Hacker News Reader

Comment by kome | Hacker News Reader

you're right about MIT vs GPL confusion. people brainwashed themselves into thinking MIT is "more open", because it's more permissive, but it lets others profit off your code without contributing back.

GPL makes them share or pay to relicense, since you own the copyright. with MIT, they don’t need to ask. MIT just benefits big corps. GPL better protects the open-source spirit, and paradoxically, the ownership of your work.

View on HN

And yes, people being able to use your code for whatever they want is absolutely more open than having restrictions on how/who gets to use it.

One other model that can also work well is to dual license as GPL + commercial, so people who want to publish their work can use the GPL license but you can potentially fund the project from license sales to closed source users using the commercial licensing option. I see this a fair bit in the audio community I work within.

Why would it be unfeasible to just share the code parts that are GPL?

If you link against GPL code, your code needs to be GPL compatible. There are some IPC based workarounds, but they are too annoying and slow in most cases.

LGPL exists too.

Sure, but the thread was initially about GPL.

When I see expressions like "GPL > MIT" I understand them more as comparing license families, not specific licenses.

>And yes, people being able to use your code for whatever they want is absolutely more open than having restrictions on how/who gets to use it.

Yes, this is why people should use free not open , and GPL is more free when you report to the entire community otherwise you are in the famous case from a story where an USAian was claiming "Amerika is the land of the free, we are free to own slaves"

Yeah, basically MIT is "more open" in the short term, while GPL is more open on the long term. GPL, while restricting some freedoms right now, is actually enabling the remaining freedoms to be sustainable in the future. Very similar to how law enforcement works out with regards to a sustainable society, and how market restrictions work out to create a sustainable and diverse market.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com