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I've participated in the open source community for 20 years and it seems to me that many people hold an opinion out of selfish reasons. Nothing wrong per se wit

I've participated in the open source community for 20 years and it seems to me that many people hold an opinion out of selfish reasons. Nothing wrong per se with being selfish, but it bothers me that people dress this up as something else. Your attitude reminds me of the GPL vs BSD discussion. The philosophy behind Free Software is that all software should be Free (libre), hence the "viral" nature of GPL. But in the 2000s people started building companies based on open source technology, and many people started complaining about the GPL's "virality" as being a bad thing. They argued that this is not "truly free" because it demanded something in return, namely that your own work is also GPL-compatible. They argued that the BSD license is "truly free" but it didn't demand anything in return. Now, 15-20 years later, the Free Software philosophy has declined in popularity, and the use of GPL has declined greatly. Nearly everything uses some sort of BSD license. But what we also see is that lots of companies build proprietary technology based on BSD-like open source technology. These companies capture a lot of value without releasing that value back to the open source community under open source terms. And now we see an increasing number of people complaining about that. Guys... what did you expect? Then why did people complain so loudly about the GPL's virality? Looks like "freedom" and "virality" were just rationalizations behind more selfish thoughts: "I want the world to be like whatever benefits me most". Rather than true believers in certain principles due to philosophy, many merely support these principles for their own benefit. A lot of people are not being honest with themselves.

jraph 4y ago
The GPL and copyleft licenses are not about "getting in return" and selfishness. They are tools for a strategy meant to ensure end user's rights. Now, is this strategy working? Maybe. Yes for several ecosystems actually: R, QGis, WordPress, Nextcloud, XWiki… extensions are free software under GPL. De facto, or because it's a requirement. And it works, healthy businesses exist while end users enjoy the benefits of open source. There are licenses that force you to contribute your changes back to the authors, and they are considered non-free. GPL only forces you to provide the sources to your users. GitHub are the one benefiting from open source while not contributing their core business code. Who is selfish now? Let's not swap roles. GPL authors always have contributed their code. It feels bizarre to call them selfish. GitHub is not giving free space and bandwidth out of their heart. It's a business strategy. It's a call product for their Enterprise edition and also a way to control the open source community like Google controls the web using Chrome. It's convenient. Even Microsoft's competitors are tied to Microsoft products. There's no mystery why they bought GitHub and about the fact they'll keep this ecosystem closed.

jraph 4y ago

The GPL and copyleft licenses are not about "getting in return" and selfishness. They are tools for a strategy meant to ensure end user's rights. Now, is this strategy working? Maybe. Yes for several ecosystems actually: R, QGis, WordPress, Nextcloud, XWiki… extensions are free software under GPL. De facto, or because it's a requirement. And it works, healthy businesses exist while end users enjoy the benefits of open source. There are licenses that force you to contribute your changes back to the authors, and they are considered non-free. GPL only forces you to provide the sources to your users. GitHub are the one benefiting from open source while not contributing their core business code. Who is selfish now? Let's not swap roles. GPL authors always have contributed their code. It feels bizarre to call them selfish. GitHub is not giving free space and bandwidth out of their heart. It's a business strategy. It's a call product for their Enterprise edition and also a way to control the open source community like Google controls the web using Chrome. It's convenient. Even Microsoft's competitors are tied to Microsoft products. There's no mystery why they bought GitHub and about the fact they'll keep this ecosystem closed.