Permissive licenses, community, and copyleft

Posted Oct 18, 2015 10:52 UTC (Sun) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
In reply to: Permissive licenses, community, and copyleft by debacle
Parent article: Permissive licenses, community, and copyleft

> If it were GPLed or something from the start, that would not have been a problem.
Presumably because the project wouldn't have existed at all.

Most proprietary developers don't like to use 3rd-party proprietary tools, unless 3rd-party tools provide essential functionality.

And in your case if you think that it was possible to develop this project without 3rd-party code, it should be possible to rewrite the 3rd-party components and release everything as OpenSource.

Permissive licenses, community, and copyleft

Posted Oct 18, 2015 11:21 UTC (Sun) by debacle (subscriber, #7114) [Link] (1 responses)

In my (limited) experience, developers are very often not free to decide what to use or not. Instead, there are company policies, company politics, project leaders preferences etc. Also, in my experience, developers of proprietary developers (I don't recall any exceptions) were more than happy to use whatever proprietary tool or library if it gave them at least a slight advantage. Most of my Windows programming ex-colleagues even used voluntarily "Visual Studio", something I would not even touch if MS released in under B-GPL-4.

Then, the discussion about what is technically "possible" is very often not relevant, but more how easy or cheap I can reach a certain goal. Legally "impossible" is much harder IMHO. If it were easy/cheap to rewrite some huge libraries, than there were no harm done by a GPL fork of a permissively licensed project. Just rewrite the GPL-only stuff. Yes, it is possible, but sometimes just very time-consuming and we all have better things to do :~)

Permissive licenses, community, and copyleft

Posted Oct 19, 2015 2:16 UTC (Mon) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

I would suggest that people go look at the reports of how much effort it takes for a company to open-source any of their software, specifically looking at how much effort it is to untangle what they want to release from libraries/patches/blobs provided by their suppliers.

When one side says it's trivial, and the other side says it's hard, looking at the evidence from past cases seems appropriate.

it sure doesn’t look easy based on the evidence