Comment by nishs | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nishs | Hacker News Reader

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> E.g. why can users of GPL stuff not just fork, just like BSD?

A GPL-licensed project can be forked. But, if you release work that uses or is derived from the GPL-licensed project, among other things:

1. you must include or make easily available the source code for your derived work.

2. roughly speaking, the license of your derived work cannot be less free than the GPL license (i.e. cannot infringe on rights granted by the original GPL license).

Releasing work derived from a BSD-licensed project does not have these requirements.

References: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License#Ter...

(edit: and on second glance, sorry, it seems like these details aren't really that relevant to the point of your questions.)

On:

"projects using licenses like the GPL… live under constant threat of having someone take over the project by producing a better version of the code and doing it faster than the original owners."

Yeah, I don't understand what the article is trying to say. Honestly the above seems like a good thing.

In other words, it's not that abandoned GPL can't be forked, it's that it's significantly less likely to be forked because the number of parties that could potentially fork it is significantly smaller.

Particularly for more niche projects, it depends not only on a party with the same use case and licensing needs as the original author stumbling across it, but also having the skill and will to take it over and judging that it's better to do that than to start from scratch. There's so many funnels there I wouldn't be surprised if for many projects only a single-digit number of people match that description.

I know the differences perfectly well. This is not a problem of me not knowing the difference. But what do the differences have to do with the point the author is trying to make?

Because it doesn't make any sense to me.

Yes, sorry, I realized this only later.

And it doesn't make sense to me either.

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