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Comment by ezoe | Hacker News Reader

Such companies will eventually shoot their own foot. What happens is this. The company use a free software. The company want additional feature. The company implement it as an internal fork while the upstream move on. Then internal fork is hopelessly outdated, no way it can be merged to the up to date branch. The company must use a decade old software and it can't compete with the competitors.

In the long term, these companies fails.

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I don't think that's the case here. Rather that OSS is not ONE license but many and it's a non trivial task to comply with all licenses.

Big companies spend a lot of resources and money to be license compliant. One way to make sure that the company follow OSS licenses is to have a process for how to contribute. The person posted the issue has not been through that processes for this specific project and hence can not contribute.

I don’t see that as making much if any sense.

Either the reporter is reporting the issue because of something they’re doing in their own time, in which case there really is no reason for the company to be involved at all (despite widespread american insanity on the subject), or it’s something they’re doing in a company context in which case they “can’t contribute” to something the company is already using which frankly makes no sense either, if the license was an issue the company could not use the software in the first place.

So the only context seems to be the usual (related to §1) “the company owns your entire life 24/7 for the entirety of your employment duration and beyond without compensating you for any of it” nonsense.

Licence compliance is irrelevant to submitting your own contributions. Typically when you submit contributions to open source software you retain ownership of the copyright, but grant a licence to the project owners to use it (and therefore to others because OSS licences includes a term about relicencing by definition). This doesn't stop you from granting others a different licence, or using it yourself however you like.

As an example, if I write and publish a complete program or library under GPL (or any other licence), then that doesn't stop me from selling the same thing under a proprietary licence. Qt is a classic example of this. Similarly, if I make a small contribution to a library under GPL, or any other licence, then that doesn't stop me from re-licensing my small chunk of code however I like, or reusing it internally under non-GPL terms - because it's mine!

The exception to this is those few projects that require you to actually assign copyright. Most notably this includes the FSF (except GCC as of a couple of months ago), their reasoning being that this makes it easier for them to litigate against violaters of the GPL, because only the copyright owners can sue.

I don't see how this is a problem, to be honest. If the company is using the software, its licensed must already be reviewed. Unless they're submitting code that links to company-made one, contributing does not come with additional license obligations.

The issue reporter seems to be suffering from full-blown stockholm syndrome about it too.

> In the long term, these companies fails.

In my experience this feedback loop is too slow to force management to make a policy change.

At some point I the future they will be chest deep in maintenance cost. At that point they are just going to redo their whole existing stack because it’s cheaper and easier than fixing the current stack.

Building off free and open-source software is much safer from a long-term maintenance and support position than building off paid/licensed/commercial software.

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