All the permissively licensed code that came with my mac disagrees. This is even more true of iphone software: you can technically look at some of the code that comes with it, but you can't modify it.
All the permissively licensed code that came with my mac disagrees. This is even more true of iphone software: you can technically look at some of the code that comes with it, but you can't modify it.
This is equally true of the GPLv2. The attempt to close this loophole - Tivoisation as Stallman called it - only won him a lot of scorn from Linux land and a refusal to adopt the GPLv3!
This is a common opinion, but seems uninformed to me. The free code helped them get started. They are Goliath now, but the benefitted from not having to do the R&D earlier.
I don’t know if they could have done the R&D. I definitely imagine it would not have been as good as the product they got from using BSD.
Anyway, I believe this kind of thinking is a shallow dismissal of the value that companies receive from starting from Libre software.
It is a dismissal of the idea, that using a different licence will magically transform the whole industry.
If the code is open, the profit orientated companies don't need to do R&D from scratch. They just take the copyleft source code and make it closed, either by simply not publishing it, or if they care about whistleblowers by rewriting it. Which is easy if you have sources of something working. Even more so today with LLMs.
That is why I am a fan of permissive licences. It is a working compromise for companies who would never consider copyleft code in critical parts of their product.
That would be preferable to me.