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Comment by Expurple | Hacker News Reader

The article makes the point that, in practice, permissively-licenced projects see more contributions back. Copyleft projects are being rewritten as proprietary instead (with a few exceptions like Linux, which are too big to fail). The end result may be even worse for the user, if the proprietary alternative ends up being the most developed one, grows an ecosystem and a network effect, and eventually everyone is forced to use that. There's plenty of examples.

It's not about "fairness". It's about reality and survival characteristics.

As a user, I care about my freedom too. But permissively-licenced projects give me enough freedom to choose them over copyleft projects that are even slightly worse in quality

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You've been very diligent in replying to the detractors in this thread, but I have yet to see any compelling examples.

You say that there are plenty of examples of copyleft projects being overtaken by proprietary versions that then create network effects that end up being worse for the end user because the original project was copyleft. You further assert that if the original project had been permissively licensed, this wouldn't have happened.

I'm unaware of this ever happening. Can you list a few of the examples you had in mind?

> I have yet to see any compelling examples.

This thread has eventually changed my own stance on permissive licenses. Now I think that LGPL/MPL have the best survival characteristics: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44657017

> Can you list a few of the examples you had in mind?

As I think about it, I see that I wrote "plenty of examples" mechanically (pulled it out of my ass). Sorry :)

That entire argument of mine is stupid because it hinges on the ability to see alternative universes:

> if the original project had been permissively licensed, this wouldn't have happened

I could pull any unpopular GPL project as an "example" (that would be more popular with a permissive license because "trust me, bro"). But that's a bad argument.

You could even argue the other way.

Proprietary market leaders are not cash cowy enough for the next generation of CEOs, get enshittified, FOSS slowly takes over.

> The article makes the point that, in practice, permissively-licenced projects see more contributions back.

How are we measuring this? I mean, sure, MIT will get more contributions than GPL.

But the MIT code is used commercially. So you can get, say, 10x more contributions, but you're losing 100x more money. Is that a worthy tradeoff?

The idea of corporate contributions is that the company is probably making WAY more money off your code than they are spending contributing back to it. Otherwise, they probably just... wouldn't.

It's a worthy tradeoff if your goal is to have the best (free) software possible, rather than making as much money as possible

// The article makes the point that, in practice, //

The article is over 10 years old. Which is 100 years in computer-dog years. What may or may not have been true about 2015 may or may not be true about what is going on today. We cannot just uncritically take its conclusions as read.

Your comment is pointless, unless you follow up and point out what specifically has changed in these 10 years and invalidated the argument made in the article.

I don't take its conclusions uncritically. I examine them logically and I map them onto my own recent practical experience. Actually, in this thread people gave multiple good counter-examples that I haven't processed yet

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