’t mean it isn’t possible.
The thing about Maidsafe which initially got me excited wasn’t the idea of a decentralised internet, I’d seen that talked of elsewhere, it was decentralised internet plus the fact that the company more or less didn’t give a flying toss what companies want or think, or at most it seemed a secondary consideration, and instead seemed to want to provide a network that is free to access and use privately for everyone. So the idea of licensing to keep companies happy, instead of licensing to keep the network a thing that respects freedom and security and privacy, doesn’t sit right with me at all.
I’d personally be thrilled to see people who want to make cool games getting funded by their friends and families or whoever, and people who already make games getting funded by the fans of their games, and big serious companies can adapt or leave us to play our own games on the Safe Network.
Even though I can’t imagine exactly how our freedom might potentially be usurped, we have the example of the current slimenet going from utopian-seeming place for the free exchange of ideas and goods and all, to what it is today: a slimenet. The more I read and learn about licensing the more convinced I feel that a copyleft license is the best tool we have here, and I’ve seen nothing to convince me otherwise going through these threads so far.
Anyway, just my two cents and all that, apologies for the length, I’m terrible at writing short things!