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You open yourself up to many, many more contributions, because you open it to a much larger audience. Think of it this way: with the GPL you have 10 individual

You open yourself up to many, many more contributions, because you open it to a much larger audience. Think of it this way: with the GPL you have 10 individuals and 3 open-source projects that might use your code. They have to contribute all their work back. Great. With MIT/BSD, you have 10 individuals and 3 open-source projects; plus 1000 more individuals, and 500 companies, plus 50 city governments and 16 universities. Of those, let's assume that 25% are benevolent and would consider contributing back (extremely conservative if you ask me) and of those, let's say 60% actually do. So you get 15% of your contributions back, or 236 people who will contribute, which is 18 times more than the alternative. Yeah I made up the numbers, but even if you only reach a slightly higher audience—the people who would have used your software when it was GPL'd are probably still going to contribute back, so you've likely not changed your overall contribution rate, only increased it, and the only thing you'll have to deal with is some obscure emotional sense that "someone might be using my code and not contributing back", which is an absolutely useless idealism that doesn't produce code, fix bugs, or make your project more popular. As in social contexts, having expectations of people you deal with only serves as a barrier-to-entry, and doesn't actually change the outcome. It turns our people will contribute back even if you don't force them to. And it turns out that sometimes, being selfish is a good thing. It ain't black and white, and you can swim in the grey area without melting or becoming a bad person. Somewhere in the middle, it works really well, and that's what MIT/BSD captures, in my humble opinion.

fafner 14y ago
The huge success of GPL software proofs you quite wrong.
- calinet6 14y ago
  It's currently the most popular license, and it had a head start in popularity I think. But the tides are changing, as the original article studies. I think open source as a concept is successful. Open source encourages community development, giving back to the community, creating things for fun, working on interesting projects, and making things people can use for free. These are all good things that lead to successful projects. My argument is not that the GPL is unsuccessful—that would be absurd. I'm saying, for a given market, would a project me more successful with a more permissive licence, and thus a broader audience, regardless of whether the majority of users contribute changes back? It's a complex question and it might vary quite a bit depending on a lot of factors. In my example, you have a largely company-dominated market with few users interested individually. The Rails ecosystem is very similar to this: lots of companies use rails, and the GPL would change that market enormously, in my opinion for the worse. In fact, I'd venture to say that the rise of Ruby and Rails have accelerated our current software boom more than any other projects, if only for setting an example of how open-source and corporate worlds can coexist and reinforce each-other positively. This specific result was almost entirely due to the choice of the MIT license. In that sense, you could say that the huge success of MIT-licensed software (in many other measures, such as the extremely fast rate that the community grew, the rate of software improvement, the use of the software to create real economic value, and the driving of the growth of the software economy) proves you wrong, also.

fafner 14y ago

The huge success of GPL software proofs you quite wrong.

calinet6 14y ago
It's currently the most popular license, and it had a head start in popularity I think. But the tides are changing, as the original article studies. I think open source as a concept is successful. Open source encourages community development, giving back to the community, creating things for fun, working on interesting projects, and making things people can use for free. These are all good things that lead to successful projects. My argument is not that the GPL is unsuccessful—that would be absurd. I'm saying, for a given market, would a project me more successful with a more permissive licence, and thus a broader audience, regardless of whether the majority of users contribute changes back? It's a complex question and it might vary quite a bit depending on a lot of factors. In my example, you have a largely company-dominated market with few users interested individually. The Rails ecosystem is very similar to this: lots of companies use rails, and the GPL would change that market enormously, in my opinion for the worse. In fact, I'd venture to say that the rise of Ruby and Rails have accelerated our current software boom more than any other projects, if only for setting an example of how open-source and corporate worlds can coexist and reinforce each-other positively. This specific result was almost entirely due to the choice of the MIT license. In that sense, you could say that the huge success of MIT-licensed software (in many other measures, such as the extremely fast rate that the community grew, the rate of software improvement, the use of the software to create real economic value, and the driving of the growth of the software economy) proves you wrong, also.