Sometimes there’s a benefit in getting open source code into proprietary software. Think libraries implementing interoperability APIs, communication protocols, file formats, etc
That’s what permissive licenses are for.
If some company wants to keep their code closed and they have a choice between something interoperable or something proprietary that they will subsequently promote, and the licence is the only thing stopping them from going for the open source approach, that’s worse.
Completely agree that a good breadth of everything else is suited to copyleft licensing though
If some company wants to keep their code closed
That’s the whole point, you’re leveraging the use of the commons so that it’s less feasible to keep your code closed. If they want to keep their code closed, they can spend a lot more manhours building everything from scratch.
Our man-hours come from leadership and architects so separated from code they can’t agree on drawings or what constitutes a micro service architecture or… Any real pattern at all.
This is a hypothetical that has no clear bearing connection to common practice.
In other words, I could just reverse this to contradict it and have equal weight to my hypothetical: devs should always use GPL, because if their software gets widely adopted to the point where companies are forced to use it, it’s better that it’s copyleft.
You totally misunderstand MIT licensing
Why not explain what’s missing to the room?
In some cases it works, in some it doesn’t. PostgreSQL for example for huge support after Oracle got control of MySQL, despite the license.
Something I don’t get paid enough to understand - what constitutes contributions, and what’s the definition of selling the software?
For instance, I don’t think I’ve worked on a project where we have made changes to the source code for security policies (much quicker path to update immediately if something gets flagged). But I don’t think I know of an instance where we sell our software as a service - as far as I know it’s largely used to support other services we sell.
Except now that I say that, that’s not entirely true, we DO have a review board that we have to submit every third party library to and it takes forever to hear back but we have occasionally gotten a “no can’t use that” or “contract is pending.” So maybe I’m just super unaware of who reviews the third party software and they review the licenses.
We have a scanner that does that on every build.
It blocks builds for dependencies with
- licenses not acceptable to Legal
- serious or critical vulnerabilities.
- political messages, even if you agree with them
- we may also add a criteria to block non-release dependencies.
As a developer, you’re free to use anything that works
I have yet to figure out how my company views contributing back to open source. I don’t know of anyone actively doing that, but it turns out we host a few originals of open source. I’ve been trying to improve development processes, get tools and dependencies up to date …… but then I ran into things where it’s a bigger change because of the downstream opensource dependencies and because it’s not really owned by the company
This seems like complaining that the BSD license does exactly what it intends to do.
Yeah, as if the authors had no idea what terms the license has…
ignorance is one thing, but it’s a whole nother level of loser behaviour to intentionally do unpaid work for big tech companies in your free time
“Unpaid work” is pretty much all OSS development. “Here’s a thing I made, anyone can use it for whatever they want as long as they give credit” is a very simple philosophy. Not everybody who works on OSS is opposed to the existence of closed source commercial software, and rather a lot of people don’t like viral licenses like the GPL. Really out of line to call people who contribute their time and effort to making free software available to everyone losers just because you disagree with their choice of license.
You’re clearly someone who never contributed to open source.
No one brought up ai yet? No, srsly ……
My opinion on these licenses is theoretical since I haven’t actually developed any open source.
However an analogous scenario which DOES affect me, and most people here ….
- I’ve posted my opinion online in various places. Offered freely to the public to do as they please.
- I’m fine with companies making money off providing the aggregate of such efforts to the public, such as by advertising. However my pseudonym retains credit and the audience is open
All well and good until AI came along and everyone sees a potential jackpot. And there’s Reddit, wanting a bigger share of that jackpot. They’ve taken the idea a step farther and I’m not ok with it. I guess I don’t like the restrictions and I don’t like the extra levels of profiteering: Reddit makes money off providing my content in a limited form to private companies. They in turn make money off AI trained by my content, to a limited audience and there is no longer a portion credited to my pseudonym. Technically they’re in the right since I never thought to prevent this scenario, but they’re not using it in the way I expected/intended/ was told
I have spent the last 10 years of my career writing open source scientific software
