The GPL has no place here
I'm sure this stance will make several copyleft people upset, but I don't care. Exile Heavy Industries
is much more concerned with personal freedoms than whether or not they're the appropriate types of freedom.
It is our official stance that free software should put as few restrictions on downstream developers as possible,
while still making it clear that it is our code being used. As such, the BSD-3 license is considered ideal,
wherin the clauses are as such (paraphrased):
- You must provide the copyright and license information in derivative works
- You may not use the inclusion of our code to claim endorsement of your work
- You may not sue us for any damages caused by using our code
- You may not claim that you wrote our code
Pretty simple, right? Do what you want with it, though we discourage proprietary downstream works, we do not feel it
is our right to prevent you from doing so. We only ask that if you find something we wrote to be useful, you assist us
in some way, from promoting our code for the uses you found useful, to code contributions, hardware donations, or monetary aid.
In contrast, most if not all forms of the GPL will require your work to be released under the same license, and that sort of
compulsion is unacceptable. As such, no patches will ever be accepted into an Exile Heavy Industries project with a more restrictive
license than the BSD 3 clause license, nor will any project allow a GPL dependency or toolchain to be necessary for proper functionality.