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The huge success of GPL software proofs you quite wrong.

• calinet6 13y 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.