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0 pointsgiancarlostoro9y ago0 comments

I don't think it's completely useless. If you have software you invested a lot of money into and the company goes out of business and you have your own internal engineers (maybe you didn't want to go this route beforehand because said product was good enough) now you can carry on without the main company. In the case of WordPress unless they disappear somehow, that is when a fork will come. Look at LibreOffice vs OpenOffice. MariaDB is a great example of someone selling a product they made for a LOT of money, and then continuing on with it, now that Oracle has taken MySQL some have taken to using MariaDB instead. Don't knock the GPL, it makes many things possible.

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3 comments · 1 top-level

charlesdm9y ago· 2 in thread

I totally agree on that, _BUT_ I can't use it in a commercial product without releasing my entire commercial source code? The GPL prohibits many commercial applications, and even if I would want to use in something, I often cannot, because it's not feasible to release my entire codebase. There's a lot of GPL software that's just off limits, exactly because of that. In a way, it contaminates commercial codebases. That makes me sad, because a lot of GPL code is of top notch quality.

Why not opt for a BSD license? The things you wrote also apply to BSD licensed open-source software.

giancarlostoroOP9y ago

If you're releasing your code, it's only to the customer. The one's who receive the code are only the ones who receive the binaries and ONLY upon request, think BMW's code they released upon a customers request. Sometimes it's better to use GPL or BSD, because some customers will not use your product if there is no code to guarantee if your company disappears they can't move on without you. Look at WordPress, their code's right there, and yet nobody can overshadow them yet.

Edit:

I agree with you, but I was mentioning GPL because you placed it in question. BSD is great, MS-PL is a little nicer if you need to protect any patents too.

cozzyd9y ago

Sounds like the GPL working exactly as intended.

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