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Comment by 0xTJ | Hacker News Reader

I always choose permissive licenses for personal project, and I often avoid depending on other projects that aren't permissive. If I want to know that, if I need to, I can grab the code and change something. And I want others to be able to remix what I make as needed.

The more limitations added on a license, the less open it is.

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> And I want others to be able to remix what I make as needed. The more limitations added on a license, the less open it is.

It's unintuitive, but permissive licenses are not the best way to acheive this. GPL's "limitations" are designed to maintain the right and abilty to remix code for the end user. So if say Microsoft forks your library and its fork becomes more popular, they can't make it proprietary after capturing the market and effectively stop people from remixing what you made.

> So if say Microsoft forks your library and its fork becomes more popular, they can't make it proprietary after capturing the market and effectively stop people from remixing what you made.

Neither can they stop people from such remixing if the project used a permissive license. The GP's project will still be there, still freely available for anyone to use however they see fit. Nobody is stopped from using it in any way.

The GPs project will become less relevant as the Microsoft fork becomes more popular, when it is fully irrelevant due to incompatible changes they can rugpull and everyone will have to pay them.

Only for the next developer. They can do whatever they want, but they aren't obligated to contribute anything back.

I would like a relatively permissive software license which forbids any profiteering (CC-NC but then strictly software).

I'm fine with people using my code, not fine with companies profiteering off my work. If you want to use it commercially, pay for it.

If it can't be used commercially, then that's not an open-source license. If you choose to license your work that way, that's your choice, but you're not making something open-source.

Who said it can’t be used commercially? Just because they can’t profit from it doesn’t stop them using it.

From the post to which I replied: "If you want to use it commercially, pay for it.". I am replying to them talking about a license that prevent commercial use.

Ah, my mistake. It's an interesting idea for a license. "Free for non-commercial use" is an idea often used in closed source software, but not open source. If a software license like this doesn't already exist, it should, so that software developers can easily choose it.

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