Comment by lelanthran
6 hours ago
> Two different ways of thinking about it I guess
I don't think so; it's two different goals, not two different ways of thinking about it.
The goal of GPL is the interests of users (they can never be locked out of improvements no matter who makes changes).
The goal of BSD is the interests of the developers (A developer can take it, add mods and close of the entire result).
In practice, GPL is pro-user, BSD/MIT is pro-business.
> In practice, GPL is pro-user, BSD/MIT is pro-business.
Yet every time a GPL licensed product competes against a BSD licensed product in an open market, even when inferior the GPL product wins in the long run.
That's because the GPL ecosystem leapfrogs the BSD one every time one of those pro-business businesses sells proprietary add-ons while the former stands on one another's shoulders.
It's almost like free markets composed of multi vendor ecosystems are business friendly?
(Sarcasm aside, the weasel word here is "business". Customers and vendors are both businesses. Monopolies are very business-friendly for the vendor, just not for anyone else.)
It's a rule that's mostly only true for self-contained products though, it hasn't been true for things like codecs and SSL stacks, and components used by proprietary and free products alike.