Copyleft and community licenses are not without merit, but they are a dead end

Re:Copyleft and community licenses are not without merit, bu... by guelo on Friday December 21, 2018 @08:28PM (#18738285)

GPL was a mostly failed, idealistic attempt at creating a separate non-commercial hobbyist computing ecosystem. It's not a big surprise that corporate developers don't like non-commercial software that they're not allowed to use.

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Re:Copyleft and community licenses are not without merit, bu... by indymike on Friday December 21, 2018 @09:10PM (#18738456)

Calling GPL a failure or non-commercial is to ignore the role of GPL software in the ISP, Hosting and cloud computing industries. For those of us writing commercial software, as the article points out, the GPL makes it very hard to create a license revenue driven business. Selling licenses is not the only model, but it is a proven one.

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Re:Copyleft and community licenses are not without merit, bu... by pritambaral on Saturday December 22, 2018 @07:16PM (#18743400)

This is way off-base. The GPL neither wanted to not has been able to restrict commercial profit from the works it's been used with.

You also imply GPL prevents corporate developers from using GPL'ed software, which is patently untrue. The GPL allows any person or organisation to take software and do absolutely anything they want with it, for themselves, without any obligation.

The GPL might have come out of a non-commercial hobbyist/hacker culture, but it certainly doesn't impose either practice.

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