Some people like being nice and that's great! However, I don't think there's anything inherently wrong in authors who put their blood and sweat into the software they write and expecting some kind of concession for it. If that's not what you want to do, then that's your choice. But flippantly characterizing authors who really only want the source code to be made public as "punitive" and "especially unsavory" really rubs me the wrong way when they're basically giving away their labor for free – it's downright altruistic compared to the unsavory, punitive measures many corporate entities would rather take.

"punitive" = karma -8 QED

I never inferred other people should choose a specific license, but rather stated the fact GPL can contaminate large bodies of work completely unrelated to community projects (mostly v3 I take issue with). The state of Steam game compatibility is a demonstration of the conflicting use-cases hobbling a platforms potential.

In my opinion LGPL is better for libraries as if you modify lib source it obligates community participation, but doesn't force your entire project into public view when a linker touches the wrong GPL lib.

We can disagree, and from each perspective believe we are correct. I'll stick with Apache 2.0, as its better suited for my projects.

Enhance your calm. =)

> obligates community participation

Nothing in the GPL/LGPL requires this, only distributing sources down to your users, who may or may not then redistribute the sources back upstream to the community.

See the post on the LGPL static-linking issue for porting above, and why the wxWidget library license had to create an exception.

The project contamination happens even with the LGPL.

The subject was contaminating licenses, and why they are not appropriate in some situations. Cheers =)

> The subject was contaminating licenses

Sure, I was just pointing out a misconception in your understanding of these licenses. They only require distributing downstream to your users, not back to the upstream community.

Having various people threatening patent/legal enforcement is another issue. One may believe porting to another platform like ARM64 with a patch would be clear, but people often confuse GPL means free as in free beer... it isn't... and some get extremely aggressive/possessive over mundane issues.

I go by the lawyers consensus, not some opinion on the internet from some unknown region of the world. Note, the user-base doesn't care, they only want a program to work on their platform. Some upstream publishers on the other hand can be disrespectful at times, as some can assume the worst... it usually has nothing to do with the FOSS foundations themselves.

Thanks for your opinion though, it is good to see people still interested in community projects. Happy computing, =)

Even the people who actually do GPL enforcement are in no way punitive. They only want GPL compliance and software freedom, not money or punishment.

https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/principles.htm...

Except, there are a lot of folks here who seem to think everything should fall under GPL. Even LGPL can create distribution porting/legal problems on other platforms if static linking is needed. Hence the wxWidget license covers the issue.

Some people are way more aggressive than the foundation. QED =)

In 2023, after decades of abusive proprietary software, I believe all software should be maximally copyleft (AGPL). So I think watering down of copyleft licenses isn't a good idea.

Sometimes people choose a compromise, so others do not suffer the weight of personal idealism.

I rather people have unrestricted development options, and not feel like they entered a Faustian bargain. Its a personal choice, but I have only been coding since 1993… so probably don’t know any better. lol =)

> Except, there are a lot of folks here who seem to think everything should fall under GPL.

Except, there’s nothing forcing someone to take a GPL’d library and integrate it into their application.

If you don’t like the license don’t use the code and later whine about “punitive” actions taken against you.

At this point there’s no excuse for not knowing that the GPL is very restrictive and the code isn’t free-for-all. No excuse except maybe they think they won’t get caught by including some reverse-engineering clause in their TOS so people can’t find out. That worked out pretty well for these folks, no?

Many projects release under multiple licenses, and try to cover everyone's use-cases. So a user may be violating GPL rules, and not violating the rules at the same time. One often can't tell by simply looking at the source or .so dump alone.

My point was, I personally don't want to inflict my own idealism on people 10 years from now, that will be doing something completely unpredictable. =)