alt Hacker NewsThe point of the article is that:
1. In most areas, they eventually will!
2. If there is a permissively-licensed project in that area, at least there's a decent chance that the "reimplementation" will be a fork of that project. At that fork has a decent chance of staying open or even being merged back into the upstream. That benefits the community more than a proprietary from-scratch rewrite (which would follow from a GPL-only open-source scene)
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lc9er • last Friday at 4:07 PM
So if we're nice to the billionaires, they may return that kindness with table scraps - if we're lucky? Sounds like the tech version of trickle-down economics.
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I don't see why a company that refuses to add to a GPL project has a "decent change" of releasing their code under a more permissive license.
If you're going to talk about theoretical behavior from big companies, you can make stories any way you want.
Let's say a big company selling computers wants to include a PCB editing software by default. If KiCAD was Apache licensed they may be tempted to make a special version for their customers, as a unique selling point. But it's GPL, so they have to choose between rewriting completely (a huge process), or just publishing the changes and being happy to include a good program.
Or a company makes modifications to a GPL program for internal use, and decides they want to share it with partners/customers later.
I have no reason to think these stories are more or less likely than the story of a company completely rejecting the GPL option but still deciding to upstream their changes.