Comment by its_magic
19 hours ago
MIT et al are winning over GPL for a reason.
I'm not a big corporation. I prefer MIT, or better yet, public domain.
19 hours ago
MIT et al are winning over GPL for a reason.
I'm not a big corporation. I prefer MIT, or better yet, public domain.
Are they winning as in more people are picking the license or are they winning as in we are getting a overall more enriched foss community?
I don't understand why people have such difficulties with the Golden Rule, sounds a simple and fair enough concept.
We are winning as in "we have more freedom to do as we like without a bunch of lawyers breathing down our necks."
Freedom and liberty are what I value. There is no harm occurring to software as a result of more freedom or more liberty. Quite to the contrary.
Is your Golden Rule "you will use 'my' software exactly how I dictate, or else I'll call my dogs to attack you"? That's not the one I was taught.
I release all my code in the public domain.
Why are you acting so strange and making up misinterpretations of what I wrote? You depend on lawyers either way, whichever license you use, I fail to see how copyright law can be implemented and defended without lawyers. The golden rule is simple, anyone can look it up, I really don't understand what difficulty you have that made you make up such a strange "not even wrong" theory about it. "do to others what you would have them do to you" , here it means you have benefited from countless man hours of work by other people, so you too should pass on any improvements you made to it just like they did to you.
Regarding freedoms, let us take this scenario. Your small company depend on a complex bsd library thats hard to replicate. It gets the attention of a much larger company, they fork it make various changes to make it much better and keep it closed, their product kills yours. While, if it was GPL (or AGPL as its needed today), the company either has to redevelop it inhouse if they wish to serve it as product to the public without releasing its sources, or they do the same thing as in the bsd case, they make a much improved version...and you have equal access to the same sources, you can take that and pivot upon it instead of your company dying. Its very simple, more or less mathematical game theory. Nobody can force anyone to choose a license, its your choice. Again, Mac OS is not a very encouraging example of the overall outcome of BSD licensing. No freebsd/openbsd/whatever person is permitted to read or use Apple's "fork" now. Apple took the hard work of others and instead of paying it back in like, it doesn't take a single cent of money, "paying" back here simply means doing the same the others did, they generously provided you their work as foss, you pass back your delta to it as foss. Thus raising the high water mark of the entire ecosystem. Think academic research. Its usually released in open, so any improvements made by one team are available for others to use and further improve upon. That's it. Nothing more. Nothing less. How does GPL "force" anyone to do anything? They can either choose to follow the license, or choose another library or home grown an alternative if they dislike the terms.
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