Sometimes there’s a benefit in getting open source code into proprietary software. Think libraries implementing interoperability APIs, communication protocols, file formats, etc
That’s what permissive licenses are for.
If some company wants to keep their code closed and they have a choice between something interoperable or something proprietary that they will subsequently promote, and the licence is the only thing stopping them from going for the open source approach, that’s worse.
Completely agree that a good breadth of everything else is suited to copyleft licensing though
That’s the whole point, you’re leveraging the use of the commons so that it’s less feasible to keep your code closed. If they want to keep their code closed, they can spend a lot more manhours building everything from scratch.
Our man-hours come from leadership and architects so separated from code they can’t agree on drawings or what constitutes a micro service architecture or… Any real pattern at all.
Something I don’t get paid enough to understand - what constitutes contributions, and what’s the definition of selling the software?
For instance, I don’t think I’ve worked on a project where we have made changes to the source code for security policies (much quicker path to update immediately if something gets flagged). But I don’t think I know of an instance where we sell our software as a service - as far as I know it’s largely used to support other services we sell.
Except now that I say that, that’s not entirely true, we DO have a review board that we have to submit every third party library to and it takes forever to hear back but we have occasionally gotten a “no can’t use that” or “contract is pending.” So maybe I’m just super unaware of who reviews the third party software and they review the licenses.
Someone biulds a thing and puts it on the curb in front of his house with a sign:
<span style="color:#323232;">I had fun building this and learnt a lot. Do with it whatever you want.
</span>
Then someone else comes along, takes it, and sells it.
I fail to see how the inventor was taken advantage of. They presumably thought about which license they want to use and specifically chose this one.
It’s a little different than that, isn’t it? More like: " look at what I built, here’s a step by step guide that makes it work. Do with it whatever you want." Some people want to use it for their job. Others might use it for personal use, or to build more open source projects.
To an extent I agree with this, but “Once upon a time, this guy licensed his code under BSD instead of GPL and basically it’s his fault the Intel Management Engine exists” is definitely a step too far