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Proprietary forks are an illusion. The value of the project is in its developers, to take the code, close it, and develop it getting external developers, good i
by antirez 17y ago
Proprietary forks are an illusion. The value of the project is in its developers, to take the code, close it, and develop it getting external developers, good ideas, and so forth, is a massive amount of work. This is why you can think of tons of BSD-ish very successful projects not forked.
Instead the real risk is that GPL is not free enough.
- rbanffy 17y agoA proprietary fork can diverge very little, still grabbing the improvements of the original project. The reason you don't hear about them is because the vendors of such software have no incentive (and mostly no need) to say their product is mostly something they got for free. I suspect they are more common than we know. In essence, the only freedom GPL forces you to give up is the freedom to turn a free product into a proprietary one.
- davidw 17y ago> Proprietary forks are an illusion. The most famous counter example is SunOS, which was directly based on the Berkeley code. Of course, times are different now - the internet has changed a lot of things.
- rbanffy 17y agoAnd most of what's left of SunOS is GPLv3.