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Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

Um... how is "talk to us and we'll see what we can do" a problem? Isn't that exactly how proprietary licensing works for non-shrink-wrap developer tools like this. You'll get the same response if you want to buy ClearCase or a CAD tool, etc...

It's a commercial product that also happens to be available under a free license you can't use. How does the second part impact the first?

Edit: it seems the implicit context in your post is that you would use this if it were free under a permissive license, but not if it costs money or is GPL. That's not an uncommon position, but it's not something that rises to a multi-paragraph complaint on HN. You're complaining about the "GPL" instead of complaining that "the authors want to charge money", and that seems inequitable and unfair. If they were just another tool vendor, you wouldn't have posted: basically you're punishing them for releasing free software.

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I read the comment from nkoren differently and agree. With something like ClearCase or a CAD tool there is a defined licensing model. They aren't going to charge based upon each CAD file generated.

With meteor there is no knowing how the pricing will be without asking first; but nkoren's concern is that they won't know a viable business model until after significant work has gone into development. At that point if nkoren doesn't like the pricing they would have to switch to another framework.

I never got the impression that nkoren was against paying for meteor, just against taking a leap of faith on _any_ system which would require significant investment of time before finding out even a general idea of how the pricing works.

One of the main points is that Meteor supposedly seeks to build a community around their project, and that the GPL is a hindrance to this goal. Without a strong community, a tool such as this might not have much relevance in the future, relative to others which have successfully built a rich ecosystem around themselves.

There are plenty of GPL projects with robust communities though. (Albeit not in the web development space). The same kind of thing was argued c. 1998 when the "Open Source" branding movement started and all the cool projects went with permissive licenses. And it really wasn't correct. GPL projects continue to be very successful a decade and a half later. The apocalypse never came.

So I guess I'm saying that I understand that argument, but I don't buy it. Which side of the argument you land on tends to be colored mostly by your emotional feelings about the GPL (I find as I age that I'm becoming more and more a pinko commie copyleft fanboi, for example), and not really well grounded in practice.

I typically land on the side of pragmatism over idealism, and as a lifelong observer of human behavior and psychology, I would say the argument carries some weight. A project I can start using without even thinking of licensing issues, and grow to become dependent on, is one I'm much more likely to contribute towards, simply out of selfish necessity and convenience.

Sure. But that's only pragmatism in the sense of "I want what's best for me and my project". It's the kind of "pragmatism" that led Andy Rubin to demand rewriting the GPL userspace with a clearly inferior one for Android, for example.

After enough years and enough projects, I find my perspective is broader. The GPL helps more than it hurts. Efforts to explicitly avoid the GPL (not just to use permissive licenses for free software projects -- that's clearly a good thing) tend to hurt more than they help.

How does saying "If you use my code, you have to give me your code" make me want to use it, let alone join your "community"? It seems toxic and coercive to me. It's suggesting that my code is of much lower value than your code, so don't worry about it. This might be correct most of the time, but when it's not, it's a problem.

Good communities are founded on mutual respect and voluntary engagement.

OK, and on reading "toxic and coercive" I just point you back to the point before where I said that the opinion has more to do with our emotional reaction to the license and not any true practical concern. Let's just say that it doesn't seem that way at all to me (I'd tend to use words like "fair" and "sharing", which don't seem so bad) and agree to drop this.

>"If you use my code, you have to give me your code"

No, the GPL says "If you use my code, you have to let people use yours too"

An important point, it's true, but you've gone too far in the other direction. It's more like:

"If you use my code, you have to share yours under the terms I determine."

It muddies my main point about the relative value of the code in question, however.

I'm sure there's some element of not wanting to pay money in the original comment, but the commenter clearly stated that one viable option is to make the pricing explicit.

I agree (almost) completely. When the pricing is obfuscated you can't take the risk of building software without knowing how much the license is going to cost you. Where I don't agree is that you can probably talk about pricing before you start coding, while developing your business plan. Hopefully they are flexible enough to have reasonable negotiations even though your business plan is not yet fixed in stone. Ideally the negotiations would simply be them stating a fixed price and a bit of haggling. It's complicated if they want a percentage of profits. But you don't know until you ask.

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