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Realize how I oriented my question around how it might affect building an OSS community. A MIT or Apache license might detract contributors, because essentiall
by j1elo 6y ago
Realize how I oriented my question around how it might affect building an OSS community.
A MIT or Apache license might detract contributors, because essentially these licenses say "your contribution is OSS today, but it might end up resulting as unintended free labor that helps build a commercial product of which you won't be part of".
However some see GPL licenses as a guarantee that external contributions are actually contributions to the overall Open-Source community as a whole, because they cannot be turned into other non-OSS product without explicit permission of all people who built it.
So yes, copyleft is more restrictive than non-copyleft. But only in the subtle sense of ensuring that no further restrictions will get added by any third party, ever. Which is a strong promise that should encourage contributions.
Ultimately, my objective is to learn if this theory matches the practice.
- GRVYDEV 6y agoYes and this makes 100% sense. This is my first Open Source project so its definitely something to think about!
- busterarm 6y ago> because essentially these licenses say "your contribution is OSS today, but it might end up resulting as unintended free labor that helps build a commercial product of which you won't be part of". Contributions to non-copyleft OSS licenses _are_ actual contributions to the open source community as a whole. There's nothing preventing your GPL'd project from being used to make a commercial product that you are not a part of either. You're talking about enforcing perpetual conditions on the future of the product/license for your free labor. This is the reason why projects like MAME have contributor agreements now. Even if through some process the license changes in the future, your contributions were still to an open source license and that version of the code will remain open forever. I haven't seen anyone discouraged from contributing to OSS-licensed projects that are not GPL unless they are an extreme ideologue. I myself generally prefer to license my work with something like MIT or Apache (read: the ISC license, generally) and that choice is absolutely fine.
- falcolas 6y ago> There's nothing preventing your GPL'd project from being used to make a commercial product that you are not a part of either. Copyright law does exactly this. The role of the GPL is to carve out explicit exceptions to the "you can't copy this" rights granted by copyright law.
- busterarm 6y agoA lot of people seem to confuse Commercial with Proprietary... They are not the same.
- falcolas 6y agoDoesn't matter. Copyright, without the licensing exceptions, won't allow EvilCorp Inc. use your code even if you publish it in the clear on the internet. Also, more relevant to the discussion I was responding to, the GPL license doesn't allow re-licensing without consent (or a pre-arranged copyright assignment - a contributor's agreement). And it's copyright law which enforces this.
- busterarm 6y agoGiven past experiences, I see large group projects trending towards having CLAs/DCOs where you give up ownership of your code anyway. Most people don't want to work with random contributors who wish to hold a gun to their heads in perpetuity.
- falcolas 6y ago> who wish to hold a gun to their heads An aside, that's an awfully violent visual for discussing ownership of code.
- gary-kim 6y agoDCOs don't give copyright ownership to anyone else or even any more rights to anyone else. It is simply a declaration that you have the permission to license the code you wrote under the license you're giving it for. This article gives a nice description of the differences: https://opensource.com/article/18/3/cla-vs-dco-whats-difference https://opensource.com/article/18/3/cla-vs-dco-whats-differe...