alt Hacker NewsPeople can license their software however they want, but it is worth reflecting on why almost all open source authors go with a permissive license like MIT: because it is basically a "buyer's market." When choosing a database, distributed queue, blogging platform, or whatever, companies usually have a choice of at least several high quality open source options.
If one of those options places restrictions on the users, then those users are probably going to choose one of the other options.
As a result, licensing your project GPL or the like usually means relegating it to obscurity. There are very notable exceptions, including Linux and WordPress, but they are outliers. It's hard to monetize an MIT project, but it is even harder to monetize a project without users.
Whether this is "good" or "bad" is a separate debate (err, usually flame war), but I think many people gloss over that this is a coordination problem and that everyone is acting rationally. For better or worse, software does not seem to be scarce.
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I disagree. It will be harder to monetize MIT licensed projects, because any competitor can just grab and run. With AGPLv3, at least legally the competitor needs to publish their modifications as well. This in turn makes it more likely the competitor will not use your code, or if they do, in accordance with the license, which would be fine, and users of the product you build will mostly not care, because they don't even know what the licenses are about.
Well, many developers publish their code not because they want to specifically make a successful open source project, but because they made something that was useful to themselves, and like the idea behind open source. In that case it makes more sense to do a copyleft license because it will legally require all derivatives to also follow that open source idea.
> licensing your project GPL or the like usually means relegating it to obscurity
Subjective. Sure if you are talking about percent of market share, but it's a huge market, you don't need to capture even 1% of users to have a viable business.
The vast majority of the GNU ecosystem is GPL. Bash, git, Apache, Gimp, Blender, Libreoffice.
There are also a lot of projects that are dual licensed, allowing commercial software to be charged a fee and non-commercial software to use for free with GPL.
> People can license their software however they want, but it is worth reflecting on why almost all open source authors go with a permissive license like MIT: because it is basically a "buyer's market." When choosing a database, distributed queue, blogging platform, or whatever, companies usually have a choice of at least several high quality open source options.
> If one of those options places restrictions on the users, then those users are probably going to choose one of the other options.
First, if someone isn’t paying, he’s not buying. ‘Paying’ should be understood broadly, e.g. code as well as money counts. A company paying dollars really doesn’t care that much about the license — plenty of companies pay for proprietarily-licensed products (even ridiculously limited ones, with dongles and high seat prices). OTOH, a company ‘paying’ with code contributions should prefer the GPL, because it knows that its contributions will never be taken away from it.
Second, the GPL does not restrict users; it restricts developers from restricting users.
The GPL family is the right way for individuals and companies to form a software commons in which all can benefit.