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One of the main points is that Meteor supposedly seeks to build a community around their project, and that the GPL is a hindrance to this goal. Without a strong

One of the main points is that Meteor supposedly seeks to build a community around their project, and that the GPL is a hindrance to this goal. Without a strong community, a tool such as this might not have much relevance in the future, relative to others which have successfully built a rich ecosystem around themselves.

ajross 15y ago
There are plenty of GPL projects with robust communities though. (Albeit not in the web development space). The same kind of thing was argued c. 1998 when the "Open Source" branding movement started and all the cool projects went with permissive licenses. And it really wasn't correct. GPL projects continue to be very successful a decade and a half later. The apocalypse never came. So I guess I'm saying that I understand that argument, but I don't buy it. Which side of the argument you land on tends to be colored mostly by your emotional feelings about the GPL (I find as I age that I'm becoming more and more a pinko commie copyleft fanboi, for example), and not really well grounded in practice.
- WiseWeasel 15y ago
  I typically land on the side of pragmatism over idealism, and as a lifelong observer of human behavior and psychology, I would say the argument carries some weight. A project I can start using without even thinking of licensing issues, and grow to become dependent on, is one I'm much more likely to contribute towards, simply out of selfish necessity and convenience.
  - ajross 15y ago
    Sure. But that's only pragmatism in the sense of "I want what's best for me and my project". It's the kind of "pragmatism" that led Andy Rubin to demand rewriting the GPL userspace with a clearly inferior one for Android, for example. After enough years and enough projects, I find my perspective is broader. The GPL helps more than it hurts. Efforts to explicitly avoid the GPL (not just to use permissive licenses for free software projects -- that's clearly a good thing) tend to hurt more than they help.
    - WiseWeasel 15y ago
      How does saying "If you use my code, you have to give me your code" make me want to use it, let alone join your "community"? It seems toxic and coercive to me. It's suggesting that my code is of much lower value than your code, so don't worry about it. This might be correct most of the time, but when it's not, it's a problem. Good communities are founded on mutual respect and voluntary engagement.
      - ajross 15y ago
        OK, and on reading "toxic and coercive" I just point you back to the point before where I said that the opinion has more to do with our emotional reaction to the license and not any true practical concern. Let's just say that it doesn't seem that way at all to me (I'd tend to use words like "fair" and "sharing", which don't seem so bad) and agree to drop this.
      - Avshalom 15y ago
        >"If you use my code, you have to give me your code" No, the GPL says "If you use my code, you have to let people use yours too"
        WiseWeasel 15y ago
        An important point, it's true, but you've gone too far in the other direction. It's more like: "If you use my code, you have to share yours under the terms I determine." It muddies my main point about the relative value of the code in question, however.

ajross 15y ago

There are plenty of GPL projects with robust communities though. (Albeit not in the web development space). The same kind of thing was argued c. 1998 when the "Open Source" branding movement started and all the cool projects went with permissive licenses. And it really wasn't correct. GPL projects continue to be very successful a decade and a half later. The apocalypse never came. So I guess I'm saying that I understand that argument, but I don't buy it. Which side of the argument you land on tends to be colored mostly by your emotional feelings about the GPL (I find as I age that I'm becoming more and more a pinko commie copyleft fanboi, for example), and not really well grounded in practice.

WiseWeasel 15y ago
I typically land on the side of pragmatism over idealism, and as a lifelong observer of human behavior and psychology, I would say the argument carries some weight. A project I can start using without even thinking of licensing issues, and grow to become dependent on, is one I'm much more likely to contribute towards, simply out of selfish necessity and convenience.
- ajross 15y ago
  Sure. But that's only pragmatism in the sense of "I want what's best for me and my project". It's the kind of "pragmatism" that led Andy Rubin to demand rewriting the GPL userspace with a clearly inferior one for Android, for example. After enough years and enough projects, I find my perspective is broader. The GPL helps more than it hurts. Efforts to explicitly avoid the GPL (not just to use permissive licenses for free software projects -- that's clearly a good thing) tend to hurt more than they help.
  - WiseWeasel 15y ago
    How does saying "If you use my code, you have to give me your code" make me want to use it, let alone join your "community"? It seems toxic and coercive to me. It's suggesting that my code is of much lower value than your code, so don't worry about it. This might be correct most of the time, but when it's not, it's a problem. Good communities are founded on mutual respect and voluntary engagement.
    - ajross 15y ago
      OK, and on reading "toxic and coercive" I just point you back to the point before where I said that the opinion has more to do with our emotional reaction to the license and not any true practical concern. Let's just say that it doesn't seem that way at all to me (I'd tend to use words like "fair" and "sharing", which don't seem so bad) and agree to drop this.
    - Avshalom 15y ago
      >"If you use my code, you have to give me your code" No, the GPL says "If you use my code, you have to let people use yours too"
      - WiseWeasel 15y ago
        An important point, it's true, but you've gone too far in the other direction. It's more like: "If you use my code, you have to share yours under the terms I determine." It muddies my main point about the relative value of the code in question, however.