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Comment by duskdozer | Hacker News Reader

I agree that it would be the right thing to do. Which is why you have to make the best attempt to make it the legal thing, because people looking to make money will not care about what's right. So, it makes sense to point out the disconnect when people use and promote pro-corporate licenses and then get upset when corporates follow them to the letter and provide them nothing but demands in return.

If you want a mutually beneficial community, you should contribute and distribute using a license that requires it.

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> because people looking to make money will not care about what's right

This is two-sided: making a kind of license mandatory also shrinks adoption if it is more restrictive. So, even if I acknowledge there is truth in your side of the story, there is also another at the other side, as usual.

How many people use GPL-licensed software as opposed to MIT licensed?

That is not the problem of GPL. I'd rather have high quality software with patches shared back and always being able to see the code than some popular software that eventually is used in some corporate environment without the ability see what they changed.

Regardless, who cares about "adoption?" That's not the original point of open source which was that if you're working on something and you wanted to share it, you could, without any expectation of usage, merely that it might help just one extra person out there. It's simply human ego to care about adoption and GitHub usage and stars especially have accelerated this.

> and you wanted to share it, you could, without any expectation of usage, merely that it might help just one extra person out there

Related: how do you think you can attract more people, by setting a restrictive copyleft that some people will use in their spare time or by attracting even corporations with money that will end up committing to a repo that is used in half of the world?

Note that I am talking about adoption bc thanks to adoption things just do not get rotten. If you make a piece of software and set a license that noone wants to touch, you will see it stall and die in front of your face.

Do not take me wrong, I mean, I think it is fair to contribute back, collaborating, sponsoring and so on. But it is a fact of life that if you make certain choices you make adoption more difficult with all the consequences it entails.

I do know what the original spirit of such licenses is. I was talking about real side-effects these choices have.

Why would I care about attracting more people? Not every piece of software needs a hundred contributors. As long as it works for me and maybe someone else gets use out of it, that's all that's needed in the eyes of the original spirit of the licenses. Stallman just wanted to fix his printer, not continuously work on that code for ten years.

> Not every piece of software needs a hundred contributors

I see it more as a piece of software being feasible to be maintained over time: if it is only me, it is more likely to end up dying soon, if it attracts adoption, it just gets better, more battle-tested, etc. independently of the economic factor.

> I agree that it would be the right thing to do. Which is why you have to make the best attempt to make it the legal thing

Do you believe that in an ideal world, any instance of not "doing the right thing" should be illegal?

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