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Comment by rty32 | Hacker News Reader

That's your definition of "useful", not mine. "political aversion"? We are talking about money and business here.

If a commercial company wants to ship a product without reinventing all the wheels, they are going to use code with permissive licenses, and skip projects with GPL license or similar in a heartbeat.

You could even argue quite the contrary -- when you make your project GPL/AGPL etc, and if it is big/impactful enough, people will inevitably create alternative projects with permissive licenses that tried to match the feature set, and it is you that is the cause of all this "waste of time". Not necessarily a good argument, but there is some truth there.

And thank god a lot of goodness actually comes out of it other than just reinventing the wheels. Apple "bought" LLVM due to gcc's copyleft license, and now we have a family new compilers based on LLVM for different languages and targets. Kudos to Apple.

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Apple literally offered the clang/LLVM copyright to the FSF to be released under the GPL. This was basically just ignored.

https://gcc.gnu.org/legacy-ml/gcc/2005-11/msg00888.html

Furthermore there were real technical problems with gcc, certainly at the time. There were good reasons to start a new compiler project.

The license was always more of a detail, rather than the main thing.

I doubt licensing is a "detail" -- various comments say it matters a lot, e.g. https://stackoverflow.com/a/14488011/3831197

> The GPLv3 was the final straw that ended Apple's interest in contributing to GCC which is the reason Apple ended it at GCC 4.2.x.

I guess GPLv2 is still GPL, but here we end up talking about copyleft licenses (GPLv3) affecting business decisions anyway.

> If a commercial company wants to ship a product without reinventing all the wheels, they are going to use code with permissive licenses, and skip projects with GPL license or similar in a heartbeat.

Did you know that there's no rule against commercializing or selling free software? The only reason that companies skip projects with copyleft licenses that's relevant in this discussion is because they intend to incorporate them into proprietary software, and this is because they are, by some deeply corporatistic scruple, incapable of conceiving of the idea of delivering free software (even if 90% of the heavy lifting in their services is done by free programs).

> You could even argue quite the contrary -- when you make your project GPL/AGPL etc, and if it is big/impactful enough, people will inevitably create alternative projects with permissive licenses that tried to match the feature set, and it is you that is the cause of all this "waste of time". Not necessarily a good argument, but there is some truth there.

Yes, it's not a good argument. The truth there is that if I develop a free program or library under (L)GPL or similar then I have made that thing free. If people want to write an alternative for technical reasons, then that's neither here nor there, but if people want to write an alternative because they don't like the license, then that's their own time they are wasting, because they would have no other reason to do it other than wanting to incorporate it into nonfree software.

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