As a software engineer/programmer myself, I love the possibility to download the code and learn from it. However building software is what brings food to my table. I have doubts regarding the type of license I should use for my own personal projects or when picking up one project to learn from.

There are already many questions about licenses on Stackoverflow, but I would like to make this one much more specific. If your main profession and way of living is building software:

which type of license do you find more useful for you?

And I mean, the license that can benefit you most as a professional because it gives you more freedom to reuse the experience you gain.

GPL is a great license to build communities because it forces you to give back your work. However I like BSD licenses because of their extra freedom. I know that if the code I am exploring is BSD licensed, I might be able to expand not only my skills, but also my programmer toolbox. Whenever I am working for a company, I might recall that something similar was done in another project and I will be able to copy or imitate certain part of the code.

I know that there are religious wars regarding GPL vs BSD and it is not my intention to start one. Probably many companies already take snipsets from GPL projects anyway. I just want to insist in the factor of professional enrichment. I do not intend to discriminate any license. I said I prefer BSD licenses but I also use Linux because the user base is bigger and also the market demand.