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Comment by DamonHD | Hacker News Reader

This is simply rude and wrong in its claims that (all) people (such as me) using BSD and Apache licences are doing so out of ignorance, rather than because we know and want the effects that they have.

This childish inflammatory bile rather hurts the standing of GPL and friends, which do have appropriate applications too.

Nuance would have been a fine thing.

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What effects do you want? There is a section at the end of the post about appropriate uses of cuck licenses. Namely, when the software has network effects so that sharing it widely is more important than making sure it only has free versions.

I very much want my (open sourced) code to be used by anyone who wants to use it, in any context, including commercial, and with Apache I also want the patent protection effects.

Using such an inflammatory term to refer to someone's non-preferred style of licence is unhelpful to reasonable debate.

Why do you want that?

The term "cuckold" isn't inflammatory. Some people enjoy watching their partners have sex with others - and they're aware that they do. If a developer enjoys aiding Google and Amazon without getting paid or even recognized, they have the right to do so. But if they're tricked into it, that's a problem.

> The term "cuckold" isn't inflammatory.

You cannot detach it from the a) contemporary usage of the term and b) the original post uses "cuck" very intentionally to evoke said contemporary usage.

It's okay to be a cuck and own it. It's only embarrassing to be a cuck when you're trying not to be a cuck. And of course also to the extent that telling anyone your fetish is automatically embarrassing.

It's my (open source) code and I want to make it widely available, ie as open as reasonably possible, including cases such as my past small start-ups with no budget and not able to release everything open source. Why do I have to justify or explain that "why"?

I'm just wondering why you want that as it can shed more light on the debate.

I just gave an example: not all potential users of code can either use GPL-ish code or are profit-driven megacorps such as Google; false dichotomies are false. There are many small or intermediate organisations (and individuals) who would like to use open source code with the fewest legal and admin complications possible. I supported a similar cohort with an early multimedia site with simple free licensing.

So your singular aim is to maximize users?

Availability to use, without adding other complications, is a key aim. I'm trying to maximise to other people whatever value there is in the work that I've done.

Do you believe that everyone being locked into a proprietary Amazon version of your code delivers more value than either: Amazon releases the source code to their version, or: lock-in hasn't occurred yet but people are free to add those same features in a free version?

Isn't there ultimately more value in Amazon releasing the source code for its update than in Amazon not releasing that?

You seem to be asserting some simple zero-sum exclusionary game here that does not exist. I am entirely content if Amazon or Google extracts some value - that in no way inhibits anyone else doing so in reality. But to me the far more important case - a messy long tail - is smaller organisations such as the small telco that used a few lines of my code to help avoid early smart-ish picture phones on their network blowing each other up with malformed JPEGs. Said telco could not have released the exchange's software suite under GPL if I'd had that 8 lines of my Java under GPL rather than Apache.

Are you content with Amazon using its rights to prevent others from using theirs? They've done embrace-extend-extinguish to MIT software before, making everyone reliant on a proprietary version of the software.

Amazon easily has the market power to make their version of your software the default one. Other software will be written so it only works with the Amazon version, and that version will be proprietary and run only on their servers. I'm not really seeing how this increases freedom. They almost did this with both Redis and ElasticSearch. They did something similar to MySQL and Postgres, obsoleting them both with Amazon Aurora, but that hasn't run to its conclusion yet.

You are constructing a universe that simply does not exist or apply to me at least. I and my code are just not that important or special in the grand scheme of things.

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