Permissive licenses, community, and copyleft and freedom...

Posted Oct 15, 2015 19:21 UTC (Thu) by emunson (subscriber, #44357)
In reply to: Permissive licenses, community, and copyleft and freedom... by SimonO
Parent article: Permissive licenses, community, and copyleft

Here here!

The developer that does the work, makes the decisions. As long as the original license isn't violated, what is the problem?

Permissive licenses, community, and copyleft and freedom...

Posted Oct 16, 2015 2:15 UTC (Fri) by Abrahams (guest, #103692) [Link]

I think the reason we need this discussion is that this choice of software license is a complex, political and strategic one. Developers have a choice to make... so how do they make it?

Permissive licenses, community, and copyleft and freedom...

Posted Oct 17, 2015 1:10 UTC (Sat) by rahvin (guest, #16953) [Link] (1 responses)

I don't see any arguments that developers don't have a right to make the choice they want, the argument is taking a permissively license project and forking to GPL is impolite and breaks communities. There is truth to what they say in this regard. From just a community standpoint to fork a permissive license to a copyleft license is kinda rude, in that I doubt many would disagree.

But all forks break communities apart, that's exactly what a fork is, irreconcilable difference between developers and a decision to go their own way. I personally don't see any problem with forking in general because the only other option is the part that's upset simply stops contributing which also breaks the community.

Permissive licenses, community, and copyleft and freedom...

Posted Oct 29, 2015 23:18 UTC (Thu) by bignose (subscriber, #40) [Link]

> From just a community standpoint to fork a permissive license to a copyleft license is kinda rude, in that I doubt many would disagree.

I disagree. The license explicitly chosen allows that action directly, so it is in direct accord with the explicit grant of license from the copyright holders.

If the copyright holders don't want that to happen, they have a well-known path that is completely in accord with software freedom: grant a strong copyleft license that *disallows* imposing further restrictions on the redistributed work.

By the logic of “applying license restrictions on a free-software work is rude”, those who find it rude should be embracing strong copyleft for their work. That they do not, speaks to a great confusion in their minds, I think.