I ask this because I think of the recent switch of Ubuntu to the Rust recode of the GNU core utils, which use an MIT license. There are many Rust recodes of GPL software that re-license it as a pushover MIT or Apache licenses. I worry these relicensing efforts this will significantly harm the FOSS ecosystem. Is this reason to start worrying or is it not that bad?
IMO, if the FOSS world makes something public, with extensive liberties, then the only thing that should be asked in return is that people preserve these liberties, like the GPL successfully enforces. These pushover licenses preserve nothing.
You’re taking an incredibly slanted position. There is a whole world of vibrant, viable, meaningful FOSS outside copyleft licenses. Even when one philosophically and politically prefers copyleft licenses, sometimes there are cases where the humanitarian or practical argument favours permissive licensing. But there are many who simply don’t share your interpretation of the philosophy and politics.
Let’s see how this goes then revisit the question.
How does permissive licensing lead to corporate takeover? Companies can do proprietary forks of permissively licensed foss projects, but they can’t automatically take over the upstream.
A company can throw so much manpower at the project that by adding more features and marketing the proprietary fork heavily (Extend) users start moving from the free fork to the proprietary one, and when the users are gone, the devs leave also. We end up with the original project dead(Extinguish).
Permissive licensing can create what is effectively “software tivoization” (the restriction or dirty interpretation of distribution and modification rights of software by the inclusion of differently-licensed components).
The Bitwarden case is a good example of how much damage can be done to a brand with merely the perception of restrictive licensing. obviously, bitwarden has clarified the mess, but not before it was being called ‘proprietary’ by the whole oss community.
So I don’t think op is referring to direct corporate takeover, but damage caused by corporate abuse of a fork.
A little bit.
A lot of the Rust remakes are being made by morons who have no problem using weak licenses that favor corporations.
We should hold them accountable and avoid using/contributing to their projects until they switch to a free license.
GPL is the only thing standing between us and Embrace-Extend-Extinguish.
There’s a reason that “Stallman was right” is a meme in the FOSS world.
Do you think IBM wouldn’t make Red Hat completely proprietary if they had the chance? They already tried to use their customer licensing to restrict source access!
It only takes one successful proprietary product to gain mind-share and market-share and become a new de-facto standard, and then all of the original FOSS has to play catch-up and stay compatible to stay relevant.
See Jabber/XMPP for an example.
See Google Chrome too.
Do you think IBM wouldn’t make Red Hat completely proprietary if they had the chance?
Adding to this, Google would make Android fully proprietary in a heartbeat if they could, given they’re already closing down more and more portions of the AOSP and trying to lock down app development and distribution as well.
And conceivably all it would take to turn Android fully proprietary ala Windows, is to hard-fork AOSP to keep the Lineage/Graphene/etc. users happy, and then rewrite main Android as closed-source.
Although, it’s kinda ironic that Windows, a fully closed environment, is less restrictive in terms of app dev and distribution, than Android, a supposedly semi-open environment, is. Like, MS isn’t mandating signed exes or trying to fully lock Windows into the MS Store, yet, while Google is trying to mandate signed APKs and also trying to lock Android into the Play Store.
And before anyone says, ‘But SmartScreen,’ unless that option is specifically disabled, you can just run unsigned exes by clicking ‘Run anyway’ still, Android doesn’t have a ‘Run anyway’ equivalent option AFAIK.
Adding to this, Google created Android, wrote all the source code, and released it as Open Source.
By definition, Google cannot take anything here. It is only a question of what they give way in the future.
What Google wants is for people to use Google services. So they are making that less and less optional. There is no way for them to mandate this in Open Source and so they are shrinking the size of AOSP.
Online “services” are the greatest threat to software freedom. What kind of license is used has little to do with it.
Since this is a “GPL saves the world” thread, how would the GPL change anything? Android is mostly permissively licensed. But let’s assume that it is all GPL. Since we are talking about code Google wrote, nothing changes at all.
And the Linux kernel is already GPL licensed. Does that mean I can run whatever I want on my phone?
