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Comment by wavephorm | Hacker News Reader

The real reason permissive licences are preferred is developers are greedy. I know, I'm a developer and I'm greedy. I don't want to admit I'm using other people's code to do my work. I want to silently include that code and pretend that I did all of it myself and impress people with my amazing programming skills. If I have to buy a license I have fess up, and admit to myself I need their code, whereas if I can just use it freely there isn't that moral barrier to cross.

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It's not greed, it's friction. Developers don't like friction in development and worrying about licensing is a type of friction that requires real money. I want to help them (I contribute $ to a few projects), but I need to know my stuff will work with there's before I go paying. There are few things worse than paying for software, deploying, and finding out you need to switch to something else.

I am fine with attributing others. I have actually done it after paying even when paying removes the need (e.g. glyphicons pro).

attributing != sharing back

it's greed, ego, etc.

I'll share back too if it I have some improvement (I am going to test in on my own site first).

Greed is actually a very poor reason for not sharing back. It actually costs more money to maintain a forked code base than contributing the change back and getting it maintained by everyone. It is also fairly stupid to hide what software you are using from a recruitment point of view.

I prefer the BSD / MIT licenses because the sharing occurs on my schedule, less stress, and less friction. I like doing things because it is right and not because I have a lawyer at my door.

You got it reverse. Most permissive licenses need attribution (in form of leaving the original header comment etc) which lets the whole world know that you are using the component. A commercial license gives you complete anonymity (most let you completely change the source code) except for the charge on your credit card bill.

And I don't think its greed. Not many applications on any platform gets written completely from scratch without using other libraries.

  Most permissive licenses need attribution (in form of leaving the 
  original header comment etc) which lets the whole world know

If the code is being used for commercial and propriety purposes then the code is never seen, never attributed. Attribution in the form of source code comments is really only valuable in other open source projects.

As a developer I'm just the opposite - I want to give as much attribution as possible from both personal (acknowledge the people who actually did the work, feel-good-about-being-part-of-a-community) and practical standpoints (demonstrating the components come from external projects known to other people rather than part of a personal codebase that only I'm intimately familiar with that the client always has to rely on me to maintain).

But then practically all my own current work is open-sourced which probably skews my opinions.

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