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My take: end-users don't care very much about the license, and even for technical users, the value of an 'open' license is overstated. I simply cannot fix bugs
by mdb31 4y ago
My take: end-users don't care very much about the license, and even for technical users, the value of an 'open' license is overstated. I simply cannot fix bugs in, say, GCC, and it would also be pretty hard for me to pay someone to do so, despite this project being pretty much the poster child (other than, of course, Linux, but that is not exactly a typical case...) for the GPL.
Corporate users want a way out of an abusive or impossible vendor relationship: source escrow can fix that as well as the GPL can (which is to say: not exactly entirely, but, close, I guess?).
Regular users want... things just to work, and someone to shout at if it doesn't. The license of the underlying source code is pretty much irrelevant for that. There are at least three levels of support/indirection prior to that making any difference.
- marcodiego 4y ago> I simply cannot fix bugs in, say, GCC, and it would also be pretty hard for me to pay someone This is like saying free speech is not important because you have nothing to say.
- mdb31 4y agoNo, it's not like that at all. My original point was that most end-users don't care about the license. Implied was that most end-users determine the state of the market, but whatever. So, here I am, 4 downvotes to my name for stating the obvious. Despite years of membership, I don't have downvote privileges, so I guess I just have to bow to the galaxy-sized minds that have this ability, and deal with the crumbs that do leave a reply, however utterly misguided?
- monocasa 4y agoThey don't care... until they do. And once you do care as a user FOSS gives you more options since you can invest either time or money to fix your problems, and the market of who you can give money to support you isn't artificially constrained by IP access.