It's their right. I really can't understand why people find this bad in any way.
If they don't want to contribute, but they are capable of improving the code and making tons of money, great for them.
Developer doesn't really lose anything.
If they don't want to contribute, but they are capable of improving the code and making tons of money, great for them.
Developer doesn't really lose anything.
I make my code BSD. A company eagerly writes some proprietary improvements, and then goes bankrupt. Its code is a dead end.
Scenario B:
I make my code GPL. A company grudgingly writes some GPLed improvements, and then goes bankrupt. The community benefits from their improvements.
Let me contrive a hypothetical, if it's still not clear to you...
Imagine you're a ruthless corporation and you don't care at all about the open source community. There is an open source software package that solves 95% of a problem for you.
If it's BSD, you will probably take it, write that 5%, use it, and not contribute anything back.
If it's GPL, you will probably take it, write that 5%, use it, and then grudgingly release that 5% back to the community so you don't get sued.
Note that I'm not saying GPL is always the best option and BSD is always worse. I'm just pointing out that, in your previous post, you miss out on one of the advantages of the GPL: it can encourage the release of open source code that otherwise would not have happened.
You're presenting a bit of a false dichotomy. If a company that's adamant against open-sourcing their work can't use a GPL solution, they're not going to shrug their shoulders, use it anyway, and then release their changes. They're going to spend more money on an in-house solution because they have complete control over it and know it won't bite them in the ass in the future.
Yes, that's why I said "probably", not "definitely". It's misleading to ignore both possibilities and pretend that only one will ever happen. That's why I made my original post.
> You're presenting a bit of a false dichotomy.
Only if you misread my post.
> If a company that's adamant against open-sourcing their work can't use a GPL solution, they're not going to shrug their shoulders, use it anyway, and then release their changes.
If they're "adamant against open-sourcing their work", then by definition they will never open source anything. So? That's not the type of corporation I was talking about in my post.
Then why did you ignore the third possibility?
> Only if you misread my post.
No, that's pretty much the definition of a false dichotomy. You only provided two scenarios when there exist more.
> That's not the type of corporation I was talking about in my post.
Then what did you mean by:
> Imagine you're a ruthless corporation and you don't care at all about the open source community.
I didn't. I was contriving a hypothetical to illustrate how the GPL can produce a positive result in some cases that BSD-like licenses cannot. That's why I started my post with "Let me contrive a hypothetical".
I even explicitly pointed this out at the end of my post by saying, "Note that I'm not saying GPL is always the best option and BSD is always worse. I'm just pointing out that, in your previous post, you miss out on one of the advantages of the GPL: it can encourage the release of open source code that otherwise would not have happened."
I did this because I knew that otherwise someone would misinterpret my post as saying the GPL is universally perfect in all situations, or that the situation I described in my contrived hypothetical was the only possible situation that could ever occur. I'm not sure how I could have made that more clear.
> > That's not the type of corporation I was talking about in my post.
> Then what did you mean by:
> > Imagine you're a ruthless corporation and you don't care at all about the open source community.
A ruthless corporation that doesn't care about the open source community (which I think describes most corporations, FWIW) is very different than "a company that's adamant against open-sourcing". The former will contribute open source code when it is in their economic best interest, but they won't go out of their way to play nice with the open source folks. The latter will sacrifice their economic interests just to stick to their ideology.
Not here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3561964 This is the post I originally responded to, so this is the post I was assuming we were talking about.
> A ruthless corporation that doesn't care about the open source community (which I think describes most corporations, FWIW) is very different than "a company that's adamant against open-sourcing". The former will contribute open source code when it is in their economic best interest, but they won't go out of their way to play nice with the open source folks. The latter will sacrifice their economic interests just to stick to their ideology.
That's fair.