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Comment by bitL | Hacker News Reader

The whole point of GPL is that nobody gets to ride free without contributing sources back to community. Of course companies prefer Apache or similar licenses. But then you end up with Amazon taking over products they didn't develop, never paid a cent to original developers and squeezed all fiscal potential out of the product, killing off the original.

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Actually, if you can make money from my old code it makes me happy.

You are correct in that Bezos does little for the community, and AWS tends to repackage community projects. Yet, most firms do put in many paid hours on kernel development etc.

Have a wonderful day =)

> Yet, most firms do put in many paid hours on kernel development etc.

Linux kernel uses GPL.

Indeed, but my point was the license is not always appropriate for some businesses who still wish to participate in FOSS.

Have a great day =)

I offer you a different perspective:

GPL (ie. Copyleft) guarantees "open source" for _users_ of the software

Apache (ie. permissive) gives source code to _developers_.

Apache gives the source code to everyone, and a choice to the receiver.

One may be surprised by having faith in peoples goodwill. =)

> contributing sources back to community

Nothing in the GPL requires this, only distributing sources down to your users, who may or may not then redistribute the sources back upstream.

See the post on the LGPL static-linking issue for porting, and why the wxWidget library license had to create an exception.

The project contamination happens even with the LGPL.

The subject was contaminating licenses, and why they are not appropriate in some situations. Cheers =)

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