5 ms·

Why is the "business point of view" relevant here? It's the business point of view that got us DRM in the first place.

coldtea 9y ago
Because in the real world you get your products from said businesses. If your favorite vendors don't like the license, they wont adopt it, period.
- pjmlp 9y ago
  The same business that will happily take anything that is MIT licensed, to reduce development costs by getting software at $0 and never contributing anything back. When they do, is only a few bread crumbs to the villagers, while keeping the crown jewels behind their gates. But hey, "they are contributing back see how nice they are!". I used to be a big (L)GPL zealot during the 90's, nowadays I just reverted back to using commercial software, because the community just doesn't care about companies taking their work away.
  - coldtea 9y ago
    >The same business that will happily take anything that is MIT licensed, to reduce development costs by getting software at $0 and never contributing anything back. Isn't that part of what people chose MIT for? To allow businesses to adopt their project without having to "contribute anything back"? >I used to be a big (L)GPL zealot during the 90's, nowadays I just reverted back to using commercial software, because the community just doesn't care about companies taking their work away. Isn't that their own decision? Whether to worry about or not? People chose MIT because they are OK with this scenario.
    - pjmlp 9y ago
      Yeah, but then they aren't entitled to complain that cannot get access to the fork used by company XYZ, that the *BSDs get less love than GNU/Linux, embedded OEMs don't publish their clang forks, Android devices are locked down to a specific version,.....
      - _ph_ 9y ago
        Right, and at least I am not aware of complaints like such. My experience rather is, that any larger customisations of open source software are usually propagated back to the project for the simple reason of saving the hassle of maintaining a fork of that software.
        pjmlp 9y ago
        I imagine you don't have much experience with enterprise code. They have piles of patches and team specific forks that are never going to go out of those Clearcase and TFS repositories. Sony was the only company I ever saw doing a presentation at a LLVM summit, referring that keeping up with upstream as their main reason to get the PS4 clang code "partially" into clang. They did not contribute back any kind of optimizations that might reveal too much of PS4's architecture. I guess some would say it is better than nothing. OEMs using Android or BSD/Linux forks for embedded use, don't have any issue maintaining their own forks.
        watwut 9y ago
        How many of those patches have non zero chance to be accepted and how much time would it take to actually hop through all obstacles to push them? My answers are 1.) a few 2.) a lot. Majority of Linux contributions are paid by various companies. It is not volunteers working for free, it is companies paying.
        deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
        _ph_ 9y ago
        I am working at a very large software company, don't know whether that qualifies as enterprise code :). Yes, if you do customisations of open source software which could reveal trade secrets, I wouldn't expect this to be back-donated, and you could do that only with permissive licenses in the first place. But the large majority of open source software means just using it, and if it gets modified at all, it consists of bug fixes an small enhancements, that can and are back-donated to the projects. And as you wrote yourself, Sony tries to get the changes which don't disclose their trade secrets into upstream to reduce the merging load.

Because in the real world you get your products from said businesses. If your favorite vendors don't like the license, they wont adopt it, period.

pjmlp 9y ago
The same business that will happily take anything that is MIT licensed, to reduce development costs by getting software at $0 and never contributing anything back. When they do, is only a few bread crumbs to the villagers, while keeping the crown jewels behind their gates. But hey, "they are contributing back see how nice they are!". I used to be a big (L)GPL zealot during the 90's, nowadays I just reverted back to using commercial software, because the community just doesn't care about companies taking their work away.
- coldtea 9y ago
  >The same business that will happily take anything that is MIT licensed, to reduce development costs by getting software at $0 and never contributing anything back. Isn't that part of what people chose MIT for? To allow businesses to adopt their project without having to "contribute anything back"? >I used to be a big (L)GPL zealot during the 90's, nowadays I just reverted back to using commercial software, because the community just doesn't care about companies taking their work away. Isn't that their own decision? Whether to worry about or not? People chose MIT because they are OK with this scenario.
  - pjmlp 9y ago
    Yeah, but then they aren't entitled to complain that cannot get access to the fork used by company XYZ, that the *BSDs get less love than GNU/Linux, embedded OEMs don't publish their clang forks, Android devices are locked down to a specific version,.....
    - _ph_ 9y ago
      Right, and at least I am not aware of complaints like such. My experience rather is, that any larger customisations of open source software are usually propagated back to the project for the simple reason of saving the hassle of maintaining a fork of that software.
      - pjmlp 9y ago
        I imagine you don't have much experience with enterprise code. They have piles of patches and team specific forks that are never going to go out of those Clearcase and TFS repositories. Sony was the only company I ever saw doing a presentation at a LLVM summit, referring that keeping up with upstream as their main reason to get the PS4 clang code "partially" into clang. They did not contribute back any kind of optimizations that might reveal too much of PS4's architecture. I guess some would say it is better than nothing. OEMs using Android or BSD/Linux forks for embedded use, don't have any issue maintaining their own forks.
        watwut 9y ago
        How many of those patches have non zero chance to be accepted and how much time would it take to actually hop through all obstacles to push them? My answers are 1.) a few 2.) a lot. Majority of Linux contributions are paid by various companies. It is not volunteers working for free, it is companies paying.
        deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
        _ph_ 9y ago
        I am working at a very large software company, don't know whether that qualifies as enterprise code :). Yes, if you do customisations of open source software which could reveal trade secrets, I wouldn't expect this to be back-donated, and you could do that only with permissive licenses in the first place. But the large majority of open source software means just using it, and if it gets modified at all, it consists of bug fixes an small enhancements, that can and are back-donated to the projects. And as you wrote yourself, Sony tries to get the changes which don't disclose their trade secrets into upstream to reduce the merging load.