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Comment by malka | Hacker News Reader

> "but tons of opportunities to just copy-paste-modify were lost due to license concerns".

Well, that's the point. GPL is working as intented.

I don't see how. Working as intended would be "And then the gamedev landscape is dominated by open-source tools because you can't make closed-source tools in-house without giving up on the ecosystem." This is very much not the case today, the market is dominated by closed-source engines (sorry Godot).

Seeing as that scenario didn't come to pass, the only result is a net loss of games that could have been made (or made cheaper) by reusing Carmack's code and instead weren't. Maybe some of these games would have been proprietary, but it's still a net loss that they weren't made at all.

I m sure it is a net loss for people who could have benefited from free work indeed.

I don't think you understand Gp's point that this in turn results in a net loss for everyone else.

People are not entitled to games created by free work. So it is not a 'net' loss.

Not entitled? Correct. Not a loss? Incorrect.

They are if the license allows for it.

> for people who could have benefited

Users?

I guess his point is that the we haven't seen a big community fork of the code with FOSS games being released, etc.

There's been a handful, but nothing like the flurry of Unity games, etc.

It doesn't solve the issue. GPL people would have taken the BSD code, do a minor change, and force everyone to redistribute the source-code under GPL.

Really terrible license.

What is the exact scenario you're against? If GPL changes are added to a BSD codebase, it's still possible to use the BSD part of the code under the terms of that license. The GPL doesn't "infect" the rest of the work, either in the present or historically. You aren't "forced" to re-distribute the source code unless you want to use the GPL changes - which is just how copyright works in the first place.

They'd only own the copyright on the minor change so can't force everyone to use GPL on all of the code.

This occurs very rarely and provokes a loud counter reaction from the BSD people.

It seems such bsd people then don't believe in the power granted by the bsd license to others using it as they wish to. Ironically. May I suggest GPL for their next project?

Whining is not illegal, if you can whine about a license change, you should.

But by the very act of making their code bsd, they have removed any valid excuse to whine. Anything that happens is just a natural consequence of their decision: whether that be someone making bank on your code without giving you any of the changes back or GPL projects GPLifying a fork of you.

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