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Comment by conformal | Hacker News Reader

this is a reminder that prizes or cash for breaking crypto products is a silly PR stunt. mega did the same thing, ended up paying out some money, then their product is "secure" by the same sort of argument. same deal with cryptocat and several other cryptoturds.

i do find it amusing to hear moxie ranting about how much better textsecure is when the license on it is such shit. can't argue with the fact that it's open source, but there is no point in contributing the codebase due to the licensing.

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The license on the TextSecure app is GPLv3. What would you like to do with TextSecure that this license prohibits?

Integrate it and distribute it with non-open-source software. So, any commercial use whatsoever.

You want to use other peoples software, modify then and distribute it. Afterward, you then want to sue users who dare to modify or share your version?

How can anyone except authors to accommodate this, when the license choice explicit states the opposite?

You can absolutely integrate it and distribute it with non-open-source software. Look at all the GPL stuff in android, for example.

I understand the down votes, and kind of expected it. But this is the actual practical reality, guys. Large software companies avoid GPLv3 like the plague. If you want your software to be used widely, then you need to use BSD/MIT/Apache/etc.

Since when is Google and Oracle not defined as "large software companies"?

Companies that avoid GPLv3 (but not GPLv2) do so because of either the patent clause, or the DRM clause. That is, they either want to by pass the license with legal restrictions, or hardware restrictions.

This is only relevant for external products, and says nothing about internal use. the actual practical reality, dead seriously, is that gplv3 is used by most large software companies that exist in the world. It would surprise me if Microsoft did not have some debian machines laying around somewhere hosting some website.

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