http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License#Link...
I think it is ludicrous to require to open source an application that may be using library as is without any modifications.
In your post you say that you appreciate when people make money out of your work but you also seem to have the faith that people contribute back because forks are inconvenient.
So kudos to you for thinking that way.
In this case, honestly, antirez's opinion seems to have an internal contradiction. On the one hand, he is perfectly fine with someone taking the things he's done, forking them for their purposes, making something theoretically valuable out of it with minimal effort, and then sequestering all of the value. On the other hand, his article clearly states that what he feels is missing in the world of open source is that the people who make the systems that people rely on to build their empires don't get paid for it, and don't get any money in return to pay their time to maintain their software. As someone who made this same mistake on various occasions, this really seems like someone who has caused their own problem: giving something away for free under the least restrictive license possible, and then wondering why they are unable to hold on to any of the value from it.
To quote his article:
> In my opinion instead what the open source does not get back in a fair amount is money, not patches. The new startups movement, and the low costs of operations of many large IT companies, are based on the existence of so much open source code working well. Businesses should try to share a small fraction of the money they earn with the people that wrote the open source software that is a key factor for their success, and I think that a sane way to redistribute part of the money is by hiring those people to just write open source software (like VMware did with me), or to provide donations.
^ antirez: If you really believe this, why not encode it into your license? You could easily say "if you want to use this for a project larger than X or making more than Y, you have to be willing to hire me in a support capacity". Alternatively, why not use one of the existing "tried and trusted" open source business models, such as "redis is awesome, but it is under a restrictively-free license; if you wish to use it for a purely selfish and commercial purpose, you thereby must contact me to get a special re-licensing of this program for your purposes, the royalties from which can be used to pay costs associated with redis, hire people (including myself) to work on redis, and generally can compensate the community for the success that using our product will bring you". Yes: the (A)GPL is the common license used to cause that to happen.
This is exactly how Redhat operates.
But there's obviously a difference between making money (re-branding) and then attempting to re-license (or break the existing one, assuming GPL, by not contributing back).
It may be ludicrous, but then again, isn't it ludicrous to base a closed source program on open source code, make money of the work of others and NOT contribute back?
If it's my library you do as I say or you don't use it. If you don't like the license, you are free to write your own library.
The GPL is about giving freedom to the users.
> If it's my library you do as I say or you don't use it.
That sounds more like giving control to the developers than giving freedom to the users.
The only freedom GPL denies the developer is the freedom to take freedoms away from their users.
Working for companies it is a rare occasion that we would open source a project, consequently most of the time we cannot use GPL libraries. On the other hand Apache, BSD and similarly licensed libraries are the safe option.
So for me it would be ludicrous to prevent others from benefiting from my OS libraries.
Unless your company is shipping binaries to third parties, I don't think there is a need to open-source your applications.
(Note: if your system could exist without that GPL library, as you could easily reimplement it yourself or use an alternative, then the idea from GPL is "ok, then you go ahead and do that, and we'll keep improving our library, at least knowing that you didn't benefit from it".)
In essence, by having put a library out under BSD, you are simply doing free work for others who are able to take what you did and contribute nothing back; in comparison, using GPL, the people who would have contributed back are not affected, and the people who don't have to look elsewhere: it is a restriction that provides a direct benefit.