Hacker News Reader

I view that as a significant negative impact to OSS. I have a strong preference for liberal licenses like MIT or Apache 2.0. Infectious licenses like copy-left put restrictions on it that make it less appealing as open source. I wrote a bit on it here: https://www.influxdata.com/blog/copyleft-and-community-licen...

View on HN

While I understand your argument, I dispute that copy-left makes things inherently less appealing as open source, or that you can make any objective claim that liberal licenses ultimately result in broader utility. 1. I personally find copy-left inherently more appealing (as something to potentially contribute to) purely because of my ideological leanings. 2. While the first order calculation of use for liberally licensed software seems clearly in favor of them, it's impossible to ever know what benefits the copy-left restrictions would bring one or more orders removed from the original distribution.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com