Comment by an1sotropy
2 years ago
The author is sharing second thoughts about using the MIT license and yes, bad actors are going to break bad, but the point of licensing is to control re-use within the (enforceable) legal framework of copyright. Reciprocal licenses (thanks Lawrence Rosen[1] for that term less charged than copyleft or viral) cede less control, and provide more footholds for enforcement. Remember that GPL has (sometimes) worked as intended in adversarial commericial settings [2,3].
[1] https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/open-source-licensing/0...
[2] https://www.tp-link.com/us/support/gpl-code/
[3] https://www.zdnet.com/article/software-freedom-conservancy-w...
To be honest I prefer copyleft or viral over reciprocal. Reciprocal licensing is traditionally an arrangement where a given license is interchangeable with another license.
For example, drivers licenses are often reciprocal between states. I've worked for firms which has reciprocal licensing agreements with some of their manufacturers. Copyleft is neither.
The big place that permissive licenses are promoted is in the giant tech companies. This is not a coincidence; it benefits them. That does not mean it benefits us.
With smaller companies we see a lot of *GPL with additional commercial licensing options ... which (assuming the main product is not a library with a non-LGPL license) often is actually still easy to comply with (especially if you only use somebody's prebuilt binaries) if you actually bother, no matter how much the hate train complains.
For individuals it varies a lot by ideology rather than deep thought, but permissive-license-regret is common.
I think regret is common. I don't think it's particularly novel to permissive licensing. Besides, most projects never reach any sort of popularity to draw a contributor count greater than 1, and relicensing at that scale is tremendously easy -- you just do it.
I'm also not sure what your on about with regards to big companies vs small companies. Do you mean companies which produce open source software? Or companies consuming it?
Generally, most software companies open source exactly nothing. Many companies open source software which they have found useful but is not designed to be used for a profit center. In my experience, only companies trying to directly license software adopt GPL or AGPL. Almost all companies which produce software under GPL or AGPL dual license with a commercial paid option that comes with no strings attached. Personally I find this disingenuous.
The reason giant tech companies promote permissive licenses is because they don't care about those things -- they're already giant and have secured whatever edge they need -- and because they can be a useful recruiting tool. Plus sometimes you need to ship SDKs and integrations and permissive is the only real way to go generally.
Anyways I've licensed and contributed to permissive licenses software. I could not care less what happens to it. That's the point. I understood the consequences of my actions as I made them.
Software that I want to make money with? I don't open source that at all, at least not until I've abandoned it.
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