No. The threats to freedom in the Android space have literally nothing to do with permissive vs copyleft.
Although, it’s kinda ironic that Windows, a fully closed environment, is less restrictive in terms of app dev and distribution, […]
I think the reason for this is mainly historic.
Like, MS isn’t mandating signed exes or trying to fully lock Windows into the MS Store
I’m pretty sure this is changing too. Like the start menu deprioritizing the application menus vs the “app list”
See Jabber/XMPP for an example.
There was a (short) time when I could chat with my friends on google hangouts (or whatever that was called back then) and facebook messaging via my own xmpp server. It was pretty cool and somehow felt like that’s the way things should be. Like email today (even if every big player is trying to destroy that too).
Maybe in some version of the future we’ll get that back.
You’re on the fediverse where that is a possibility.
It’s not really a same thing. I can’t reach my mother or neighbor over fediverse since they don’t know nor care what that is. But they use whatsapp, facebook and other stuff which are in their own walled gardens and there’s no option to communicate to those gardens with anything I self host.
And trying to convince everyone to switch is not a battle I’m actively fighting for multiple reasons. Of course I mention signal, fediverse and everything to anyone who’s willing to listen, but those encounters are pretty rare.
The problem you are describing in this comment is a social problem, not a technological one. In the previous comment I answered, a technological problem was described, and I offered a technological solution.
I am on the fedi, I do not proselytize to anybody that’s not on the fedi, nor do I interact outside of it. I am not fighting a battle, nor do I need to change people. There’s tons of people on the fedi that I can interact with. If people like where they are, they can continue to enjoy that, and I don’t have to bother them. I call my parents using the phone.
It’s kinda-sorta social problem, but originally not the way you intend. It used to be possible to self host XMPP and chat with people regardless of the platform since both Google and Facebook (it wasn’t Meta at the time) adopted the protocol. But then they changed their policy and created the walled gardens they have now and thus it’s a social and/or political problem.
They fully followed the playbook of Embrace-Extend-Extinguish which eleijeep@piefed.social mentioned few messages up the thread and pretty much devastated XMPP out of existence. Sure, there’s still handful of users and project itself isn’t dead, but before their policy change I saw quite a lot of servers around which are now either dead or forgotten.
On a previous comment I didn’t mean to describe that as a technological problem but a problem related to big corporations embracing FOSS projects/protocols and killing them by introducing their own walled garden variant of it.
https://matrix.org/category/dma/
There is work in progress to address this compelled by EU legislation.
Do you think IBM wouldn’t make Red Hat completely proprietary if they had the chance?
No. I don’t. For quite a few reasons.
1 - Red Hat has released new software (quite a lot actually) that they wrote, as GPL since the IBM purchase (rather directly refuting your thought experiment)
2 - A huge amount of Red Hat Enterprise Linux is permissively licensed. They have the chance every day to make this proprietary. They don’t. Again, answering your question.
3 - Red Hat is one of the most profitable parts of IBM.
4 - IBM has left the Product and Engineering teams independent. Because of #3 obviously.
5 - I use facts when forming my opinions
Red Hat is the most commercially successful Open Source company and perhaps the biggest proponent and prolific author of GPL software. They founded (created on purpose) one of the most successful community Linux distributions (Fedora)—a distribution with annoying dedication to free software (eg. codecs). Many of the “leaders” and “contributors” to Fedora are Red Hat employees. Red Hat of course does not make Fedora proprietary since having it be “community” led is a core part of their strategy.
Finally, you do not have to fear a Red Hat take over. Because it already happened.
Half the software (source code) you think of as GNU sits on servers Red Hat manages and controls. This is where that software is developed (not in Savannah—which is just a mirror). I am talking about GCC, Glibc, core utils. Etc.
Do you use systemd, pipewire, Wayland, Mesa, Podman, Cockpit, or Flatpak? Where did all this software come from? From the Free Software Foundation? University students? No, these are all part of the “Linux platform” as defined by Red Hat and they have swept us all along with them as they create it. You can probably add GNOME and GTK to the list at this point.
