Comment by o11c
2 years ago
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.
> 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.
There was at least for a time a trend (or at least noted by some) of using AGPL with copyright assignment[1] as a trojan horse to force customers into commercial licensing once due diligence came in.
[1] I consider copyright attribution to be the big sin in this, not AGPL, even though I'm against AGPL on other grounds. I understand why FSF uses (used?) it, but it opens a way for exploitation of people's work in unequal ways.
Copyright attribution is necessary to avoid tombstoning the project. Imagine you have something using AGPL, and some high profile court cases change the landscape of copyright, resulting in the arrival of new, next generation licenses. For example, let's assume AGPL is defeated in court.
It is effectively impossible to adopt a different license without either:
- getting consent from all authors/copyright holders.
- removing all the contributions of any outstanding authors/copyright holders who don't/can't provide consent.
Your options are pretty bad here.
Furthermore, not having a CLA even for very permissibly licensed projects can be a poison pill for any sort of M&A, even if the project would never need to make use of it. Not using a CLA muddies the IP portfolio of the company, and many investors will spook easily at the scent of IP issues regardless of whether or not they really matter.
Unless you feel like fucking around and finding out (I don't) you get copyright assignment.
Anyways, you can always fork.
1 reply →