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> do not contribute to open source projects. Find a copylefted project and contribute to that.

GPL software is still open source. The problem is when you contribute to a private company's MIT or Apache licensed software.

I would change that to:

'do not contribute to permissively licensed projects. Find a copylefted project and contribute to that.'

I thought the scare quotes around "open source" in my first statement were enough to convey that. But point taken, I'll adjust my messaging in the future.

I understood it that way since Stallman has criticized the term "open source" and distanced it from "free software": https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....

The tern Open Source was created to combat the GPL's perceived corporate unfriendliness.

Much of the internet makes fun of "choosing beggar" "influencers" who want to pay people with "exposure" instead of money. Permissive licenses are the reverse: they're asking others to pay you only in "exposure" instead of money. If expect to gain any return (other than some CV padding and personal satisfaction) due to contributing to permissively licensed projects you're a sucker. Permissively licensed software is charity work. It's good, useful work in many cases, but it's not going to make you money.

Give money and time to causes you support. Go contribute to the BSDs. Volunteer at your local animal shelter. But don't think that you're going to get rich from it. You'll save some puppies and help some people (and maybe some megacorps) but that's all you can expect.

If your company lets you sign the FSF legal papers. Most will not, and in the end you will not be able to contribute to GNU projects. It also needs weeks to clear the FSF paper work. About 1% of my users did it successfully.

> all you have to do is release a value-added component and all but cripple the community one

This is Traefik in a nutshell. 1.x had built in support for sharing Lets Encrypt certificates among HA nodes. Once they decided to make a company out of the project 2.x was released which axed the feature as being "too hard to implement." Yet somehow it exists just fine in Traefik Enterprise ($5,000/node).

> GPL or bust.

GPL or its stronger copyleft counterpart, AGPL, can be later closed source too, afaik, at least under two scenarios:

1. Original developer owns all copyrights (CLAs).

2. There's no other contributor but the original developer.

MPLv2 and EPLv2 resist close sourcing the already open sourced bits to the same extent as xGPL, except xGPL is intrusively more viral than these two.

Also, I read somewhere that GPL lets one impose strange restrictions:

1. A vendor distributes binary of GPLd code to "X" (among other non GPLd things), and can impose upon "X" that if "X" does share vendor's GPL code without approval, "X" would breach contract (not necessarily of GPLd code, but of other non-GPLd things).

2. A vendor "rents" / "lends" binaries to "X", in which case the vendor doesn't have to share the binary's GPLd code.

IANAL.

Edit: Clarification. Ref: https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2338/can-i-us...

1. If a vendor distributes binary of GPLd code to "X", they can impose upon "X" that if "X" does distribute vendor's GPL code without approval, "X" would breach contract.

2. A vendor can "rent" / "lend" a binary to "X", in which case the vendor wouldn't have to share the code.

I'm pretty sure neither of those are legal. https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#DoesTheGPLAllow...

Under the terms of the GPL, I believe the first is absolutely verboten, the second feels shaky.

However, if you have the rights to dual-license the code, either of those would be just fine under whatever second license you'd like to cook up.

As an example, here's ZeroTier moving from GPLv3 to BSL: https://github.com/zerotier/ZeroTierOne/commit/52a166a71#dif...

Just look at this inane spam from the netgate moderators[0]. Post at Oct 27, 2017, 12:04 AM by ivor

Obviously the company policy is "We just sell stuff, leave us alone.". That's why they "invest millions" in patches which are not yet ready for upstream.

[0] https://forum.netgate.com/topic/121969/where-is-the-pfsense-...

> GPL or bust

AGPL3, but your point stands ;-)