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Comment by Narann | Hacker News Reader

TL;DR: Nintendo use a MIT licensed code.

The newsworthy thing here is the developer is happy his code is being used freely and not threatening to stop development unless he gets paid money by a corporation using his free and open source software.

Obviously if you license your code without any strings attached, you can't exactly demand payment or anything. Rather this should be a cautionary tale that MIT/BSD in the hope of other people using your code is dumb and the industry really needs to double down on GPL if we are to ever expect megacorps to be good faith players in the community.

Except the author doesn't see it as a bad thing that Nintendo uses his code.

I would rather my code gets used and better the software ecosystem than I get paid for it. To that end, GPL is only behind proprietary in things that I wouldn't use.

I think there are loosely 2 groups of people who use liberal licenses: First, people who use it as a "sane default"; these people are sometimes unhappy when it gets used commercially. The second group is the people who explicitly and intentionally licensed it to allow the widest possible use; these folks are often if not always thrilled to see uptake even if there's no direct money involved.

The difference is whether you're developing for charity or for money. MIT license is charity.

Why do megacorps need charity? Additionally GPL doesn't have any financial interest, just a demand that contributions are upstreamed.

"MIT/BSD in the hope of other people using your code is dumb"

But they did use the code. So MIT/BSD work?

GPL has obviously utterly failed to solve this problem. "Doubling down" on it will only serve to further isolate any code which adopts it. There will always be people out there who will be happy to license their code freely, and those people will be the ones whose code gets used widely. Highly restrictive and viral licenses like GPL only serve to stifle the code which it encompasses and ensure it almost never gets used as people continue to excise its poison from their codebases.

The Linux kernel is fine. It's probably even better thanks to the GPL.

A big chunk of WebKit is LGPL and Blink too as a consequence. They might be successful thanks to that too.

Honestly, I don't find your obvious so obvious.

Releasing under a permissive license, then being unhappy about someone using your work—that would be news. Normally this is the desired outcome, and happens all the time (curl is used by a dozen of automobile manufacturers in millions of cars, for example[0]).

What tends to be ignored is attribution, respect to Nintendo for having good internal processes in this regard. If there is any news here, it’s that.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18406694

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