The Conflict at the Heart of Open Source

Re:The Conflict at the Heart of Open Source by thatthatis on Wednesday May 07, 2014 @09:17AM (#7709942)

The entire logic chain of this article can be summed up as: author likes copy left, heartbleed is still a timely topic, OpenSSL was copy middle, ergo if OpenSSL had use the license style the author prefers we wouldn't have had heartbleed, ignore copious easily obtainable counter points at every link in the chain.

Some software thrives in copy left, some thrives in copy middle, some thrives in copy right. If you are an empiricist, it remains eminently unclear which license style is best suited for which kinds of projects in the long term.

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Re:The Conflict at the Heart of Open Source by bowlofpetunias on Wednesday May 07, 2014 @12:42PM (#7711165)

Anybody who qualifies BSD/MIT style licenses as "business-friendly" and juxtapositions that with "copyleft", thereby implying that copy left is anti-business is not someone advocating copy left.

Quite the contrary, the whole suggestive false premise is remarkably similar to 90's style anti-GPL FUD. Unless the the author is a card carrying communist and believes anti-business is a good thing, I would say he's not a big fan of copy left.

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Re:The Conflict at the Heart of Open Source by thatthatis on Wednesday May 07, 2014 @07:42PM (#7713218)

I read "business friendly" as having a snide tone. Large swaths of the copy left community don't like the concept of business friendliness and I often hear it in the same sentences as "leeches" or "steal."

That said, copy middle, or permissive licenses, or whatever term you want to use, is at least a little more business friendly than copy left.

I personally don't allow copy left code into my applications so I can keep my IP rights clean. I do that for long term option value, aka business reasons.

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Re:The Conflict at the Heart of Open Source by sharemywin on Wednesday May 07, 2014 @10:54AM (#7710480)

I read it more like if you use a copy right license for your project you'll have a hard time funding your project for the long haul.

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Re:The Conflict at the Heart of Open Source by ternaryoperator on Wednesday May 07, 2014 @04:36PM (#7712508)

"Some software thrives in copy left, some thrives in copy middle, some thrives in copy right."

That's the problem. There is no "copy middle."

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Re:The Conflict at the Heart of Open Source by thatthatis on Wednesday May 07, 2014 @07:27PM (#7713168)

BSD, MIT, Apache2, wtfpl

I consider all of those to be copy middle

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Re:The Conflict at the Heart of Open Source by gonzo on Saturday May 10, 2014 @05:37AM (#7724930)

All these licenses are based on copyright.

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Re:The Conflict at the Heart of Open Source by pessimizer on Wednesday May 07, 2014 @12:49PM (#7711217)

> If you are an empiricist, it remains eminently unclear which license style is best suited for which kinds of projects in the long term.

Only if you're the kind of empiricist who hasn't done a systematic survey of what they're trying to figure out, but just assumes that all options are even by default due to the Law of Averages.

That is, unless you're summarizing some study about Free and Open Source software licensing and project growth that I'm unaware of. If you are, I'd be highly interested in reading it.

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Re:The Conflict at the Heart of Open Source by thatthatis on Wednesday May 07, 2014 @07:35PM (#7713193)

The data set I'm most familiar with is web frameworks where copy middle seems to have a substantial lead:

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_web_application...

Another data set: http://www.softwarefreedom.org/resources/2013/lcs-slides-aar...

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