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0 pointsrakoo2y ago0 comments

Please, let's not pretend developers who build MIT- or BSD- licensed software on their free time after their day of work at BigTech are struggling for money. Let's not pretend React is done out of pure goodwill for the developers community by one of the richest companies in the history of mankind, and developers who work on it are evaluating whether they're going to have food on the table.

There is a distinction between "I need money to live" and "I want money because I want more", and the distinction should be clear enough. Yes, many projects are in the first case, but that's not the subject.

If you want to commit to a new project, make a living off of it, what does non-copyleft bring you compared to copyleft ?

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tgma2y ago

> what does non-copyleft bring you compared to copyleft?

This is not a statement of my values; simply providing plausible answers to that question.

Usually non-copyleft free software is written in a variant of these scenarios:

1. Paid for by a company whose business model is distinct from selling software (e.g. ads) and prefers to not have to worry about copyleft licensing issues in small contributions they get back from the community and be free to integrate it in proprietary products.

2a. An individual author who will indirectly benefit (in both ego and monetary ways) by writing a popular piece of software. Copyleft in fact limits the spread of the software. Think Tanenbaum being excited and proud when the news that MINIX is used in Intel Management Engine came out.

2b. Result of a academic research that benefits from maximum spread. Lots of consuming companies prefer Apache to GPL and are more likely to use the non-copyleft software.

pyrale2y ago

Let's also not pretend that the solution to this specific issue is to expect all the devs of the world to respect some sort of honor code.

Had the US done its job properly and antitrusted the offending companies a decade ago, as it should have, we wouldn't be having this discussion right now.

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