alt Hacker NewsI think it definitely hurts adoption. No hobbyist or experimenter wants to delve into legalities head first by first having to understand the licensing terms of software, whereas permissive licenses like MIT and Apache 2.0 are easily-understood and familiar.
The solution is probably to be more selective what you're open sourcing if you're planning to build a business. And what you open source, you do it under a permissive license so people don't feel limited should they wish to play around with it.
A more restrictive license might be more apt if you don't really want to open source, but you must for regulatory reasons.
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Excuse me but as both a hobbyist and commercial software developer I say that the gpl (any version) is quite simple enough. There is no need to go all the way to bsd/mit just to get safety and clarity and freedom from encumberance.
The only people who avoid gpl and talk about mit as being the only safe option, are exactly the people no one should care about. They are the people for whom free isn't free enough, and they must steal even when it's already free.
That is not "adoption" anyone needs to care about.
"The solution is probably to be more selective what you're open sourcing if you're planning to build a business."
Fully agree, FOSS maintainers are - in the grand economic scheme of things - beggars high on altruism. The whole model of FOSS from the position of a non-corporate sponsored developer was already broken and with the advent of AI is now most probably broken beyond-repair. Buy-me-a-coffee with a <0.01% hit rate compared to open feature requests/gh issues on some of the more popular projects out there, all while companies like atlassian - using FOSS to run their business on for free - can charge 50k EUR for a single 1h migration call. Time is the most valuable resource one can waste, something you get to realize once all the mental gymnastics wear off(either by itself or due to less fortunate life situations)