Has Debian moved to all these technologies? Why? Because of the FSF? No. Because of Red Hat.
Personally, I am ok with it. My core distro uses A LOT of software brought to me by Red Hat and I am thankful for it. But I avoid a lot of Red Hat software like GCC, Glibc, and systemd. But the replacements I use are also mostly corporately funded (Clang, MUSL, and dinit).
That’s good point.
Another thing that is dangerous are CLAs, like Google uses for jujutsu. Technically, it is GPL, but Google demands to hold all the copyright, so it can change the license at a whim.
Also like Ente uses: https://github.com/ente-io/ente/pull/7945#issuecomment-3538457041
Yes.
Anyone who cares about user freedoms is not choosing a permissive licence.
The problem is developers only caring about themselves and other developers.
When I talk to devs I know who like FOSS, they are always focussed on their needs as a dev when it comes to licences. The real concern was, and always should be, for the software user’s freedoms.
God forbid developers earning something for their work
Developers should absolutely get paid for their work, but as @mina86@lemmy.wtf said, that is is a different issue. There are plenty of companies that employ developers of FOSS code, both copyleft and permissive licence.
uutils developers aren’t earning any more than coreutils developers. This is an orthogonal discussion.
GOOD GOD, the number of people getting downvoted in this thread the know WTF they are talking about IS INSANE.
This question is a bad question by somebody who is dw to this ecosystem, and clearly dow Want understand how the community, development, or code works.
The people in here who are pointing this out are being brigaded by other comments am have zero idea about how any of the licensing or code management works as well.
You can’t have a corporate “takeover” of something which is code-complete, and already out in the world. There is a fundamental misunderstanding over what licensing protections are designed to do as well.
Y’all need Jesus /s
Code complete is arguably a myth when talking about security. You need to update when vulnerabilities are found at minimum. Sometimes, the changing software environment changes and so the software has to start adding features again or get replaced. Rarely old features are the vulnerability, and have to be removed.
What does security have to do with open-source projects succumbing to “corporate takeover”, which isn’t even possible?
If the code is of such a restrictive license that you aren’t able to fork and re-release it with changes, then it isn’t open-source to begin with.
To your last point about removing “old features”, this is done all the time, and this is why things use semantic versioning. Nobody wants to be forced to maintain old code into perpetuity when they can just drop large portions of it, and then just release new versions with deprecated backends when needed
Sorry, I didn’t explain what I was talking about.
The problem is that in the modern software environment there’s a constant need for updating and patching, and if a proprietary fork provides those updates and a free original can’t keep up for whatever reason, the proprietary fork (that could have contributed otherwise) gains inertia until the free original dies. This is admittedly harder to pull off in a mature and well maintained free software ecosystem, but I think you’d be surprised how many important free software projects lack needed manpower. It doesn’t help that MIT practically encourages people not to publish code, compared to GPL.
People make out forking like it’s a big protection against proprietisation, and it is, but it’s not foolproof. Good forks are usually founded by community members that already understand and contribute to the code, most forks actually die quickly. The fewer contributors relative to the project’s size and complexity, the more realistic it is to either be overtaken by a more competitive proprietary fork, or for the maintainers to sell out and relicense without anybody to fork it.
Realistically, I don’t know how likely this would happen to anything decently important, but it has happened at least a few times. I remember using Paint .NET while it was still MIT licensed years back, but nobody forked it. Since we’re on Lemmy, Reddit used to use a Free software license.
There’s a few different things getting wrapped in here together, so let me break down my take:
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Licensing - if you intend to only use FOSS software, it wouldn’t matter if a corporate/proprietary version of something exists or not. If you intend to release something and make it free, you would need to include only license-compatible libraries. I don’t see why Microsoft having a proprietary version of something that is better would be a problem, because that’s not the focus of your goal of releasing something for free. Similarly if you start a company and bootstrap a product off of open libraries, you will steer towards projects that are license-compatible. Whether there is a better version is irrelevant.
