Writing software sucks. I release code with a permissive license because I want to make it suck a bit less for those who come after me. My only goal is to relieve developer pain by providing reliable chunks of code.

Maybe I'd feel differently if I made an entire service instead of small focused libraries. But that's an entirely different world.

That makes sense. I think it would suck less if less software overall were closed-source, which GPL seems to encourage in the long term.

But one person can't do much, so it at least depends on what one thinks of that.

I don't release much open source code, most of the code I work on can't be released publically.

The code I do release is probably not that useful to many and in most cases is something i've written for personal use primaraly.

I always use a permissive license for anything I release. It's usually served it's initial purpose to me and if it can be of benefit to another, then they should be able to use it in any way they want

I don't think open source developers prefer permissive licenses - I think permissive licenses are better suited to become popular.

I think permissive licenses lack any pushback against proprietary network effects, and therefore are subsumed by them. One of the goals of the GPL is to cultivate a network effect of its own, to counter that of proprietary software. It's not that permissive licenses are better suited to become popular, but that they represent support of the proprietary status quo.

The GPL does create a network effect, but in a way which ends up excluding large chunks or ecosystems from professional developers.

Back when I was just a Linux hobbyist, I loved the GPL. Then I got a job as a proprietary software developer. Now, GPL just means "stuff I can't use at work".

I would love to try and convince my boss and coworkers to implement a project in Scheme. But because the majority of the packages for most Scheme implementations are GPL'ed, it's a non-starter.

So Scheme (and lots of other pockets of FOSS) shall remain a weekends-only pipe dream :(

As soon as someone else contributes, copyleft licenses also prevent you from using your own work in anything proprietary. So if you have side project that may potentially grow into a business if it takes off then permissive makes sense.

No license is going to prevent you from using your own work.

Of course if you accepted external contributions to your code under a copyleft license then you can't use that part freely, but that's kind of the point.

> ...you can't use that part freely, but that's kind of the point

The irony is that non-copyleft project author/maintainers want to reserve the right to exploit other people's work when they "grow the project into a business", but bellyache when Amazon "exploit" their permissively-licensed work. Freedom for me -- but not for thee.

IMO extremely large businesses like Amazon cause quite a bit of harm to modern economies/societies. They reduce the diversity of alternatives, and cause a concentration of wealth.

That there is not a good standardised way to give preferential treatment to small companies does not mean it's unreasonable to want to.

"Limiting Amazon's harm" is an honorable to put it - one which I do not agree is necessarily true. My cynical view is that Amazon is rich, and can afford to pay more, so a lot of projects are miffed that Amazon is not aiming a firehose of dollars at them for using code that they granted Amazon a license to use, but "not like that".

> Of course if you accepted external contributions to your code under a copyleft license then you can't use that part freely, but that's kind of the point.

Well yes. But if you:

1. Want to accept external contributions 2. Think you might want to use the entire project (which may still be mostly your own work) in proprietary code in the future.

Then a permissive license is a lot easier than the alternatives.

Why do you think you need proprietary software to run your business?

Especially if it's a hosted web app business?

Yeah, I see a lot of ways to monetize FOSS.

Providing paid support a la Red Hat, paying for hardware/cloud space, or even paid binaries if you think your customers won't bother to build from source.

(Yes, one can build from source then distribute free binaries, but maybe those same customers won't even go to the trouble of finding them?)

Companies love unpaid labor with no strings attached. Being unable to proprietarize FOSS makes them unhappy.

It's not surprising that they invested a lot into spreading FUD around GPL and spreading the idea that weak licenses are "practical" while labeling GPL as "ideological".

I mean, of course companies don't like copyleft. It was individual developers that I found confusing.

So I can use it at my job, and justify spending my employer-paid time working on open source.

I write programs as a hobby. For most of my career, I have been teaching Math and Physics courses. The whole point of teaching is to get someone to learn something and use it as they see fit, with no constraint imposed upon them. I view the code I write the same way: if anyone finds something useful in it, I want them to be free to use it without constraint.

I write with other humans in mind, not companies.

I occasionally like to read other people's code to learn. However, in order to avoid any problems, this means that I stay away (much to my regret) from reading any GPL licensed code, no matter how interesting the project might look to me.

I admit to have been occasionally disappointed in the past when large parts of some of my work were plagiarized with no attribution (including by one commercial venture) ... but I prefer for my work to be free of barriers so that anyone interested can either learn from it or (more likely) get in touch with me with suggestions as to how to improve upon it.

