Here are reasons why I use the GPL.

1. I do not need nor desire a proprietary product that can be sold.

  • Conducting a business, or having the need to acquire sponsors, greatly constrains the direction of research, and the available time for its pursuit.
  •  I do not need a salary as my wife and our investments are supporting me.

2. Contrary to naive intuition, the GPL precludes a lot of competition. Commercial firms rarely enter a market niche that is initially dominated by a freely available GPL product that meets customer needs. In contrast, a small commercial software firm that pioneers a new, profitable, and rapidly growing market attracts many competitors, perhaps giant ones. Even if the small firm sells out to a giant firm, there is little guarantee of continued market share.

3. GPL compatibility allows the inclusion of GPL third party components as well as Apache, BSD and so forth. This extends to GPL style content such as Wiktionary and Wikipedia. And it extends to open source infrastructure such as SourceForge for my code repository.

4. A GPL product can be easily included in Linux distributions.

5. A GPL style project is more likely to attract numerous volunteers when the tools are available for skill acquisition via English dialog.

6. There are two categories of things that investor’s money could buy - salaried labor and capital equipment. The former I hope to provide via volunteer labor and the system’s (in the future) own growing intelligence, and the latter is mainly computer cycles and disk space that should be provided by volunteers and users - in a vastly scalable peer-to-peer network .