Hacker News Reader

The only problematic licenses here are the GNU family of licenses. This is very unfortunate but there's no way around it.

Luckily there are many many useful libraries available with very liberal licenses.

View on HN

While GNU is restrictive it is an important bulwark against exactly the kind of corporate conquest that more liberal licenses have seen. Much of Amazon's unfortunate domination over cloud services couldn't exist without liberal open-source licenses...

How so? I think it's quite the opposite. The GPL allows you to run your code on a server that clients connect to without you having to give them the code to your server.

This is the only way to profit off of GPL licensed libraries.

GPLv3 was supposed to patch that hole but isn't really seeing much use. With regards to hosted services, yes GPLv2 is quite liberal and prone to abuse

Not really. The AGPL is what is supposed to counter that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com