Permissive licenses, community, and copyleft

Posted Oct 18, 2015 11:21 UTC (Sun) by debacle (subscriber, #7114)
In reply to: Permissive licenses, community, and copyleft by Cyberax
Parent article: Permissive licenses, community, and copyleft

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