I personally don't care about the interests of big corporations cheating with end-users' rights. If they were my potential customers, or any intermediary which is afraid of not being able to do business with them due to their obsession with restricting end-users' rights, then I'd probably have a conflict of interest. In that case, I could think of sacrificing ethics for food temporarily. But I'm not in that business, and I don't want to.
I won't blame the GPL instead of the "old culture" of doing business by forcing customers to do only what you want them to do, and make them pay for any upgrade some of them could do themselves otherwise. Distributing works with GPL restricts the options to other developers using your product or library. No doubt about that. But ethically, that "freedom" only helps the old model of doing software. All software should be GPLd in the first place. There's a book that indirectly illustrates my point, and one I enthusiastically recommend: Badass users [1]. Anyway, we could go on and on. It's a matter of pragmatism vs ethics of software. Usually, people sharing your "classic" point of view of the business of software don't understand why people write free software and give it for free. Is that your case? [1] http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920036593.do 2017-09-21 17:16 GMT+02:00 Jimmie Houchin <jlhouc...@gmail.com>: > On 09/21/2017 09:47 AM, Ben Coman wrote: > > [SNIP] > Its horses for courses. No one viewpoint fits all circumstances. Another > way to look at it is that permissive licenses give a developer more freedom > to combine libraries with different licenses. > > I do like this radical simplification I bumped into... > "Another way of looking at it is that you’re picking a license based on > what you are afraid of. > * The MIT license is if you’re afraid no one will use your code; you’re > making the licensing as short and non-intimidating as possible. > * The Apache License you are somewhat afraid of no one using your code, > but you are also afraid of legal ambiguity and patent trolls. > * With the GPL licenses, you are afraid of someone else profiting from > your work [or profiting off end-users] (and ambiguity, and patent trolls)." > [https://exygy.com/which-license-should-i-use-mit-vs-apache-vs-gpl] > > ...which aligns squarely with Pharo - our greater fear is people not using > it. > > > I think the GPL one looks right. Fear, anger, offense if someone has the > possibility of using their software and not contributing back. To me I > think it doesn't work as much as they think. It doesn't take into account > the free will of people to walk away and completely not use their software. > I personally don't even look at GPL licensed sources unless there are none > other available which is very rare. I don't want the knowledge or > understanding of that code tainting other code I write. > > MIT often means, we don't care, do what you want, just don't blame us. > We don't care if you take it and use it in closed source proprietary money > making big corp software. > We don't care if you take it and use it and keep it to yourself. > We don't care ... Just don't blame us for any problems. > > However, we would love your buy in on open source philosophy and > contribute back where you are able. We understand you have software which > is business critical, proprietary and can not be open sourced. We also know > that you probably have software which has no business specific (your > business) code which is releasable. And we see many, many, big and small > businesses doing so today. Close off what you must, open what you can. > > I don't think most of us are afraid of no one using our code. PostgreSQL > has no such fear. SQLite which is public domain has no such fear. And we > could go on and on. Python, etc... > > I personally am very much in the camp of I want people to contribute > because they want to contribute. Not because I have a stick called the GPL. > But rather because I have the carrot of all of the benefits derived from > open source software. I am carrot oriented, not stick oriented. > > Jimmie > > >
