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Author tried it and didn't work. He presumes small businesses don't care about the potential risks associated with LGPL, and those were the majority of his most

Author tried it and didn't work. He presumes small businesses don't care about the potential risks associated with LGPL, and those were the majority of his most promising market.

sokoloff 3y ago
The risk profile to a SaaS company from LGPL and AGPL licensed code are night and day. Even GPL is pretty low risk for a hosting company, but LGPL's risk is strictly lower.
tormeh 3y ago
And those small businesses were right. All the Apache/MIT-licensed software baffles me when LGPL for libraries and AGPL for applications seem clearly superior for promoting collaboration.
- immibis 3y ago
  Big businesses convinced software developers they have the world's best intentions at heart, or at least, they are harmless and never need to be opposed.
KingMob 3y ago
The LGPL, which the author tried, is not the AGPL, which might have been a larger roadblock to the freeriding unicorn.
- jonhohle 3y ago
  Any company big enough to have a legal department will tell their devs to say away from LGPL, GPLv3, etc. If a dev is using that as promo for their commercial offering, it will probably just be ignored.
  - sokoloff 3y ago
    My company is big enough to have a legal department. (I'm the tech counterpart/coordinator with legal for open-source topics, whether its us open-sourcing code we work on, contributing to existing open-source, or consuming open-source.) We license under Apachev2, and we readily use LGPL & GPL v2/v3 with a quick review, and have very specific and much more thorough review processes for AGPL. I'm quite sure that I don't work for the only such company.
jokethrowaway 3y ago
It's definitely a matter of target market. He made a small business and he's targeting small companies who are probably still running a cracked version of photoshop CS6. Big companies have rules about which OSS licences they can use and enforce them on their developers. Developers in general will just skip it and pick an alternative they can use without problems from legal and possibly without paying. So even with the license in place, I don't think it would ever magically attract big clients. I think the author needs something a bit more unique or way better sales to get larger businesses. They are all likely on Amazon SES or SendGrid.

Author tried it and didn't work. He presumes small businesses don't care about the potential risks associated with LGPL, and those were the majority of his most promising market.

sokoloff 3y ago

The risk profile to a SaaS company from LGPL and AGPL licensed code are night and day. Even GPL is pretty low risk for a hosting company, but LGPL's risk is strictly lower.

tormeh 3y ago

And those small businesses were right. All the Apache/MIT-licensed software baffles me when LGPL for libraries and AGPL for applications seem clearly superior for promoting collaboration.

immibis 3y ago
Big businesses convinced software developers they have the world's best intentions at heart, or at least, they are harmless and never need to be opposed.

KingMob 3y ago

The LGPL, which the author tried, is not the AGPL, which might have been a larger roadblock to the freeriding unicorn.

jonhohle 3y ago
Any company big enough to have a legal department will tell their devs to say away from LGPL, GPLv3, etc. If a dev is using that as promo for their commercial offering, it will probably just be ignored.
- sokoloff 3y ago
  My company is big enough to have a legal department. (I'm the tech counterpart/coordinator with legal for open-source topics, whether its us open-sourcing code we work on, contributing to existing open-source, or consuming open-source.) We license under Apachev2, and we readily use LGPL & GPL v2/v3 with a quick review, and have very specific and much more thorough review processes for AGPL. I'm quite sure that I don't work for the only such company.

jokethrowaway 3y ago

It's definitely a matter of target market. He made a small business and he's targeting small companies who are probably still running a cracked version of photoshop CS6. Big companies have rules about which OSS licences they can use and enforce them on their developers. Developers in general will just skip it and pick an alternative they can use without problems from legal and possibly without paying. So even with the license in place, I don't think it would ever magically attract big clients. I think the author needs something a bit more unique or way better sales to get larger businesses. They are all likely on Amazon SES or SendGrid.