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Only speaking personally, I've never felt this way about the GPL. The virality is a feature that I really like as a developer. It ensures the changes stay open

Only speaking personally, I've never felt this way about the GPL. The virality is a feature that I really like as a developer. It ensures the changes stay open which is the true nature of open source for me. I find that business is the first to scoff at this, but just because your software is GPL doesn't mean your code can be readily "stolen". There's plenty of complexity in actually getting that code to users that can make it quite difficult for others to replicate your success. That said, there are licenses that I also like that are weaker, like LGPL and MPL 2.0. I'm often surprised MIT is chosen. Apache 2.0 is more robust due to explicitness.

beagle3 6y ago
> There's plenty of complexity in actually getting that code to users that can make it quite difficult for others to replicate your success. That's true when the competitors are of comparable size/ability. Not necessarily equal, but still comparable on a similar scale. However, the likes of Amazon, Google, Microsoft easily take e.g. Redis or Postgres or Mongo or a variety of other products, and "get that code to users" by SaaS means -- which they can do at least as well as the original developer/copyright-holder, and their "vertical" integration (e.g. AWS) makes their offer superior to the original developer. (They can easily do the same without the source code, by developing their own clean-or-mostly-clean-room implementation, but the internal barrier for them to do that is much, much higher).