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I have no principled objection to it, but it takes a very specific set of circumstances for it to make sense. You need enough funding to be able to work withou

I have no principled objection to it, but it takes a very specific set of circumstances for it to make sense. You need enough funding to be able to work without outside help, an opinionated enough development philosophy that the cost of integrating external contributions exceeds the value they provide, and a reason to want to give away the source code. Plenty of companies have the first two, but consider the program they are developing a competitive advantage.

dspillett 4y ago
> but it takes a very specific set of circumstances for it to make sense. > funding Not everyone is coding for a commercial entity or otherwise monetising their projects, they might just be doing it for fun and want to share, but want to keep their version properly theirs. A key reason for this can be licensing, if the licence is not a very permissive one. If you have a project that is AGPL and you later want to change to MIT, or if you do decide to go commercial, then if all the code is yours that is easy: just do it. You can't revoke the earlier licence of course, so the last GPL release is effectively dual-licensed. If you have numerous other contributors then you may have issues with relicensing their contributions. They might not care if you are going from AGPL to something more permissive (though that might*, depending on ideology) but they are more likely to if there is money involved. Moving to a more restrictive license is often easier, but might still not be 100% plain sailing.