Fair enough. I respect agree with your viewpoint, and you're not the one I'm calling out if that's your position. I do however think that from practical standpoint, when compared to copyleft licensing, permissive licensing is a weak solution toward the end that you are seeking.
My gripe with copyleft was that it used copyright, which I wanted to avoid participating in. Unfortunately, this means that you're making it very easy for others to take your work, obfuscate it, and receive copyright protection for their "derivative".
My goal was to remove copyright from my work, but using permissive licenses seemed to instead mean "I'll give up my copyright protection, but you can take my work and receive copyright protection and sue others".
Permissive licenses simply do not help achieve this goal as effectively as copyleft licenses do.
I use to share that view, but I'm no longer sure if this is true. Do you have evidence you could point to, or is this a instinctual opinion? I don't have evidence going the other way, but I don't think it's a clear cut truth.
I think I’m still going to use permissive licenses.
The choice is a trade-off after all. And copyleft licenses are not the holy grail either. To some extent, such code can still be used for nefarious and abusive purposes.
One thing I've found surprising and interesting over the past decade or so is the popularity of permissive licenses like BSD, MIT, and others. I would have expected the essential share-alike fairness of copyleft to resonate more. I don't know if it's down to marketing (the whole viral thing), the influence of commercial users, or if it's fundamentally what people prefer, as you do.
Most of the blog seems to be about the difference between copyleft and permissive without saying so. Even so, permissively licenced software was necessary to get the ball rolling. Copyleft may have not caught on in the same way (in products rather than used to host) but you can't separate out the engagement of the software from the licence.
Personally I agree with copyleft licenses for as long as they are just restricting distribution as defined by copyright law. This because IMO there needs to be a clear, lawful boundary for what FOSS licenses can and cannot restrict.
I care more about the choice of licence… and sadly enough, they went with a pushover/permissive one. This seems like the kind of project where copyleft is by far the better choice.
I'm a big fan of copyleft licenses, but when the objective is to push the industry toward a better standard, as opposed to a specific implementation, permissive OSS licenses make sense.
Yep. Permissive licenses (MIT et al) maximize freedom for developers. Copyleft licenses place sometimes-frustrating restrictions on developers in order to guarantee more freedom for end users. I like to compare it to laws against slavery. Yes, they impose restrictions on would-be owners, but society is freer as a result.
And when that's the goal, a more controlling license like copyleft makes a lot of sense. Especially in the case of a codebase from a failed startup that is no longer building a business around it though, a permissive license makes more sense.
Well put and understandable. I write proprietary software for embedded systems and I am thankful for people with more permissive licenses.
If I find useful copyleft code I would copy the code to a degree because I read it and cannot forget about it. I do try not to make a simple copy and in most cases it is just a tiny subset of the original, but a case could be made that it is still the same in abstract.
I do think that copyleft should have its place though, it doesn't have to be either/or. Especially in todays world where systems get more and more restrictive, it is a good license to have for some projects and ensures that ideas continue to be shared.
> It's literally designed to be forked and used in whatever way the user/developer sees fit.
That's true of open source under "permissive" licenses like MIT, BSD, Apache, and now Blue Oak. It was never true of open source under "copyleft" licenses, strong or weak. Others are free to fork and use copyleft software if they release the results likewise.
When companies choose a permissive license for maximum adoption, and then decry competitors for adopting, I haven't much sympathy, assuming they had the resources and wherewithal to make a better choice. But copyleft was also an available option, and copyleft is plenty open source.
Not trying to bait a copyleft vs permissive argument, I'm genuinely interested.
reply