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Expurple • last Friday at 10:12 PM • 1 reply • view on HN

Ideal for whom?

It's still not ideal for downstream proprietary developers. The requirement to provide some means to relink the project is extra headache that can be avoided by using permissive dependencies, reinforcing the point of the article.

Also, in theory, I can imagine a situation where a proprierary developer strongly needs to make a change, and for some reason is strongly against open-sourcing it, and is strongly law-abiding. And thus, a proprietary rewrite is born. Sometimes, instead of a complete rewrite, that's going to be a fork of a permissive project, boosting its usage and reinforcing the point of the article.

For library authors, LGPL/MPL is often a good tradeoff, indeed. You still get all the modifications back, while also having more users then you would have with GPL. Although, as seen in this thread, enabling proprieraty dependents is actually a downside for some authors, due to their beliefs.

To me, it looks like LGPL/MPL become irrelevant in the "longer" run too.

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I agree with you regarding the "tipping point". There's nothing we can do about this. In a similar vein, when considering a massive investment into a GPL project, they are going to conclude that they are better off invesing a similar amount into a proprietary rewrite and keeping the added value to themselves.

Replies

ltbarcly3 • last Friday at 11:41 PM

They might decide to rewrite an lgpl project, but there is a massive sunk cost. At the point they make the decision the gpl project is less tempting to bring fully in house.

  (L)GPL:
  - Investing $3M to extend.
  - Would cost $17M and 3 years to re implement to baseline and then extend.
  - Lose all community development inputs because new solution  is fully in house.

  Permissive:
  - Investing $3M to extend.
  - Would cost $0 and 0 years to keep in house and still extend
  - Keep 100% of community development inputs initially and potentially forever if they are able to extend in a way that avoids conflicts.  Can port most community developed features with some effort.
Corporations make decisions 1 quarter and at most 1 year ahead. It's a very hard sell to say "we need to take 3 years and a huge investment to get to where we already are at". It could happen for some very specific, high value technologies where someone at the Sr. Director or VP level is taking a long view , but it would be extremely rare.