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Scope of license - Your comments seem to focus on larger product-complete projects. You mentioned Paint.net as an example. So say Adobe forks GIMP, and drops a bunch of proprietary Photoshop libraries into it to make it beefier or whatever. Similar to the above, people who intend to only use FOSS software still wouldn’t adopt it.
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Death by license - there have been some cases where FOSS project maintainers get picked up by corporate sponsors and sort of “acquired”. This is on the maintainers to make that choice of course, not the community, and contributing members of that community have every right to be pissed about that. Those contributing members also have the right to immediately fork that project, and release their own as a competitive product. Redis vs Valkey, and Terraform vs OpenTofu, are examples. Some people flock away, some people don’t, but in most cases ts a guaranteed way to turn the community against you, and towards a fork of said project. Happens a lot.
I think what you’re not seeing here is that these companies buying out projects really don’t intend to put a lot of money back into them after they get their bags of money. Whether or not people continue to use the originals is less important than the forks being available and supported. If companies believe in the project, they kick in PRs to keep things rolling along because they need that particular part of their stack. I myself am a maintainer in multiple public projects, and also work with companies that contributed to dozens of different public projects because the products they make revolve around them: everything from ffmpeg, to the torch ecosystem. You find a bug you can fix, you submit a PR. That’s what keeps this ecosystem going.
Smaller scale startups to mid-sized companies contribute all the time to public projects, though it may not be apparent. Larger corporations do as well, but it’s more of legal thing than an obligation to the community. Rewriting entire batches of libraries isn’t feasible for these larger companies unless there is a monetary reward on the backend, because paying dev teams millions of dollars to rewrite something like, I don’t know, memcache doesn’t make sense unless they can sell it, and keeping an internal fork of an open project downstream is a huge mess that no engineer wants to be saddled with.
Once a public project or library is adopted, it’s very unlikely to be taken over by corporate interests, and it’s been that way for almost fifty years now (if we’re going back to Bell and Xerox Labs). Don’t see that changing anytime soon based on the above, and being in the space and seeing it all work in action. Though there are scant cases, there’s no trend of this becoming more prevalent at the moment. The biggest threat I see to this model is the dumbing down of engineers by “AI” and loss of will and independent thought to keep producing new and novel code out in the world.
I suppose you’re right that copyleft is not the primary motivator for contributions.
I’m aware that forks happen often when a takeover is attempted. There are many big success stories in FOSS. However, my point was that most FOSS software isn’t that successful. There are plenty of projects out there with very few contributors, and it is those I’m saying are easy for taking over. Perhaps they get taken over because most of the community doesn’t care, but it still happens from time to time. I originally commented because you seemed to make out that proprietisation was impossible.
I get your point that it’s incredibly unlikely for anything that matters however.
Edit: I think I misremembered an example I gave of a successful fork after an attempted takeover, but it was something Oracle.
Just based on experience in the community and professional experience, I can solidly say that your take on FOSS not being successful is just wrong, and I don’t mean that like you’re stupid or I’m shooting you down, you just wouldn’t realize how huge contributions are unless you know where to look.
Here’s a big example: look how many companies hire for engineers writing Python, Ruby, Rust, Go, Node…whatever. ALL OPEN SOURCE LANGUAGES. You bootstrap a project in any of these, and you’re already looped into the FOSS community. 100% of the companies I have personally worked with and for write everything based on FOSS software, and I can tell you hands down as a fact: never met a single person writing in any closed source IDEs or languages, because very few exist.
If you want to see where all the community stuff happens, find any project on GitHub and look at the “Issues” section for closed tickets with PRs attached. You’ll see just how many people write quick little fixes to nags or bugs, not just on their own behalf, but on behalf of the companies paying them. That’s sort of the beauty of the FOSS community in general in that if you want to build on community projects, you’ll be giving back in one form another simply because, as my last comment said, NOBODY wants to maintain a private fork. Submodules exist for a reason, and even then people don’t want to mess with that, they’d rather just commit fixes and give back. Companies are paying engineers for their time, and engineers committing PR fixes is defacto those companies putting back into the community.
