Comment by canyp
2 months ago
Not really. A company that does not bother contributing to a liberally-licensed project will 100% avoid GPL software like the plague. In either case, they won't contribute. In the latter case, they don't get to free-ride like a parasite.
It is reasonable to assume that this is true. But an equally effective way other than making your license unpalatable to them, is just to say no and state clearly: "Patches or GTFO". Also, have a homepage to link with your (hefty?) consulting rates?
I have mentioned this in the past, but there was this weird shift in culture just after 2000 where increasingly open source projects were made to please their users, whether they were corporate or not, and "your project is your CV" became how their maintainers would view their projects. It does not have to be this way and we should (like it seems to be the case with libxml2) maybe try to fix this culture?
> It is reasonable to assume that this is true. But an equally effective way other than making your license unpalatable to them, is just to say no and state clearly: "Patches or GTFO". Also, have a homepage to link with your (hefty?) consulting rates?
That's fine for feature requests, but the issue in the present case is bug reports.
I fail to see how that is different. Ultimately, you have released a piece of software into the wild with a clause stating: "The software is provided 'as is' and the author disclaims all warranties with regard to this software including all implied warranties of merchantability and fitness". Thus, it is purely cultural that somehow others and yourself expect you to cancel your family time on a Saturday night solely because an issue has been found in a piece of software you have given away for free. This "value add" is wearing people out and if we want this expectation to remain, maybe it is time for those profiting or those with a monopoly on violence to explore ways to support those that kindly provide free labour like this?
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> will 100% avoid GPL software like the plague.
Not true. Many companies uses Linux for example.
They will just avoid using GPL software in ways that would impact their own intellectual property (linking a GPL library to their proprietary software). Sometimes they will even use it with dubious "workaround" such as saying "we use a deamon with IPC so that's ok"
> > will 100% avoid GPL software like the plague.
> Not true. Many companies uses Linux for example.
I thought it was clear, given that this is a discussion about an open source library, that they were talking about GPL libraries. The way that standalone GPL software is used in companies is qualitatively quite different.
That is precisely what I meant.