Comment by fuzztester
8 months ago
Your logic seems faulty.
Let me see if I have this right:
>For some of us that is unacceptabme.
1. So, Apple, creator of macOS, "the most valuable company on the planet", followed the rules of the BSD licence,and that is unacceptable?
But, Google, a company that is also highly valuable, and the creator of Chrome, also followed the rules of the LGPL licence, but that is acceptable?
What is unacceptable for "some of us" is that rich corporations are parasites of the commons.
ANd give very little back. Like Apple on top of BSD or AWS on top Riak.
For people like me that find that unacceptable exist the GPL licenses.
Both companies did the bare minimum demanded by the respective license, its just that one license forces a bit more as bare minimum. Think. What does this mean? If you use a license that demands even more, you could have pressurized the companies to behave even nicer.
> you could have pressurized the companies to behave even nicer.
No you couldn't. What would happen is your project would be a complete non-starter for many companies; either in use of, or developing for.
Which would raise the bar for them requiring them to spend efforts writing it in house or procuring similar elsewhere. The more polished and complex a package is that is hard to find alternatives for, the better the leverage.
Yes, forced to follow. Its a sign in retrospect that KDE should have used an even stronger license. I don't know if AGPL existed then, but if I start a browser today, I'd license it as AGPL. If you want to use the project, you have to release your changes to your users. If you don't want to do that, good luck, spend millions on developing an equivalent application in house. Thats the beauty of GPL like licenses.
With BSD companies are under no obligation to release their changes, and like any self interested party, most don't.