alt Hacker NewsThe article makes the point that, in practice, permissively-licenced projects see more contributions back. Copyleft projects are being rewritten as proprietary instead (with a few exceptions like Linux, which are too big to fail). The end result may be even worse for the user, if the proprietary alternative ends up being the most developed one, grows an ecosystem and a network effect, and eventually everyone is forced to use that. There's plenty of examples.
It's not about "fairness". It's about reality and survival characteristics.
As a user, I care about my freedom too. But permissively-licenced projects give me enough freedom to choose them over copyleft projects that are even slightly worse in quality
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> The article makes the point that, in practice, permissively-licenced projects see more contributions back.
How are we measuring this? I mean, sure, MIT will get more contributions than GPL.
But the MIT code is used commercially. So you can get, say, 10x more contributions, but you're losing 100x more money. Is that a worthy tradeoff?
The idea of corporate contributions is that the company is probably making WAY more money off your code than they are spending contributing back to it. Otherwise, they probably just... wouldn't.
// The article makes the point that, in practice, //
The article is over 10 years old. Which is 100 years in computer-dog years. What may or may not have been true about 2015 may or may not be true about what is going on today. We cannot just uncritically take its conclusions as read.
You've been very diligent in replying to the detractors in this thread, but I have yet to see any compelling examples.
You say that there are plenty of examples of copyleft projects being overtaken by proprietary versions that then create network effects that end up being worse for the end user because the original project was copyleft. You further assert that if the original project had been permissively licensed, this wouldn't have happened.
I'm unaware of this ever happening. Can you list a few of the examples you had in mind?