Why the GPL is great for business | Hacker News Reader

Why the GPL is great for business

socallinuxexpo.org

44 pointspabs311 comments

Is it only the announce of a talk or am I missing something?

Yes, it seems just a talk announce. Here is an explanation of GPL3: https://fossa.com/blog/open-source-software-licenses-101-gpl....

The GPL is awesome for sure, and yes it’s great for business too. I see it as highly synergistic with proprietary software. They each have complementary strengths and weaknesses.

In the company I work for the GPL is classified as high risk by legal. MIT and BSD style licenses are preferred because they don't have the viral effect that the GPL has.

Yes, but that’s for dependencies, not for using the software. E.g. not developing a proprietary compiler on top of GCC but should be no problem running MongoDB as a user. The use-case in the talk is the latter one, where users don’t fall under the viral provisions, only competitors do.

GPL is user centric license.

> GPL is user centric license.

GPL (and other share-and-share-alike licences) gives freedom to the software.

BSD (and other attribution or public domain licences) gives freedom to the developer.

Both give similar freedom to the users. In fact, they establish no restrictions on users or usage.

With GPL the user is entitled to access the source code of the software and any modifications which allows them to hire another developer if they aren't satisfied.

With BSD (and other attribution licenses) it depends on the developer's goodwill whether the user can get the source code or not.

GPL allows nearly frictionless transition

> With GPL the user is entitled to access the source code of the software and any modifications which allows them to hire another developer if they aren't satisfied.

Absolutely, which is why I used the term of 'giving freedom to the code' - in perpetuity.

> With BSD (and other attribution licenses) it depends on the developer's goodwill whether the user can get the source code or not.

Concur, which again, is why I used the term of 'giving freedom to the developer' - to do with the code what she/he wants.

A use case which usually people do not think about: the GNU GPL does work for many defence contracts... yep it works with strong secrecy.

The end-user being the defence, any modifications done on top of GPL open source software have to be provided to the user... namely the defence, the only end-user.

It's also heavily used in banks, many of their internal systems are built with/on GPL software and that's fine because the only user is themselves.

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