A handy guide to financial support for open source

Re:A handy guide to financial support for open source by smichel17 on Monday November 27, 2017 @10:21AM (#15787957)

I'd like to bring a bit of perspective to "GPL is a nightmare [because you cannot create proprietary derivatives]." That's the point of the GPL: to ensure that the code remains open rather than, for example, killed by 'embrace, extend, extinguish'[1].

The GPL is a user-focused license. It sacrifices some freedom for developers (the ability to produce proprietary derivatives) in order to safeguard other freedoms[4] for users.

Whether that's a good trade-off is a matter of opinion, not a universal consensus as the parent comment might lead you to believe.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...

[4]: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

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Re:A handy guide to financial support for open source by zaarn on Monday November 27, 2017 @11:17AM (#15788435)

The GPL is a nightmare for Legal. Compliance can be difficult for larger corporations and as such expensive. Thusly corporations will avoid it in favor of licenses which aren't complicated. This goes doubly for the AGPL.

In addition to that and as a side note; The GPL does not protect against EEE, only against EEE through a fork of the source code. No license can do anything about EEE through standards.

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