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Anything not hard-copyleft (GPL, AGPL) or source-available (BSL etc.) is going to be embraced, extended, and SaaSified / paywalled. Eventually the open version might get abandoned since its authors will get tired of providing free labor to billion dollar cloud companies.

I don't think you'll see a lot of major projects under super-liberal licenses in the future. You will see such licenses for libraries and other components.

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> I don't think you'll see a lot of major projects under super-liberal licenses in the future. You will see such licenses for libraries and other components.

And that seems fine, at least if you subscribe to the Unix philosophy of composability. Honestly, I love Django, but for some projects I'd love even more to use just Django's ORM without all the other stuff (which I also like, but is irrelevant for some projects).

> Anything not hard-copyleft (GPL, AGPL) or source-available (BSL etc.) is going to be embraced, extended, and SaaSified / paywalled. Eventually the open version might get abandoned since its authors will get tired of providing free labor to billion dollar cloud companies.

FreeBSD is 27 years old. Postgres is 24 years old. SQLite, which is placed in the public domain, is 20 years old.

You will forgive me not holding my breath.

I think that OSX co-opting BSD is a perfect example here, honestly.

If you use a GPL library then your main work becomes GPL.

We are talking about products here.

If you use a GPL library and don't make the main work GPL you're committing copyright infingement. Your work will never magically become GPL.

That's true -- well, you're obligated to release the work under GPL -- but quite a lot of libraries are LGPL licensed which allows a proprietary application to link to it.

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