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Comment by PenMount | Hacker News Reader

Oh like Oracle cannot make a commercial closed version of MySQL because it is under GPL[0] or QT[1] cannot have both a closed and a GPL version.

There are a lot more examples of this.

On the other hand look at how RMS/FSF talks about LLVM and BSD[2], i am a developer there prefers the MIT license for my software, and for me FSF and GPL are a lot more dangerous then apple and there open source license.

[0] http://www.mysql.com/about/legal/licensing/oem/#4 [1] http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/licensing.html [2] https://lwn.net/Articles/582242/

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> Oh like Oracle cannot make a commercial closed version of MySQL because it is under GPL[0] or QT[1] cannot have both a closed and a GPL version.

Oracle can't pick up third party patches and incorporate them into their proprietary version (for example: patches from MariaDB). They can only incorporate their own changes, and changes that other sign over.

As I see it permissively licensed code puts every one on equal terms. We all can make open source forks & we all can make proprietary forks. With copyleft some one is more equal and it is not the users, since we can only make copyleft forks.

Or you could contribute back to the copyleft project (without copyright assignment or relicensing grants) and then you're all on equal terms again: nobody can make proprietary forks.

Why should i take the freedom of making proprietary forks away from people?

My goal with open sourcing my software are to make the (software) world just a little better, i do that by writing the best software i can and hope that as many people possible use it, if i write the best ftp library in the world and you need a ftp library for your proprietary program i hope you use mine instead of an inferior implementation.

In my world view i do not loss anything by you making a proprietary forks of my work (i still have my version of my work with my license) but you and your users are getting a better product.

If your priority is to improve the quality of the software that people use, I don't think you should use copyleft.

If you think that quality is important, but that as important as that is that users should have control over the software they use, as part of the control they should have over their own lives, then I think a copyleft license is a good tool to help achieve that.

My comment was in the context of big company X, "releasing something in a permissive license" vs "releasing something in a copyleft license". Either way I prefer to use, support and contribute to permissively licensed projects.

Most corporate copyleft projects only accept contributions with assignation.

Except that lone developers or small teams and large corporations aren't equal. A lone software developer who works on software under a permissive license is not benefitted to the same degree by those supposed "equal terms", because he doesn't have the resources of a larger team or corporation to exploit that "permissiveness".

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