Fundamentally, I think the best companies have a symbiotic (or at least respectful) relationship with their customers and not an adversarial one.
What are examples of large companies like this?
Never forget that Industry itself came to America by way of direct theft. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Slater
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If you care about your users, you should always prefer some copyleft license.
Prefer permissive licenses only if you want to subsidize big business. Hopefully you have a plan for when they decide to take it closed-source and outcompete you. You probably don't, though, since that's not mentioned in the aggressive "use permissive licenses" marketing campaign they've been running for the last decade or two.
Permissive licenses can fit in a niche for software that has already been implemented many times. But the downsides remain, and why aren't you just using the existing code directly? The main occasion on which I will consider it is when everybody else is doing it wrong (and content to do so), and I as a user keep getting annoyed at hitting those limitations.
The second-worst reason to use permissive licensing is arguably "I don't understand how to dynamic linking".
With copyleft licenses, developers always have to sell stuff adjacent to the software (support, individual development, software-as-a-service).
With permissive licenses, developers can just sell a license to the software itself. Much easier, much more direct.
It's the reason why there is much more tooling around permissive licensed projects vs. projects with a GPL style license.
Permissive licenses are win-win: Proprietory developers win because they get to sell licenses, users win because they have more tools they can use.
I can sell licenses to my tool because it is closed source.
If the big open source project was licensed under a copyleft license, I would have to make my tool open source as well. Then I would have a hard time selling licenses.
I couldn't have spent the last 10 years building a tool for the open source software, and users of the open source software would have had fewer tools available.
There is no possible way for users to be hurt by a permissive license. Even if some company were to make a closed source fork, who cares? The original is still there, still just as free as it ever was.
> Prefer permissive licenses only if you want to subsidize big business. Hopefully you have a plan for when they decide to take it closed-source and outcompete you.
I prefer permissive licenses because I'm making a gift to the commons. It strikes me as hypocritical to say "I'm giving this to you, but only if you things the way I approve of". Thus, I make it completely free for all users, whatever they want to do with it. You may not see it that way, which is fine. But I'm sick of the false idea of "you're just subsidizing big business" being promulgated. That isn't true.
And why would I care if someone "outcompetes" me? My gift to society is still there to be used if people want, or not if they don't want. It doesn't diminish or harm my efforts in any way.
They can add sufficiently popular functionality to said closed source fork and make the open source original a) obsolete and b) incompatible with the combined ecosystem, and thus deprive the users of a feasible free option.
All the permissively licensed code that came with my mac disagrees. This is even more true of iphone software: you can technically look at some of the code that comes with it, but you can't modify it.
I’ve written thousands of lines of copyleft code. I don’t see a practical benefit if you don’t want to obligate users of that code.
GPLv4 should be AGPL+no-AI if it is supposed to have any effect.
JohnKemeny•1h ago