4 ms·

> How much you have to tell anybody about using a particular piece of software and whether you can use it for commercial purposes, that's all in the licenses. I

> How much you have to tell anybody about using a particular piece of software and whether you can use it for commercial purposes, that's all in the licenses. I don't understand the fuss and I don't understand what not exploiting OSS would look like or what not employing Zed Shaw has to do with plagiarism. I just don't get it. Many of us are illiterated in use of these licenses. Even a contributor like Zed. I could imagine a generally available rule of thumb on licensing for open source: something like dual licensing. My code is free for all peer hackers but not for big corporations. Is that something available? Ie. a variation/combination of CC or GPL or BSD or MIT?

adharmad 17y ago
How do you distinguish between hackers and corporations. A small startup, can in a couple of years of time become a large company, which can be bought by a bigger corporation. Where do you draw the line? That's the reason I think that GPL/dual licensing is the best. If it is a casual hacker, he shouldn't mind reciprocating. If it is a company, it shouldn't mind paying.
- csbartus 17y ago
  Okay, understood: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual-licensing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual-licensing. And thanks! Just one question: Is dual licensing a common pattern or many other licenses are used frequently (BSD, CC)? Just wondering if there is such a protective and still free, clear licensing why people are not using it as a de facto standard?
  - fauigerzigerk 17y ago
    Because people have different goals. "People" like IBM do not have the same interests as people like Zed Shaw. IBM made Eclipse available under a non viral license in order to combat VisualStudio (and maybe Sun). They want as many corporations as possible to build on Eclipse to take the wind out of VS's sails. They are not interested in making money from Eclipse. They are interested in limiting the influence of Microsoft on their enterprise customers. So the license is a strategic tool. Linux is kind of an accident in that regard. Linus chose a license long before the big corporations found that they had to support Linux after they had successfully crushed each others' Unix business in a decade long war of attrition. So Linux is GPL, but fortunately they found a way to interpret GPL in a way that didn't preclude closed source software on top of it. It's all in their definition of "linking". Where this ingenious trick doesn't work, in the device drivers space, the whole thing breaks down, which every Linux on Laptop user has been able to experience for many many years. A single non-cooperative device manufacturer can prevent sleep and resume, power management and many other functions to not work properly for many users. So Linux has become almost exclusively a server platform, contrary to Linus Torvalds personal desires, but in agreement with the BigCorp strategy.

adharmad 17y ago

How do you distinguish between hackers and corporations. A small startup, can in a couple of years of time become a large company, which can be bought by a bigger corporation. Where do you draw the line? That's the reason I think that GPL/dual licensing is the best. If it is a casual hacker, he shouldn't mind reciprocating. If it is a company, it shouldn't mind paying.

csbartus 17y ago
Okay, understood: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual-licensing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual-licensing. And thanks! Just one question: Is dual licensing a common pattern or many other licenses are used frequently (BSD, CC)? Just wondering if there is such a protective and still free, clear licensing why people are not using it as a de facto standard?
- fauigerzigerk 17y ago
  Because people have different goals. "People" like IBM do not have the same interests as people like Zed Shaw. IBM made Eclipse available under a non viral license in order to combat VisualStudio (and maybe Sun). They want as many corporations as possible to build on Eclipse to take the wind out of VS's sails. They are not interested in making money from Eclipse. They are interested in limiting the influence of Microsoft on their enterprise customers. So the license is a strategic tool. Linux is kind of an accident in that regard. Linus chose a license long before the big corporations found that they had to support Linux after they had successfully crushed each others' Unix business in a decade long war of attrition. So Linux is GPL, but fortunately they found a way to interpret GPL in a way that didn't preclude closed source software on top of it. It's all in their definition of "linking". Where this ingenious trick doesn't work, in the device drivers space, the whole thing breaks down, which every Linux on Laptop user has been able to experience for many many years. A single non-cooperative device manufacturer can prevent sleep and resume, power management and many other functions to not work properly for many users. So Linux has become almost exclusively a server platform, contrary to Linus Torvalds personal desires, but in agreement with the BigCorp strategy.