Yesterday I had a long-awaited meeting with two lawyers and the CIO from my new employer (who purchased my previous back in April) regarding our releasing of certain software under the GPLv3+. This follows a previous, fairly deep discussion a number of weeks ago with one of the lawyers. Despite their unfamiliarity with software and copyright (we are not a software company), the CIO and lawyers approved our current arrangement. We will continue to release free software under the GPLv3+, and one of the lawyers will work with me on starting to formalize a procedure for doing so with projects going forward.

I'm relieved, because had this gone in the other direction, it would have been a nail in the coffin for me---this issue is deeply important to me, which I made clear. I structured a lot of my personal time and research around these projects knowing they would be free/libre, and they would not otherwise exist.

And it's a nice demonstration of the benefits of corporate use of the GPL as copyright holders. In this case, Copyleft made my job pretty easy: competition wouldn't be able to make use of our projects without releasing code, which made the legal department much more comfortable.