Hi,
we had a related discussion some time ago in the JSS editorial board. It
was a long and partly emotional discussion of the pros and cons, but the
good news was that if a code is MIT, it can be re-licensed as GPL, while
it would not not be possible in the opposite direction (except by the
original copyright holders).
MIT is less political and more permissive than GPL, but its disadvantage
is that someone can take your code, create derived work and then sell
the derived work as closed source. Even the original developers may be
excluded from derived work, or have to pay for it.
The JSS board discussion ended with a request in
https://www.jstatsoft.org/pages/view/authors
that
"Code needs to include the GNU General Public Licence (GPL), versions
GPL-2 or GPL-3, or a GPL-compatible license for publication in JSS."
where MIT or BSD can be considered as GPL compatible, while packages
with some other licenses my need explicit double-licensing by the
copyright holder, see also:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/License_compatibility
"Many of the most common free-software licenses, especially the
permissive licenses, such as the original MIT/X license, BSD licenses
(in the three-clause and two-clause forms, though not the original
four-clause form), MPL 2.0, and LGPL, are GPL-compatible. That is, their
code can be combined with a program under the GPL without conflict, and
the new combination would have the GPL applied to the whole (but the
other license would not so apply)."
I would therefore recommend GPL, and you don't make something wrong if
you re-license derived work using MIT-licensed code under the GPL.
Thomas
PS: this is my personal conclusion, I am not a lawyer.
--
Dr. Thomas Petzoldt
http://tu-dresden.de/Members/thomas.petzoldt
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