3 ms·
Can you explain?
by animal_spirits 5y ago
Can you explain?
- pvarangot 5y agoNot OP but they probably mean you don't get the competitive advantage of owning your own purpose specific codebase, but your library also doesn't have an agile community that's working on it "for free".
- teddyh 5y agoWhat you’ll have is an unmaintained insecure fork held in place by a company who doesn’t have to do any maintenance, since they, and their code, are declared “secure” by fiat.
- animal_spirits 5y agoI don't see how that's any different than where we started from? Google can't just take over an open source library and declare no one can work on it any more.
- teddyh 5y agoIf it’s MIT or otherwise permissively licensed, they absolutely can take it over by forking, putting enough work into it that it’s not worth continuing the original version, and then not releasing it openly, or with complicated entanglements. If it’s GPL or similar, the process is slower. They will probably immediately start a grand redesign which will, incidentally, not use the GPL library. In the short run, they will start a replacement implementation of the GPL library, incidentally permissively licensed. Both will take time, but usually gets there. Both of these cases are seen all the time.