Comment by flushit | Hacker News Reader

Comment by flushit | Hacker News Reader

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This is pretty sad. I believe there needs to be a critical mass. If, say, 90% of all FOSS projects were copyleft, then it would be much easier to introduce copyleft-licensed FOSS in companies, since they'd already know how to deal with it and it would not be a big deal.

Today, many companies basically ban GPL-licensed or otherwise copyleft software projects, perhaps apart from a handpicked list of exceptions, because they don't want to deal with the hassle. MIT, fine, GPL, no. And that's pretty sad. Because it means that if write a new project you need to choose between "people will use it but it won't be copyleft" and "copyleft but a sizeable part of the community won't touch it with a 10ft pole".

> Today, many companies basically ban GPL-licensed or otherwise copyleft software projects

At the same time, there are shining examples of commercially used and developed copyleft software like Linux, Blender, OBS-Studio. I doubt there exist many companies that banned really all GPL-licensed software, including Linux.

This shows that the GPL itself is not necessarily a hinderance to commercial use or development. In the end many hardware vendors accepted the GPL as a fact of doing business and opened their drivers to add them to the Linux kernel. With NVidia being the most prominent counter example.

I don't see why it's sad. As long as the code isn't forked and maintained internally as part of some proprietary piece of code, why would you care whether it's technically legal to do so or not?

It's sad because it basically gives a huge drawback to picking a copyleft license that has little to do with the actual contents of the license but mostly with market share of the license.

(I won't start discussing the merits of copyleft itself, if that's what your "why do you care?" question was aiming at.)

Yes, I was refering to the merits of copyleft itself - that's what I was getting at with my original comment as well - I view it as mostly unnecessary. I understand that you don't want to discuss that further, not trying to prolong this, just clarifying my position.

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