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> I think more permissive license have allowed a lot of companies to wave the banner of OSS while not having to really contribute things back to the community.
by pluma 10y ago
> I think more permissive license have allowed a lot of companies to wave the banner of OSS while not having to really contribute things back to the community.
Another way to look at this is that it has allowed companies to contribute to open source at all.
We'll never see how the industry would have developed if there had only been GPL and closed source with nothing in between but I believe we're better off this way because I don't think enough closed source companies would have made the jump to GPL.
Right now I'm using an open source OS published by a commercial company, running an open source browser published by a commercial company and make my living developing software using open source libraries published by commercial companies. Most of the software these companies produce is open source and most of the open source software is non-GPL, yet they are enabling me to stand on their shoulders for free.
Political tangent: I think a pure GPL open source ecosystem is impossible in a capitalist environment. Much like Communism it only works when executed at a global scale to achieve the critical mass. If GPL is Communism, non-GPL open source is Democratic Socialism. Purists think it's a stopgap at best or distraction at worst, pragmatists see it as the only viable alternative to the tyranny of closed source.
- lorenzhs 10y agoBut Android isn't really open. Without the Google Play Services, you can't use half of all apps, or even get push notifications without ruining battery life. Your device likely also uses a bunch of binary firmware blobs without which it wouldn't work. It's pretend-open. Also, Chrome for Android isn't really open source either, see the FAQ: https://developer.chrome.com/multidevice/faq https://developer.chrome.com/multidevice/faq "Chrome for Android is derived from Chromium. Since the launch of the first version, we have steadily open sourced all the critical components. You can build various Chromium components for Android as used in Chrome for Android using the instructions here."
- icebraining 10y agohttps://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/lkgr/docs/android_build_instructions.md https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/lkgr/docs/a... https://download-chromium.appspot.com/?platform=Android&type=continuous https://download-chromium.appspot.com/?platform=Android&type...
- lorenzhs 10y agoAh, my bad, I didn't know you could build Chromium for Android. That second link hasn't been updated in over a year, though.
- pluma 10y agoI wrote that comment using Chrome (by Google, a company that makes money) on Ubuntu (by Canonical, a company that makes money) so your argument isn't really relevant. Although to be fair, Google Chrome itself is not open source (although Chromium is). The main reason I'm using Chrome rather than Chromium is that I like the closed source parts too (e.g. the Google-specific integrations).