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With just open source someone can steal your house and lock you out. With copyleft they can still "steal" your house - but not lock you out, so you can still en
by z3t4 3y ago
With just open source someone can steal your house and lock you out. With copyleft they can still "steal" your house - but not lock you out, so you can still enjoy any improvements. Company owners hate GPL because they don't control the keys.
- bee_rider 3y agoWhat does “steal your house” mean in this context? I think you are just talking about a situation where someone forks an open source code into a private one. But the original author still has the code. If someone steals my house but I get to keep my copy… nobody has lost anything. I don’t think analogies to physical objects work all that well for software.
- z3t4 3y agoSoftware is more then just code. There are communities and ecosystems around it. When you release software you gain goodwill which is worth money to the right buyer. And all your users are good upsale and marketing targets. An unscrupulous company can take your code, win users over by marketing their fork, and if there is no copyleft they can implement extra features that only exist in their version.
- CrampusDestrus 3y agoHow exactly has Sony using FreeBSD for its consoles impacted my ability to go to FreeBSD.org and download their source?