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GPL gets hate because it’s a self-killing license. Sure, it’s great idealism, but it just creates an incentive for any corporate interests to create either a closed source offering or a better funded competing OSS offering that can be commercialized.

If some software provides value, it will eventually be monetized in some form. It makes no sense for a corporation, whose entire existence is predicated on monetization, to see GPL software and say “I guess I’ll just stop charging for our products!” Instead, the completely predictable response is “this is valuable, but I can’t use it, so I’m going to make something like it that I can actually use”.

Like it or not, you cannot “hide” value from capitalism. The machine will find and extract value wherever it can. GPL establishes unrealistic ideals for software that are inconsistent with the reality of how and where it is used.

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> it just creates an incentive for any corporate interests to create either a closed source offering or a better funded competing OSS offering that can be commercialized.

what's wrong with that?

If they produce their own version, then the world now has another piece of software, and this competition is going to make the ecosystem better imho.

The only problem with lenient licenses is that they allow leeching. MIT, eclipse, and apache licenses, all are basically allow free commons which others leech off as much as possible. The corps may continue to contribute, but only because they see value they could extract more than what it costs them.

I would say AGPL should be the _only_ license anyone contributing to OSS should pick. And if you own the project, make it dual licensed - a commercial offering, and AGPL. If said software is good, a commercial offering can be profit generating enough fund further development.

There’s nothing wrong with that, and there’s nothing wrong with people who want to build GPL software - do what you like, consistent with your ideals. This is really only in response to the perennial “why don’t more people use GPL” questions that seem to always pop up any time software licensing is discussed. It’s fine for some people, but there’s a reason corps tend to avoid it or have internal policies against using GPL software.

>why don’t more people use GPL” questions that seem to always pop up any time software licensing is discussed

millions of people use it. the perennial question is why does the license make people so unreasonably angry?

>there’s a reason corps tend to avoid it

it's the same reason they try to assign IP you dreamt up in the shower to themselves in perpetuity with no exceptions - a combination of corporate greed, hubris and lawyerly risk aversion.

I don’t agree with the greed and runaway capitalism that drives it, I’m just observing it exists.

People tend not to like it because it’s restrictive to the point of being off limits in many real world use cases. Bob works on the platform team at at GigaCorp. He’s overworked, and found a great OSS product that does exactly what he needs and could save him weeks or months of effort. Except because it’s GPL, he can’t touch it.

> save him weeks or months of effort.

so it's worth the time, and thus money to pay. Therefore, if he's got a brain, he would ask for corporate money to buy a commercial license, and do away with the risks of GPL.

Except he doesn't, because the corp (or he himself) believes that it should be free somehow?

Bob has a wonderful opportunity to channel GigaCorp's deep pockets and penchant for extreme risk aversion towards supporting open source.

Bob could just whine at the developer, of course, for not making his day at a well paid job slightly easier.

> It’s fine for some people, but there’s a reason corps tend to avoid it or have internal policies against using GPL software.

But the only reason for such anti-GPL policies is so that the corporations can ensure their software remains proprietary, which is inherently wrong.

I always wondered: is there actual study about this?

There is people arguing both ways with relatively good arguments, but what about quantifiable realities? As the author of GPL-licensed softwares, I didn't have much reasons to go that way or another, apart from hunch. Can we quantify those effects, so that we can properly align our licenses with the effect we want?

I’m not sure if there are studies, though it is probably something you could do. Maybe look at GPL vs MIT licensed software and see how each grows over time in terms of commits, lines of code, number of committers, number of issues, average time to close issues, total monthly downloads, etc. Of course metrics like these are pretty general, but at a large enough sample size I imagine there could be some observable patterns.

Of course, not everything is an optimization problem. So even if the metrics are better for x or y in general, people have their own reasons and beliefs about the world that might make one or the other better. I have generally felt that unless restrictiveness is important to you, minimally restrictive licensing is a good default choice.

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