I like the article here as it makes a powerful argument about open source. FOSS is eating the software world. In Social Architecture, Peter Hintjens (ZeroMQ) h

I like the article here as it makes a powerful argument about open source. FOSS is eating the software world. In Social Architecture, Peter Hintjens (ZeroMQ) has another way of putting it. Paraphrased he says that: Open sourcing a particular product can be a "market breaker". Imagine someone all of a sudden open sourced a great Photoshop alternative with a nice community. Suddenly, the for-profit market would collapse as photo editing became free over night. That's open source eating software. On the other hand, (1) licensing your software under the GPL family without asking for contributor licensing agreements and by (2) claiming your trademark (in his case: ZeroMQ) is the control mechanism that defends your product against exploitation. (1) GPL as it allows to create a piece of software that has a huge number of owners and hence becomes impossible to capture by anyone. And also because GPL may force an exploiter to contribute back (APGL). (2) Trademarks so that nobody can come along and offer a "ZeroMQ service" without your consent. Post Script: I love Peter's argument for choosing GPL (1), which is that it creates a huge number of owners for the software. Imagine being an infrequent ZeroMQ contributor and now AWS comes along and hosts your product. Then, essentially, they're messing with YOUR intellectual property. I think this dimension is often overlooked. I'd love to see a contributor class action lawsuit one day :D