To your Oracle point, I think the biggest thing there you may have been Java. That one is tricky. Java existed long before it was ever open sources by Sun Microsystems, and was available for everyone sometime in the early '00s (not bothering to look that up). Even though it was created by an engineer at Sun, it was always out there and available for use, it just wasn’t “officially” licensed as Open Source for contributions until some time. Sun still technically owned the trademarks and all of that though, and Oracle acquired them at some point, bringing the trademarks under their ownership. There wete a number of immediate forks, but I think the OpenJDK crew was further out in front and sort of won that battle. To this day I don’t know a single Java project using Oracle’s official SDK and tools for that language aside from Oracle devs, which is a pretty small community in comparison, but you’re right in that was essentially a corporate takeover of a FOSS project. How successful it was in bringing people to bear that engagement I think is up for discussion, but I’m sure the community would rightly say “Fuck, Oracle” and not engage with their tooling.
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You’re the only user catching downvotes
Check the rest of the thread 🤣
People in here don’t work in the space, and are clearly not knowledgeable about the subject. They can down it’s all they want.
I did, twice
It is concerning, yeah. I usually license my own software with MIT, but, not all of it, and I think GPL is very important for Linux.
I’m going to continue releasing my software with a license that I deem appropriate.
For things I’m building only for myself or that I have no interest in building a community around, I couldn’t give a shit what people do with it or if they contribute back. My efforts have nothing to do with them. I’m releasing it for the remote chance someone finds it useful, either commercially or personally. Partially because I’ve benefited from others doing the same thing.
I’m not anti-copyleft, but the only time I actually care to use something like the GPL is for projects that would be obviously beneficial to have community contributions. Things that require more effort than I can put in, or that needs diverse points of views.
I use permissive licenses not because I’m a pushover, but because I really don’t care what you do with it.
I use permissive licenses not because I’m a pushover, but because I really don’t care what you do with it.
The point of all of this is that you really should, no matter what it is. I’m sure there is something you would object to having been a part of; protecting your labor from contributing to that only makes sense. If you really have no problems with that, then that is simply terrifying.
The point of all of this is that you really should, no matter what it is.
That’s like saying: I have a pecan orchard, I like my trees and I don’t mind if people collect the nuts as they walk by. Oh, but the point is: you really should, those are your nuts, you pay the taxes on the land, you care for the trees, YOU should be the one to sell them, not give them away to some randos passing by.
Yeah, sure. You do you.
Headline 1: mangocats supports local drug dealers by providing free-to-use property under the guise of free pecans to hide young adults that indulge in drug use, promiscuity, and other acts on mangocats pecan orchard.
That’s the most obvious and potentially PC way that predators can overreach on someone’s generosity and turn a “awwe” thing (the free pecans) into people getting in trouble or hurt.
The worst is some legal jujitsu of your signage “free pecans” implying tacit and potentially unrestricted use and/or terms of use to the orchard. Now some asshole subsumes your free pecans into the bottom line of their criminal enterprise, and you’re the longest running connection providing a financial bedrock for their blah blah. Now you’re in Rico. Pecans to uncle without even hitting the blunt.
I don’t speak from experience. But I was a young adult, I do by the book things, and I also developed an imagination of what can and could happen.
Then I tried magic cigarettes and got paranoid and now all I do is cross my Ts because therenare real good people to become better from. And there’s the other kind too and they love slipping people up.
“Free nuts”
Of course, shit-for-neighbors can make all kinds of trouble out of anything. I was thinking more along the lines of MIT free nuts, take 'em, eat 'em, sell 'em, just don’t sue me over 'em. As opposed to GPL “free nuts,” must be consumed on the property. If you take a dump while you’re here be sure to bury it at least 3" deep along with any TP used. Bring your own privacy screening.
My labor is done. I’ve already made the product. I have nothing to protect it from. Someone copying the product deprives me of nothing.
