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Comment by abritinthebay | Hacker News Reader

Which is why the LGPL exists. Most code that is designed to be shared & incorporated rather than complete/forked should likely be LGPL (if the GPL ideals are what is wanted).

Personally I just go with MIT/X11 but there are good reasons to want to use a GPL-type license

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LGPL is sensitive to linkage, which means it has very different effects on different programming languages. For example, it's stricter for Rust and Go (as those languages are typically used) than for Java and Python (as those languages are typically used).

MPL, on the other hand, is per-source file.

Yes. But the LGPL is still more restrictive as it requires you to share your changes. Not as much of a disincentive but it still discourages community.

There are two good reasons to go with a gpl or lgpl license.

One is ideological. You believe software should be free and that downstream developers must conform to your ideals. This is the Richard Stallman approach.

The second is control. You actively want to discourage forking and outside contributions. This is Oracle’s approach. This isn’t necessarily bad or evil, but it’s pragmatic. Generally a corporation doing this will offer the license under a separate paid offering as well.

I can’t think of any other good reasons to choose GPL.

> But the LGPL is still more restrictive as it requires you to share your changes. Not as much of a disincentive but it still discourages community.

Not a fan of GPL (because of developer restrictiveness), but I don't see how requiring changes to be shared implies more restrictiveness or discourages community. Can you explain the reasoning here?

In the early days of a software project, the most likely people to use it are business programmers: front line devs who have no say in corporate policy.

Typically, they want to use your code to save their own time. The code rarely does exactly what they need, so they almost always need to make changes. And since they are required under their NDA not to disclose any company related work, this prevents them from incorporating your code.

I have no feelings about this one way or another, but it's an answer to your question.

Yeah, it discourages the community from benefiting from other people's work without giving back.

LGPL only requires you to share changes to the LGPL code that you publish (you don't even have to submit them back, just make them available).

And yeah, that comes down to "well if you want to use our stuff and base new work on our stuff... share it to the world" but it has no effect on the wider application.

Here's a third reason:

"I used to be worried about fragmentation, and I used to think that it was inevitable at some point," said Torvalds. “Everyone was looking at the history of Linux and comparing it with UNIX. People would say that it’s going to fail because it's going to fragment. That's what happened before, so why even bother?"

What made the difference was the license. "FSF and I don't have a loving relationship, but I love GPL v2," said Torvalds. "I really think the license has been one of the defining factors in the success of Linux because it enforced that you have to give back, which meant that the fragmentation has never been something that has been viable from a technical standpoint."

https://www.cio.com/article/3112582/linux/linus-torvalds-say...

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