Wider adoption results in a healthier ecosystem. Also, don't forget that most of FOSS developers are employed somewhere and surely they want to use FOSS at their jobs.

You can base your business model around that. Support, certificates, Trainings, etc.

Of course that is not the case for the majority of projects like curl for example.

Getting it out there. If your goal is just to ensure that a well supported open source solution exists and people can use it instead of having nothing at all or only paid proprietary garbage, a permissive license makes far more sense.

If your goal is sticking it to the man and demolishing capitalism or whatever then it's different of course.

I’ve worked several jobs in the past where using reciprocal OSS (such as GPL) was expressly forbidden. This would leave us in the position of reinventing the wheel, buying something, or using something (possibly inferior) that’s more permissive.

(I guess in many ways this is a data point to support the “OSS work becomes just a source of free labor for large tech companies” thesis up thread.)

It might be the only pragmatic choice, so I'm not condemning developers or anything, but that would make me a bit uncomfortable with the company itself.

So I take it Linux was not used at all in any shape or form?

I suspect that when GP said "using", they meant "incorporating it into your own code".

No one at any company I've heard of or been involved with cares if you simply use, i.e. run, Linux or other GPL software. That doesn't affect the licensing of your own software.

What they do care about is if you take the GPL software and incorporate it into your own product.

I guess you are right. The OP said "buying" and I suppose in the trajectory my career has taken me the concept of buying code is foreign to me.

You are ignoring the protections against "tivoization", patent trolling and passing software freedom down to the end users.

Often we are the end users. Because of permissive licensing phones, routers, iot devices have a lot of closed or otherwise locked own components that I cannot trust nor modify.

The same apply to SaaS.

Open source software is bizarrely sticking it to capitalism. RMS and his ilk developed these licenses pretty much because they wanted free shit out there with no stipulations. It's insane that anyone with skills would care enough to work on GNU instead of making 6 figures to write the same code for IBM. OSS kinda proves that humans are deep down pretty alright

> RMS and his ilk developed these licenses pretty much because they wanted free shit out there with no stipulations.

Copyleft, having to release code diffs, is a stipulation / restriction.

MIT/BSD is the one without any stipulations / restrictions:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_License

Depending on one's goals one may be better than the other.

For anyone not very familiar with copyleft, the actual goal is:

> My work on free software is motivated by an idealistic goal: spreading freedom and cooperation. I want to encourage free software to spread, replacing proprietary software that forbids cooperation, and thus make our society better. [1]

Free as in freedom for the users of the software to control, audit, and modify what runs on their hardware.

The stipulations are there to prevent people who aren't aligned with those goals from benefiting from (and working against) the work done by the community that believes in those goals.

[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/pragmatic.html

Being forced to release source code is a restriction. Some people are okay with that, and others want totally unrestricted code available.

> others want totally unrestricted code available.

It's easy to give the lie to this, because the restriction they are unhappy with is the restriction against restricting others. Anyone complaining about that is just masking a demand of "free for me, but not for thee" - definitely _not_ "totally unrestricted."

Just a small correction -- The GPL does not require you to release code diffs. The requirement is that people who receive binaries from you are entitled to receive the source to that binary upon request.

You're kind of underselling Stallman's vision. He realized early on (80s) that the users' control over the software running on their machines was intimately related to their personal freedom. Most of society has only started to notice this when rumors about apps and websites secretly accessing your microphone and camera started to spread in the late 2010s.

For Stallman, and the rest of us inspired by the copyleft movement, writing GPL software wasn't merely a way to impact the profits of capitalists. He would have been scarcely more satisfied with closed-source software written by a democratically organized cooperative and released for free. The goal was and is to ensure that users have the freedom to know what the code running on their machines is doing, and to alter its behavior if they wish.

That dream seems so distant today that people worry it may never be satisfied, but I have a more optimistic view. Someday, hardware generations will not be so rapid or represent such major improvements. That will create an opportunity for the GPL ecosystem to close the gap in functionality and provide alternatives that run on the hardware most people own. Mostly, the GNU project is always running behind on the hardware treadmill; keeping up with software functionality is easy by comparison.

What do you mean by "free shit with no stipulations"? As I see it, that would describe permissive licenses, which even allow you to build on software and sell it without giving back via source code. The GPL requires you to abide by some rules and "play fair".

IBM pays some people to write GPL code.