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Comment by syshum | Hacker News Reader

>>>The commentary doesn't specify, but what private sector use of OSS might be declining rapidly? Does this claim have any merit? It seems like almost all web stacks rely heavily on OSS

The trend for Open Source has been for a long time to Open Source Tools, Libraries, and other code that is used to create propriety closed source software for companies and individuals to consum

This is why you see a massive decline in GPL and other copy left licenses and a Huge increase in Apache, BSD and MIT licensed code as there are no legal issues with including Apache, BSD or MIT code into your Proprietary end user application

SaaS, and PaaS (aka Cloud) are also leading the downward use of Open Source as most of these applications are at best Freemium where the supported version of the Software is closed source paid for and they might have a "community edition" that is open (if you are lucky)

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If you are the copyright holder, you can do whatever you want with the software. You don't need to obey any license since you're the counterparty for anyone accepting the license. If your premise is correct, and open source projects have become dominated by tools, libraries, etc that support a proprietary end product, it would make more sense to me that most of those tools would be released under the GNU GPL so that the original author can incorporate it into their own proprietary software but no one else can do the same and the original author gets back any improvements contributed by outside parties.

>> If your premise is correct

There is no if, my premise is a fact

>open source projects have become dominated by tools, libraries, etc that support a proprietary end product,

One look at Github proves this to be fact

> it would make more sense to me that most of those tools would be released under the GNU GPL so that the original author can incorporate it into their own proprietary software

No infact it would not, because if they accept code contributions those would be GPL with a copyright attached to the 3rd party developer, and if they then incorporated those into their closed code base they would be in violation of GPL and the 3rd party dev could sue them, This has happened many times

Some organization attempt to get around this is CLA's but CLA's are universally frowned upon and completely kill contribution from 3rd parties as such most Open Source projects that operate with CLA's end up having very few contributors that are not being paid directly by the primary company behind the project.

CLAs are frowned upon by some, but they don't completely kill contribution from 3rd parties. I've signed plenty, and I've encountered plenty of projects that use them that continue to have a good community of outside unaffiliated contributors.

Tools might be fine as GPL, but companies don't want to touch strong copyleft with libraries and subcomponents for fear of needing to disclose the proprietary additions. And one of the larger reasons to open source something is to get external involvement and funding in the project. So you don't want to license it in a way that will disincentivize contributions. Copyleft protects you from proprietary forks, but if your building common infrastructure with peer companies across different industries this isn't a concern, instead maximizing involvement is the objective.

Where I work, our open source stuff is released under fairly liberal licenses because we want it incorporated into other companys' proprietary software. If they adopt our code and our standards that makes it easier for us to interoperate with them. Improvements tend to be upstreamed anyway, regardless of license, because it makes maintenance easier and reduces fragmentation.

If you release your tools under GPL it is less likely anyone will get paid to improve them. If you release under MIT, commercial users will try to upstream their changes so they can continue to benefit from trunk development as well as avoid the maintenance burden.

LGPL is for libraries, not GPL.

You can use GPL for a library. Just as long as you don't care that the user needs to release their code under the GPL.

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html

I'm a big fan of GPL but I don't think it's appropriate for libraries. In that page they give the example of readline, which is GPL because there are no alternatives and it is supposed to boost the GNU community. What happened is that there is at least an alternative now, the BSD-licensed libedit/editline http://thrysoee.dk/editline/

My argument about licensing with GPL is that I want all the modifications back and not blackboxed in some software a company is making money from. They can make money out of my work (anyway it's more about marketing than sw development) but at least they have contribute back the improvements. Libraries are usually a small brick in the building. If they patch a LGPL library they must contribute back the patches and I think it should end there. The author shouldn't have any claim about all the other software they're linking it to. So LGPL, not GPL.

LGPL also contains the re-linking requirement as a wrinkle. This makes a LGPL library impossible to use in mobile apps. The walled garden ecosystems are in conflict with it.

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