Jumping the licensing shark

Posted Mar 30, 2023 6:51 UTC (Thu) by gwg (guest, #20811)
Parent article: Jumping the licensing shark

I think Bradley Kuhn is totally out of touch with the financial reality of trying to sustain an open source project that isn't Linux or something similar. My reality is that the only thing that comes at all close to allowing me to continue to developing free software, is selling commercial licenses to my GPL code under the implied threat of a copyright infringement suite if commercial users don't do so. Calling this "abuse" is throwing sand in faces of many of the people who contribute to the free software landscape.

Jumping the licensing shark

Posted Mar 30, 2023 10:49 UTC (Thu) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

There are a number of high-profile kernel developers (and of some other widely used Linux utilities) whose status as a maintainer of core software is well-established, and who have pretty good job security thanks to having job opportunities at n of many large corporates with interests in Linux infra. And those large corporates heavily lean towards a "softly softly" approach to enforcement of copyleft, even a "no enforcement". Those corporates often prefer MIT/BSD type licences where they release new code.

One has the sense these players would love to see the obligations of copyleft disappear, by social pressure wrt the copyleft licences they can not change, and - if copyleft-next is representative - by a degree of capture of those working to draft new copyleft licences.

In which case, what is the point of copyleft-next? Why bother with a copyleft licence that is difficult to enforce? It's neutered - just use a permissive licence.

Jumping the licensing shark

Posted Mar 31, 2023 2:11 UTC (Fri) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link] (1 responses)

The GPL doesn't prevent commercial use/distribution/modification, so why would a company need those commercial licenses to not infringe copyright?

Jumping the licensing shark

Posted Mar 31, 2023 3:07 UTC (Fri) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

Presumably they're building something derivative of it and would like to avoid the relevant GPL clauses so they can keep their secret sauce secret.