Also, you seem to be moving into another topic of controlling how software is used which is rarely ever addressed in licenses.
There is a reason nearly every software corporation out there is allergic to GPL code, and similarly why they love MIT/BSD/Apache code. I urge you to consider why that is. Licenses do affect how software is used, that is literally the purpose of them.
There is a reason nearly every software corporation out there is allergic to GPL code, and similarly why they love MIT/BSD/Apache code. I urge you to consider why that is.
I’m well aware. Are you assuming that people using permissive licenses are somehow incapable of understanding the implication of their license choice?
Licenses do affect how software is used, that is literally the purpose of them.
You implied that I would be “contributing to something” I would object to. I’m left to fill in the gaps. Maybe be more direct in your comments.
Most Open Source software is written by corporations. The Open Source licenses are an advantage to them.
The biggest source of GPL software is probably Red Hat (IBM). They maintain most of what people think of when they think of GNU software and they wrote many of the newer GPL projects that everybody uses (like systemd).
The trend has been towards permissive licenses for a long time. The have led to more Open Source software, not less.
Look at Clang vs GCC. Clang attracts a greater diversity of corporate contribution and generates greater Open Source diversity. Zig and Rust appeared on LLVM for a reason.
What we should be worried about is the cloud. It allows big companies to outsell the little companies writing Open Source software. Neither permissive nor copyleft licenses prevent this.
One side community wants total GPL take over and one side they don’t support total GPLv3 licenced Operating system like
Also on that topic, very interesting read:
Interesting, but ultimately a roundabout justification for why the author chose a non-FOSS license for their startup Slack-clone built on ATProto.
They talk about “pro-labor licensing” but what they mean is pro- their -labor, not pro- anyone else’s -labor.
GPL is already the most pro-labor licensing since it respects the work of anyone who contributes in equal measure, and does not hold the “original” founding author in higher regard.
It’s really quite something to rail so unequivocally against the “fascistic mega-corps” and “autocratic corpostates” in your licensing justification blog post and then build your commercial product on top of Bluesky .
like the GPL successfully enforces
I’m not aware of the GPL being legally tested to where you can claim that
GPL has certainly failed time and time again, openly in the case of FFmpeg and their clones all over Eastern Europe and elsewhere. FFmpeg made a lot of noise and resorted to “public shaming” mostly because the courts weren’t working for them. And they have a very visible product… so many GPL licensed things are lurking inside proprietary products where they’ll never be seen.
It’s like putting a license on COVID to prevent it from spreading… it just doesn’t work in the real world.
The original intention of public licenses was never to prevent code from spreading in any circumstance. Rather, that’s the “innovation” of copy-left. We just wanted a way to share our code without putting the people who used it into legal hot water. We didn’t want to control or manipulate people, using our code to extort a particular behavior out of them. We just wanted to share our code. I think copy-left makes sense in certain situations but I don’t think it should be the default option of a person wanting to contribute to culture.
We didn’t want to control or manipulate people, using our code to extort a particular behavior out of them.
The FOSS community, and even the community of developers on single large FOSS projects, is large and diverse… The royal “We” doesn’t really apply at all, even in the case of Linus and the kernel - sure, he’s a clear leader, but he’s hardly in control of the larger community and their wants.
I think the current state of open source licensing is much as it should be… MIT has its place, as does GPL, and if we’re going to pretend that intellectual property is about protecting creators, then it’s the creators who should get to choose.
In the world I live in, intellectual property is a barrier to entry that’s primarily used by organizations with a lot of power (money) to prevent others from disturbing their plans of making more money. MIT seems most appropriate for individual creators to assure that that world doesn’t come crashing into their bedroom with CDOs and lawsuits. GPL is “cute” - but I think most practitioners of GPL licensing don’t have any clue how far out of their depth they are if they should ever seek actual enforcement of their self-declared license terms. That’s not to say GPL is toothless. It gives small players a tool to amplify the trouble they can make for those who would violate their license (primarily mode of violation being by use of the code so licensed.) But, other than making minor trouble for the bigger players, thus discouraging the bigger players from entangling with them, GPL isn’t going to “make” the bigger players do much of anything other than stay away.
