what an achievement, good job! I hope you'll get handsomely paid for it, cheers
All code is implicitly dual licensed, for the right price. Only some of it explicitly so :)
A maintainer can't just re-license the whole project unless all other authors agree (or already agreed to that e.g. by accepting some contributor agreement).
Or did you mean a price high enough to just ignore the existing license?
This is a "tragedy of the commons" of sorts. If all open source projects could collaborate and choose a single license, what would it be ?
I don't think this is possible really. Even the FSF who IMO are some of the most vocal supporters of user and developer empowerment created the LGPL to solve this very problem. Some of their software (like glibc) is licensed under the more permissive LGPL instead of the GPL to foster adoption[0].
An except from [0]:
> This is why we used the Lesser GPL for the GNU C library. After all, there are plenty of other C libraries; using the GPL for ours would have driven proprietary software developers to use another—no problem for them, only for us.
It's not a dilemma at all for those that explicitly choose the GPL over MIT because they believe in Free Software (others might choose GPL for other reasons....).
Being Free and having every user of the software retain their Freedom is the literal point of the GPL. Saying "hey, your software would be used by lots more people if we make a proprietary product out of it" is undermining the entire point of the Free Software movement....
So it's more ethical if 10 people use your software and they retain their Freedom, then it is for 10 million to use it bundled in a proprietary product.
There are plenty of ways to monetise MIT like consulting, career building, training and so on - at least for smaller scale but popular projects. Plus OP can now say that a big game studio used his project and it could be a great conference talk :]
I think this is the first time I've heard an OSS maintainer say that!
I'm literally writing this comment from an airport at a country I wanted to visit and was flown into because of open source I wrote (they paid for a vacation for a conference). I'm having a hard time complaining :]
It's not like maintainer burnout isn't real and there aren't issues in open source but we also really need to fix the culture around it IMO.
Classic is offered over the web, so only the AGPL would be relevant (or well, I'm not actually sure how GPL applies to JS apps served over the web but run in browser), and anyway, it's not like MS is making money from Minecraft classic, for a lot of people they did get something out of it: a cool game.
https://www.fsf.org/news/announcing-js-labels https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap.en.html
It isn't at all clear how courts will decide the case if such a case ever comes to trial.
Of course they are, it's part of the franchise so at the very least it's an advertisement for all the other Minecraft things you can buy.
When the market works, at least. So it's actually quite possible that Microsoft is being nice and "inefficient" here.
Also, I think there are probably sufficiently small decreases in expected profit ithat many large companies would tolerate.
And even aside from that, there is the possibility of a choice between options which does not have any large-enough-to-predict-or-evaluate-its-direction impact on the bottom line, and in these cases, the decision will likely be made in accordance with how some people working there prefer.
No model is perfect. I guess I should prioritize rhetorics in the future lest someone use my honesty against me.
> Also, I think there are probably sufficiently small decreases in expected profit ithat many large companies would tolerate.
There aren't. A company that accepts decreases in profit does not become large, it fails against its more psychopathic competitors.
> And even aside from that, there is the possibility of a choice between options which does not have any large-enough-to-predict-or-evaluate-its-direction impact on the bottom line, and in these cases, the decision will likely be made in accordance with how some people working there prefer.
If a company cannot predict whether an action is profitable, it will always decide against it and instead invest its resources in something that is.
> it fails against its more psychopathic competitors
I see no reason why choosing to lose an expected value of .01 cents total, would result in failing against a competitor which does not do so. That just doesn't make sense. It isn't like there is a ranking of "what company in this field made the most profit", and then all of them other than the top 1 or 2 are immediately destroyed each month. No, a company runs out of business when it is not sufficiently profitable. Now, if something results in their products being more expensive, or something like that, in a way that significantly changes their profitability, or other things which might slightly change their per-unit profitability, then yeah, that could make them non-viable.
But, like,
have you worked in a large company? There are certainly inefficiencies in large companies which are the result of the continued choices of individual employees, even among large successful companies. This is obvious.
Companies are not able to perfectly optimize for profitability, even if they wanted to.
> It isn't like there is a ranking of "what company in this field made the most profit", and then all of them other than the top 1 or 2 are immediately destroyed each month.
The process is not that quick, but in principle, this is exactly how markets work. The most profitable companies undercut all others, which then go under. Provided markets work, that is.
Like I said well upthread, this is a cynical and wrong viewpoint. The real world doesn't operate as an efficient market, doesn't operate over infinite timescales, doesn't have ways to exactly calculate the proftabilitiy of a decision or action.
It is overly cynical, and mostly wrong, to take microeconomics 101 theory and try to apply it to a world that doesn't fit any of the microecon 101 assumptions.
On the other hand, you can make a profit-driven motive argument for practically any action a company takes if you try hard enough, even literally giving money away.
I think it is great that the default option is "hey world! Do whatever you want with this!".
Anything that promoted the free flow of information, technology, and innovation is a good thing IMO.
Absolutely. And MIT fails spectacularly on that, since it doesn't consider the behaviour of downstream dependees.
And it doesn't have to be charity either - MS could recognize a good chance to spend an insignificant (to them) amount to get good PR in an open source community they've been trying to warm up to.
That said the author of the engine has definitely achieved something here.