alt Hacker NewsI 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.
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Didn't Sony gobble up a whole bunch of stuff from FReeBSD for the last few Playstation release without hardly contributing anything back at all ? IIRC the might have sent some patches to improve SMP or sponsored a conference.
Same with Microsoft and the Windows TCP stack lifted from BSD as well.
Compare with GPL licensed projects, like the Linux Kernel & its license making many projects possible, like the OpenWRT project for example.
> 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.
It's simple in my experience.
Many big companies have some set "A" of code that they want to keep private, and some set "B" that they don't care about keeping private.
Lawyers are worried that at some point someone will accidentally include GPL code in something from "A" and force it to be made public. So they ban GPL entirely. They could in theory just ban GPL code from "A" and allow it in "B", but they can't trust that among thousands of employees none will make a mistake, so they just ban the GPL entirely.
> 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.
Because upstreaming a patch once is cheaper than maintaining your own proprietary fork forever. It externalizes the effort of maintaining it in the future. That's the point that the article makes. And it's true in my experience. My employer allows and encourages me to contribute back to our dependencies. Those aren't the core of our business and our competitive advantage