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Comment by pnathan | Hacker News Reader

I observe that BSD/MIT et al are just ways to give away profits to large corporations without returning value to the original developer.

I release all my personal code under some flavor of GPL - LLGPL, LGPL, or AGPL3 - because I personally refuse to let my work be exploited like that.

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Like how Apple, Google, Intel, Nvidia etc. are exploiting the LLVM project? IMO, the need for GPL style restrictive licences isn't backed up by facts; more open licences encourage commercial use and open development.

There's a game I own that I'm only able to play on my computer because its developer accidentally used a GPLed audio library, and found their best course was to GPL the game engine. Internet volunteers then ported that engine to other platforms. So as an end user the GPL really has made things better for me than a BSD-style license would.

That doesn't do anything. Large corporations don't have to distribute your software for internal usage. It can reach hundreds of thousands of employees and still be internal.

In my experience companies just use other code or develop their own, so the original developer doesn't benefit directly anyway. So it doesn't matter which license he chooses.

One could argue that making a successful open source project makes the original developer "wanted" in terms of employment, paid support requests, paid consulting... And choosing leeching-friendly license helps in achieving that.

That is the express intent of the BSD/MIT license though. If the authors wanted to prevent people profiting from the software they would have released it under some other license.

Minor nerdrage here - the GPL says NOTHING about sale of source. It strictly is about release of source. You can sell systems with GPL in them for as much cash you desire to do. I've seen it done in extremely profitable situations, actually.

Do you have some sort of evidence for that observation?

Roughly, look at any mobile software you use and look at the open source licenses. Note how much of that code gets pushed back into the rest of the world. For even more excitement, look at major non-tech companies and see how much they contribute back. In my idle memories, I think Walmart might be the only one I've personally seen... The GPL (or its stronger and younger sibling, the AGPL), contractually require release of source to the user.

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