Re:GitHub Sponsors
by throwaway_7718 on Thursday May 23, 2019 @07:37AM
(#19990719)
Say a sponsored developer Bob has some software, that another person, Alice forks. The fork becomes wildly more successful than the original for some reason, and Bob loses many sponsors in the course of time. Would a situation like this force developers to use restrictive licenses?
(I get that Bob can just integrate Alice's fork into his original - assume that it's too much work for Bob to do so)
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Won't a restrictive license mean fewer users, and thus fewer sponsors?
This... doesn't make much sense. An open-source license (one that is actually recognized as such by OSI[0]), means that anyone can fork the code and contribute to it at the very minimum. The only way to stop this would be to use a non open source license (or none at all, making it effectively source-available), but nobody would want to donate to someone making only source-available or closed-source projects.
The reality is that people would just have to choose, unfortunately.