This isn't snark, but a genuine question. What makes open source developers prefer permissive licenses to GPL and other copyleft licenses? What is the benefit in letting corporations use your work in proprietary software?
Maybe I'd feel differently if I made an entire service instead of small focused libraries. But that's an entirely different world.
But one person can't do much, so it at least depends on what one thinks of that.
The code I do release is probably not that useful to many and in most cases is something i've written for personal use primaraly.
I always use a permissive license for anything I release. It's usually served it's initial purpose to me and if it can be of benefit to another, then they should be able to use it in any way they want
Back when I was just a Linux hobbyist, I loved the GPL. Then I got a job as a proprietary software developer. Now, GPL just means "stuff I can't use at work".
I would love to try and convince my boss and coworkers to implement a project in Scheme. But because the majority of the packages for most Scheme implementations are GPL'ed, it's a non-starter.
So Scheme (and lots of other pockets of FOSS) shall remain a weekends-only pipe dream :(
Especially if it's a hosted web app business?
Providing paid support a la Red Hat, paying for hardware/cloud space, or even paid binaries if you think your customers won't bother to build from source.
(Yes, one can build from source then distribute free binaries, but maybe those same customers won't even go to the trouble of finding them?)
Of course if you accepted external contributions to your code under a copyleft license then you can't use that part freely, but that's kind of the point.
The irony is that non-copyleft project author/maintainers want to reserve the right to exploit other people's work when they "grow the project into a business", but bellyache when Amazon "exploit" their permissively-licensed work. Freedom for me -- but not for thee.
That there is not a good standardised way to give preferential treatment to small companies does not mean it's unreasonable to want to.
Well yes. But if you:
1. Want to accept external contributions 2. Think you might want to use the entire project (which may still be mostly your own work) in proprietary code in the future.
Then a permissive license is a lot easier than the alternatives.
It's not surprising that they invested a lot into spreading FUD around GPL and spreading the idea that weak licenses are "practical" while labeling GPL as "ideological".
I write with other humans in mind, not companies.
I occasionally like to read other people's code to learn. However, in order to avoid any problems, this means that I stay away (much to my regret) from reading any GPL licensed code, no matter how interesting the project might look to me.
I admit to have been occasionally disappointed in the past when large parts of some of my work were plagiarized with no attribution (including by one commercial venture) ... but I prefer for my work to be free of barriers so that anyone interested can either learn from it or (more likely) get in touch with me with suggestions as to how to improve upon it.
Of course that is not the case for the majority of projects like curl for example.
If your goal is sticking it to the man and demolishing capitalism or whatever then it's different of course.
Copyleft, having to release code diffs, is a stipulation / restriction.
MIT/BSD is the one without any stipulations / restrictions:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_License
Depending on one's goals one may be better than the other.
> My work on free software is motivated by an idealistic goal: spreading freedom and cooperation. I want to encourage free software to spread, replacing proprietary software that forbids cooperation, and thus make our society better. [1]
Free as in freedom for the users of the software to control, audit, and modify what runs on their hardware.
The stipulations are there to prevent people who aren't aligned with those goals from benefiting from (and working against) the work done by the community that believes in those goals.
It's easy to give the lie to this, because the restriction they are unhappy with is the restriction against restricting others. Anyone complaining about that is just masking a demand of "free for me, but not for thee" - definitely _not_ "totally unrestricted."
For Stallman, and the rest of us inspired by the copyleft movement, writing GPL software wasn't merely a way to impact the profits of capitalists. He would have been scarcely more satisfied with closed-source software written by a democratically organized cooperative and released for free. The goal was and is to ensure that users have the freedom to know what the code running on their machines is doing, and to alter its behavior if they wish.
That dream seems so distant today that people worry it may never be satisfied, but I have a more optimistic view. Someday, hardware generations will not be so rapid or represent such major improvements. That will create an opportunity for the GPL ecosystem to close the gap in functionality and provide alternatives that run on the hardware most people own. Mostly, the GNU project is always running behind on the hardware treadmill; keeping up with software functionality is easy by comparison.
(I guess in many ways this is a data point to support the “OSS work becomes just a source of free labor for large tech companies” thesis up thread.)
No one at any company I've heard of or been involved with cares if you simply use, i.e. run, Linux or other GPL software. That doesn't affect the licensing of your own software.
What they do care about is if you take the GPL software and incorporate it into your own product.
Often we are the end users. Because of permissive licensing phones, routers, iot devices have a lot of closed or otherwise locked own components that I cannot trust nor modify.
The same apply to SaaS.