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Comment by mihaelm | Hacker News Reader

I think it definitely hurts adoption. No hobbyist or experimenter wants to delve into legalities head first by first having to understand the licensing terms of software, whereas permissive licenses like MIT and Apache 2.0 are easily-understood and familiar.

The solution is probably to be more selective what you're open sourcing if you're planning to build a business. And what you open source, you do it under a permissive license so people don't feel limited should they wish to play around with it.

A more restrictive license might be more apt if you don't really want to open source, but you must for regulatory reasons.

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Will hobbyists and experimenters that has no interest in understanding licenses go out of their way to locate specific licensed code, or are they more likely to just ask the AI/agent to cobble together stuff without care of any licenses?

"The solution is probably to be more selective what you're open sourcing if you're planning to build a business."

Fully agree, FOSS maintainers are - in the grand economic scheme of things - beggars high on altruism. The whole model of FOSS from the position of a non-corporate sponsored developer was already broken and with the advent of AI is now most probably broken beyond-repair. Buy-me-a-coffee with a <0.01% hit rate compared to open feature requests/gh issues on some of the more popular projects out there, all while companies like atlassian - using FOSS to run their business on for free - can charge 50k EUR for a single 1h migration call. Time is the most valuable resource one can waste, something you get to realize once all the mental gymnastics wear off(either by itself or due to less fortunate life situations)

Excuse me but as both a hobbyist and commercial software developer I say that the gpl (any version) is quite simple enough. There is no need to go all the way to bsd/mit just to get safety and clarity and freedom from encumberance.

The only people who avoid gpl and talk about mit as being the only safe option, are exactly the people no one should care about. They are the people for whom free isn't free enough, and they must steal even when it's already free.

That is not "adoption" anyone needs to care about.

right but the GPL explicitly allows commercial use, which isn't what the original comment was about ("use in production requires a fee"); i agree with the previous comment that such a license is hard to assess for a hobbyist, but the GPL is not such a license (hence yes it's simple enough)

Even though it's technically allowed, a lot of companies are afraid of it. Not GPL2 - that's used a lot, because tivoization lets them ignore the spirit of it. But they fear GPL3 and AGPL.

You can also just do a crayon license. "All rights reserved, noncommercial use allowed." Nobody's stopping you. If and when Debian wants to ship your package, ask them for proper legal advice about changing it, they have lawyers.

I'm not sure there's a lot of fear of GPLv3 out there. Linus just didn't want to adopt it for Linux.

AGPL is a different matter because companies are unsure of the boundaries between their own proprietary code and any AGPL code they're using.

Companies that make physical products are afraid of GPLv3 because of the anti-tivoization clause. Cloud companies aren't, but they're afraid of the AGPLv3, because of the anti-cloud-tivoization clause.

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