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In the past I’ve seen that free software licenses make companies nervous, and they will inject Legal in the middle of your project schedule. This creates at le

In the past I’ve seen that free software licenses make companies nervous, and they will inject Legal in the middle of your project schedule. This creates at least weeks or months of nontechnical dependencies in order to obtain approvals for even the simplest things (and you have no control over the activities of the Legal departmentc at all so good luck with your promised timeline for completion). In addition, GPL can practically translate to an automatic “No” in some organizations. The wording of licenses also matters, which is why coming up with “cute license that is mostly well-known license but different” is a sure way to severely delay or prevent corporate adoption of your project. At this point, you should really just pick a well-known license. Given these thorns in the side of company code, it is not at all surprising when engineers consider just coming up with some code themselves.

microcolonel 9y ago
Yeah, but most new code (especially frontend javascript, desktop application libraries, mobile application libraries) is 2-clause BSD, ISC (which is formally equivalent to 2BSD), MIT, or Apache 2.0. I guess there are goons going around slapping WTFPL on things, but oh well, doesn't seem to be stopping anyone. GPL doesn't cause problems unless you're distributing. If you're just compiling and running it as part of your service, it's no biggie. I ran it by legal pretty quickly. I've worked on plenty of projects with GPL stuff in them.
- flukus 9y ago
  > GPL doesn't cause problems unless you're distributing Or if you might want to distribute in future, what is good now might become impossible because a client wants an on premise install for instance. Or if the software department ever get's spun out to a separate legal entity. I'm a big fan of the GPL, even the AGPL, but I wouldn't use a GPL library in a non-GPL product.

microcolonel 9y ago

Yeah, but most new code (especially frontend javascript, desktop application libraries, mobile application libraries) is 2-clause BSD, ISC (which is formally equivalent to 2BSD), MIT, or Apache 2.0. I guess there are goons going around slapping WTFPL on things, but oh well, doesn't seem to be stopping anyone. GPL doesn't cause problems unless you're distributing. If you're just compiling and running it as part of your service, it's no biggie. I ran it by legal pretty quickly. I've worked on plenty of projects with GPL stuff in them.

flukus 9y ago
> GPL doesn't cause problems unless you're distributing Or if you might want to distribute in future, what is good now might become impossible because a client wants an on premise install for instance. Or if the software department ever get's spun out to a separate legal entity. I'm a big fan of the GPL, even the AGPL, but I wouldn't use a GPL library in a non-GPL product.