I may wish to write some code for free, that is, have the intention of letting you use my source code in your programs, and to write other code for profit. Please separate the issues of freedom and price. I think you are lumping them together. A number of people these days write free software for profit; there are companies whose business is based on developing free software, and all the software they develop is free. See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html for more about these issues. I would vastly prefer that people simply place their code in the public domain explicitly. If you want to use our code in non-free software, and leave your users (who would then be our users also) no freedom, it is understandable that you would ask for this. But if we care about their freedom, as well as about your freedom, it is natural that we would say no. I've heard many people say that the X11 license is "more free" than the GNU GPL. Implicit in that is an assumption that you should measure the freedom where the program leaves the hands of the original developer. But that doesn't measure the *users'* freedom. If you measure the freedom where the program reaches the end user, you find that the GPL results in more freedom for the users, because it protects the users' freedom. The X11 and BSD licenses have failed to do that. A large fraction of the users of X11 are running proprietary modified versions; for them, X11 has very little freedom. The same was true of BSD--most of its users were running the proprietary systems SunOS 4 and Ultrix. (Maybe that is still true.) See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/x.html for more explanation. But if you do decide to use a non-copyleft free license, please don't use the BSD license. Please use the X11 license, or some other that is free of special problems. See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/bsd.html for an explanation.