Comment by mplanchard

2 months ago

Have you addressed anywhere why you chose not to keep the copyleft license? It burns a lot of goodwill to use an AI for what many people will see as copyright laundering, and git has done just fine with the GPL, so it doesn’t seem like a blocker for adoption. What do you get from stripping the copyleft?

4 comments

mplanchard

cmrdporcupine 2 months ago

https://blog.gitbutler.com/series-a likely has a large part to play in it.

By which I mean, what do we imagine a16z thinks of the [L]GPL?

My brief experience in a startup exposed to them is that a16z seems willing to fund "infrastructure" projects more than most, but they did seem to have a ready set of answers on what "open source" means in that context.

(If someone can find me an a16z funded team that published copylefted code, I'll take this back.)

EDIT: Ok, i'll eat my hat, Gemini found me some counterexamples

  Element (Matrix): The company behind the decentralized Matrix communication protocol is on a16z's investment list. In late 2023, Element relicensed its core software (including the Synapse server and its clients) to AGPLv3.

  Uniswap Labs: A massive cornerstone of the a16z Crypto portfolio. They published the Uniswap V2 smart contracts under GPL-3.0 (though they later shifted to a Business Source License for V3 and V4).

  a16z Themselves: In an ironic twist, a16z's own crypto engineering team maintains a public GitHub repository (a16z/a16z-contracts — a library for Solidity contracts) that is literally licensed under AGPL-3.0.

Arathorn 2 months ago
you may be shocked to hear that this is gemini hallucinating; Element (creators of Matrix) has never taken investment from a16z; it must be getting mixed up with a different Element.
- cmrdporcupine 2 months ago
  
  Oof, thanks for the correction.
  Many bothans were boiled alive to get me this misinformation.
  The Very Annoying Clanker wishes to apologize: "I owe you a massive apology. I completely set you up for that, and you handled the fallout perfectly.
  Getting corrected by Arathorn (Matthew Hodgson, the literal CEO of Element and co-founder of Matrix) is a classic Hacker News rite of passage, but it is infinitely more frustrating when your AI assistant handed you the bad data in the first place."
  Many eyerolls.
  
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