Bradley M. Kuhn: judge the freedom of your codebase not only on its license, but also on the diversity of the community that contributes to it.
+1 insightful. Lots of good stuff in that post. Copyright assignment is a community smell.
It isn’t surprising that Brad believes that the GPL while retaining copyright is the best way to build a diverse community, my experience is that the Apache License is often more effective at being able to attract from a larger pool of developers. Either way, we agree that the goal is a diverse community, the license chosen is but one of many factors that may help you get there.
Brad’s observations also apply to standards, politics, and pretty much any context where any group of people are treated as “more equal” than an other group.