GPL does shape the community, it has its effects, I just get tired of hearing about the specific immediate legal language of it, because that’s far from the actual effects it has.
There was a “we” that produced the first public licenses – amateur and enthusiast software developers, who previously were simply publishing things to the “public domain”. And “we” had clear goals in doing so, which we often wrote directly into our ad hoc self-written licenses. They weren’t handed down by God, there is a mortal history, and living people here were part of it.
I agree that the GPL should be viewed as a cultural artifact, not a legal one. It’s just the spirit of shareware, but without money involved.
I’m not aware of the GPL being legally tested
https://fsfe.org/activities/avm-gpl-violation/avm-gpl-violation.en.html
In context of the many failures, I don’t think this establishes anything.
Given the current world we live in I do not want anything that I create or contribute to itself contributed to an exploitative corporation’s bottom line (at best) without my consent or their assuredly begrudging reciprocation. This should not be controversial. The GPL accomplishes this. Nothing more lax or permissive does or will. You are not a cool or chill guy because you don’t care what someone does with the code you write. You are handing all of those who would sack you the keys to the castle, ushering them inside. That is not abstaining, it’s letting your opponents win. No thanks.
Your opponents. You do not get to decide who my allies and opponents are.
I agree with everything you are saying “for you”. It sounds like the GPL is the perfect choice for code that you wrote (assuming you wrote any).
But stop telling me what to think and do. Or, at least stop using the word “freedom” while you peddle your authoritarianism.
My philosophy is single. Those that wrote the code should get to choose the license. Many people prefer the collaboration that permissive licences allow. I do not oppose that.
without my consent or their assuredly begrudging reciprocation. This should not be controversial. The GPL accomplishes this
In legal theory. In corporate practice, MIT and similar “pushover” licensed software, especially FOSS libraries, is more readily adopted by corporate users - and through this adoption it is exercised, tested, bug reported - sometimes the corporate trolls even crawl out from under their rocks and publish bug fixes and extensions for it. By comparison, GPT stuff is radioactive, therefore less used.
Then we can talk about how successful you are likely to be in enforcing GPT on any large entity, particularly those in foreign countries.
If it’s radioactive, that’s because of a fundamental assumptive imbalance in the contract between the author, the community, the users, the stakeholders, and the parasitic lawyers and their overlords.
If they don’t like it, pay/license and/or contribute.
In the corporate world, they have a lot to lose. So, they have lawyers - expensive lawyers - who, in theory, protect them from expensive lawsuits. One of the easiest ways to stay out of lawsuits over GPL and friends is to not use GPL software, so… that’s why it’s radioactive. Just having the parasitic lawyers review possible exposure is hellishly expensive, better to re-develop in-house than pay lawyers or even begin to think about the implications of entering into an agreement with a bunch of radical FOSS types.
It sucks, but it’s also how it is. Some corporations (like Intel) do heavily support and contribute to FOSS, when they feel like it.
Yeah this happens when the wrong kind of professional reviews exposure, which happens a lot.
Lawyers reviewing the licence terms will absolutely flag stuff that’s realistically a non-issue.
People that do threat risk assessment, (insurance type of thing) can view FOSS and other open standards as a reduction in risk across the board, and when these kind of professionals are tendering the creation of systems they specify open APIs and access to stuff. (At least in the projects that I’ve worked on, security systems in Toronto.)
This isn’t a hard rule, kinda a spectrum.
The whole legal/courts system is pretty dysfunctional at the low end of the economic spectrum (like: license fees that a group of 10s of developers might charge…) We have a shared well with our neighbor, put there by the previous owner of both properties. When he tried to sell to a previous potential buyer, they tried to hammer out a legal agreement around the shared well, and it just wasn’t feasible. The cost of anything approaching a legal agreement about sharing maintenance of the well cost more than putting in two new wells.
