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Comment by sebastian_io | Hacker News Reader

In this case it's a comparison between MIT and GPL. GPL software is more restrictive than licenses like MIT/Apache/.. and therefore not as much as present in the VFX or CG industry and that's key here. But you are absolutely right! The wording is potentially misleading and should be improved. I'll fix it

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Depends on how you look at it. GPL is more permissive in that it allows you to contribute to and benefit from evolutions of the software. While MIT doesn't permit you to reuse code that was expanded on by huge corporations.

Of course, you can frame the debate the other way around, i'm just making the point that "permissive/restrictive" means very little in this context and what matters really as a question is "do you wish huge corporations to benefit from your free-software work and expand on it to develop their own business, without EVER contributing anything back"? If yes, choose MIT and you'll probably regret it like so many open-source maintainers. Otherwise, choose (a)GPL and you probably won't regret it (at least i've never met someone so far who regretted choosing copyleft for their works, but it may exist of course).

Just for clarification, there are two projects involved here. SnowFS is the underlying open-source VCS, and Snowtrack is the commercial UI build around it.

But for your statement about licenses, there is actually not much I can say to counter your arguments. I've followed the fight between Amazon and Elastic so you have very valid points. For the moment I don't think SnowFS will face the same issues given its current scope and target audience/market

>> Just for clarification, there are two projects involved here. SnowFS is the underlying open-source VCS, and Snowtrack is the commercial UI build around it.

This discussion sounds like they were afraid to build Snowtrack on top of git.

I'm not a fan of the names of git commands and some of the other details about it, but functionally it works well and is the industry standard. To avoid it because of the GPL doesn't seem right. There are many commercial tools built of git.

You're right. Git is widely used but I wouldn't call it an industry standard (yet), especially not not for repositories that exclusively contain binary data. And the GPL works well with commercial products. On top there is libgit2 which is a fantastic alternative as well. But Git doesn't fulfill the technical requirements for Snowtrack

Git doesn't work well for binary files, in particular large binary files.

This is the reason so few VFX, graphics, and game devs use Git for anything that needs to version large binary files.

Git LFS can help, but it's not always the right solution.

"Permissive" at least is an established term of art, meaning a license which does not impose many conditions on redistribution:

https://fossa.com/blog/all-about-permissive-licenses/

Even the GNU project uses it that way:

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html

You're right that "restrictive" is an unusual term in this context. The antonym of "permissive" is usually "copyleft".

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