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Comment by speeder | Hacker News Reader

I still prefer BSD and MIT style licenses.

GPL is great for making a system remain open, yes, but it also results in some commercial applications shying away from it, and it might ultimately die without proper use.

Game Developers love BSD/MIT, and they do contribute back to the BSD projects they use for several reasons.

And what matters in the end, that is reach end users, means that those end users would not have all those cool games without BSD and MIT tech available.

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I think many GPL-leaning people generally agree that BSD-style licenses are very useful for e.g. reference implementation libraries of open, royalty-free data formats. We want the open formats to succeed, so if we make it dirt simple to put support for it in commercial systems we help the proliferation of the format.

So do I.

Mostly I run away from GPL code, whatever I do I can't choose to make it available or not, I have to, I consider that a restriction of my freedom, and while I would like that everyone who makes changes or improvements to any of my code to contribute back, I think it's unfair to force them to it, because I don't want to be forced either. Most of my stuff is BSD or MIT, and for some less serious things WTFPL.

GPL has that "viral" effect that I hate, you are free to change but you have to keep it GPL, I don't know if it is possible to change GPL software into non GPL, can anyone tell me more about that?

The only way to convert from GPL to a different license is for all the copyright holders (approximately every contributor who has a single line of code in the project) to release a version with a new license. For projects with a small number of contributors this is simple, just call them up and negotiate a proprietary license. I expect that there would be better chances of success if the proposition was "money for license" instead of a plea to go to a BSD-like license. Of course the more contributors the greater the likelihood one of them will reject the offer and thereby make dual-licensing impossible.

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