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Comment by Osiris | Hacker News Reader

The author chose a license. Why not dual license it for commercial use?

The author chose a BSD-style license that has no problem with use in proprietary software. It's too late to do something like a dual AGPL and commercial license (unless some amazing new features are added), as it's already in widespread commercial use.

The author could release new versions with a more restrictive license.

The license is probably a reason for its popularity.

Possibly. Switching to GPL would probably mean that chromium can no longer use it (I think they use it currently, but I'm not 100% sure). Then they could switch to an other permissively licensed jpeg library that is maintained (is there any?), roll their own (probably forking an old version), or persuade the author to consider licensing new versions permissively (hopefully with some money).

There is of course the original libjpeg, which libjpeg-turbo forked from back in the 00s, which has had its latest release in 2022.

I wonder if author has paid a red cent to the maintainers of libjpeg

Evidently you can't have both unrestricted free use, and capture all the value you've created.

But the existing version under the permissive license already exists, and everyone can keep using it or even fork it. The only way a change to a more restrictive license could work is if there were really compelling features only available in that version.

Well, the author mostly complains about lack of funding for maintaining the library, making bug fixes and adding new features. So I think that's OK?

In the end, it's not the individuals who are greedy to the extreme. Instead, it's the companies that are pathologically greedy to the point of killing off what they need to survive.

These companies could throw $10k or more at their FLOSS constituents to thank them. And more most of the companies we're talking here, is a rounding error of a rounding error. But, most don't cause there is no 'need' to.

Why build a community when you can just use people up?

An accountant once told me that you don't get paid unless you send out invoices.

Businesses aren't going to pay unless they are mandated to, because why would they otherwise?

Tragedy of the commons.

Even that won't be guaranteed to work. Bash is forever stuck on an ancient version on macOS, because Apple doesn't want to touch GPLv3 code. At some point they switched to zsh for the default shell.

That's entirely apple's fault.

Works for whom? I don't think the authors of bash care.

The really compelling feature will come along, and it'll be to take advantage of the acceleration capability of a new instruction set or CPU that doesn't exist yet. He could quite happily say "4.0 will be GPL or email-for-commercial-terms" safe in the knowledge that such an update will be needed. Unfortunately it sounds like it's about 5 years too late for him.

In this case many FOSS projects that depend on it will just not update because of license incompatibility.

LGPL is compatible even closed source. From https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html (and be sure to check the title of the page)

"using the Lesser GPL permits use of the library in proprietary programs"

so it's going to be OK even in BSD and other permissive licenses.

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