4 ms·

Yeah. It's not stealing if they use it under the terms of the license you placed your project under. I personally prefer licenses like MPL or LGPL, because it

Yeah. It's not stealing if they use it under the terms of the license you placed your project under. I personally prefer licenses like MPL or LGPL, because it aligns with my own views of open source. If you're going to change and/or improve my project, I want those changes available to the community. If you just use my project as-in, I don't really care. I mean, if you turn my shower-thought open source project into the next multi-million dollar service, ya know, a kickback would be nice, but I'm not expecting that in any way. And either way, if a company were to put money into one of my projects, I would personally consider myself to have an obligation to listen to them. That turns the project from a thing I did to relax into a potential chore, and I may not really want that.

pabs3 5y ago
MPL and LGPL don't make the changes available to the community, only to downstream users. Those users won't necessarily share the changes back upstream. There aren't any open source licenses with this feature, and it is arguable that such a feature wouldn't be open source, because someone on a desert island (or a dissident) can't reasonably comply with them.
- Teknoman117 5y ago
  Right, but nothing prevents you from closing the loop. If I (project developer) purchase a copy of their application or convince another customer to help, I can then request their changes and either merge it or cherry-pick parts of it into upstream if I wanted to. None of the licenses require work on the part of downstream to collaborate with upstream, only that a user of downstream can get the changes made to components the license applies to.
  - pabs3 5y ago
    Correct, but it isn't always possible to do that; it might be too expensive, the company might be picky about its customers, existing customers might be unwilling to share the competitive advantage they paid for, the company might have a grsec style "we don't give updates if you share the code" setup, etc.

pabs3 5y ago

MPL and LGPL don't make the changes available to the community, only to downstream users. Those users won't necessarily share the changes back upstream. There aren't any open source licenses with this feature, and it is arguable that such a feature wouldn't be open source, because someone on a desert island (or a dissident) can't reasonably comply with them.

Teknoman117 5y ago
Right, but nothing prevents you from closing the loop. If I (project developer) purchase a copy of their application or convince another customer to help, I can then request their changes and either merge it or cherry-pick parts of it into upstream if I wanted to. None of the licenses require work on the part of downstream to collaborate with upstream, only that a user of downstream can get the changes made to components the license applies to.
- pabs3 5y ago
  Correct, but it isn't always possible to do that; it might be too expensive, the company might be picky about its customers, existing customers might be unwilling to share the competitive advantage they paid for, the company might have a grsec style "we don't give updates if you share the code" setup, etc.