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Comment by blackhole | Hacker News Reader

You know, if I make something open-source, it's because I want people to use it. I refuse to use copyleft licenses because all they manage to do in practice is ensure no commercial venture will ever use your code. If I didn't want a commercial entity using my code, I wouldn't make it open-source.

The GPL was created to help free software, which is more about freedom of speech, not open-source. It should be used only when your code is intended as a contribution to the free software movement, not when it is intended to simply be open-source.

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> You know, if I make something open-source, it's because I want people to use it. I refuse to use copyleft licenses because all they manage to do in practice is ensure no commercial venture will ever use your code.

Because no commercial venture uses Linux or BusyBox.

> The GPL was created to help free software, which is more about freedom of speech, not open-source.

FSF is actually more about making sure that as much software as possible is "open source" than about freedom of speech. Maybe you confused them with EFF.

... I've got to be honest. It wasn't until you pointed it out that I noticed the difference.

I thought they were two heads of the same hydra.

Indeed. Part of this for me is vanity in a sense, I'd love it if Microsoft used my code. (Although they never will, but hey, I can dream.) But also, I like permissive licenses because it means I worry less and anyone who uses my code can worry less about it.

right, like for example Git. No one has built any commercial ventures around Git that I know of.

I can't tell if my sarcastometer is out of calibration but... GitHub?

yes I was being very sarcastic

They don't use git. They have a custom ruby based git implementation.

Are you referencing Grit? https://github.com/mojombo/grit

Are those commercial ventures linking their code with the Git binary? Or are they just building tools which wrap the command-line Git tool?

I'm inclined to think that most (if not all) commercial offerings are going to use the second option, because there won't be much difference to the end-user and it means the company won't have to open-source their code. If Git was permissively-licensed, perhaps those companies would choose to link with the binary (or incorporate the code directly into their products) and contribute patches and bug-fixes back to the project.

perhaps, I think it's some what of a myth that one can't make money from free software. Sure one can't erect flimsy toll booths and extract rents but as I look around I see lots of companies, .eg. IBM profiting quite nicely from free software.

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