martingxx

I led our teams to switch from Java to Go because of the productivity of development, but then noticed deployment was simpler and faster, memory usage was slashed (for comparable applications), request/response times were much more consistent, startup was practically instant and as a result we started aggressively rewriting Java applications to Go and saw a notable difference in the number of machines we needed to run in AWS.

So in my situation, the JVM is heavier by every single measure listed, and for each by a considerable margin.

"My point is that with GPL, the implementation of the fixes/new features is right in front of you, you see it, yet you can't merge it into your GPL-incompatible codebase."

1) You almost certainly can as long as it's trivial, or you didn't look at the fix but did it independently based on a description of the bug. Legally, it all comes down to whether your work was a derived work or the original, not whether the result looks the same.

2) That's the idea anyway! Allowing someone to copy the work of others into a codebase that doesn't allow similar copying is exactly what the GNU GPL is designed to prevent. It's a risk you take if you decide to maintain a proprietary fork.

Re-implementing "independently" once you have seen the source code can be legally problematic. (see https://www.gnu.org/software/classpath/faq/faq.html#faq3_2 ) for an example.

No longer needing the product kind of means that it's failed. In which case, why would it suddenly be valuable to others with a simple change of license?

It's more likely to succeed in the first place by fostering collaboration from the start. This is how successful open source projects operate. It's all about community, mutual respect, and bi-directional sharing.

Having the source available but not open (yet) strikes me as a cynical attempt to appear open while retaining control of other peoples freedoms, and I for one would never work with such a project. I'd probably rather use a completely closed product with no source available; at least you're getting something that's not pretending to be more open than it really is.

I interpret this as "I don't want to collaborate with you people yet - I want this all for myself because I think I can make more money that way. But in case I fail, I'll change my mind and hey let's work together!"

No thanks.

GNU GPL is an excellent choice for a license for a commercial product if you do it right. It fosters collaboration and community from the start. Look around at the most successful companies whose major products are open source, especially the GPL ones. Note that none of them started off refusing reciprocal collaboration with potential contributors.

You can't port fixes and new features unless you have a license to do so. That's true in all cases. If you only license you have is GPL, it doesn't allow you to use those in a non-Free way, which I think is the point you are making, and I agree that's how it works.

But that's a feature of GPL, not a bug.

If you are a company producing code and trying to make a living from it, it's risky to release code as BSD/MIT unless you can afford to have someone clone it, close it and sell an improved version, passing it off as their own without giving you anything (like Microsoft did with the BSD TCP stack, and with NCSA mosaic for example). If you release as GPL however, that can't happen. It's much safer in that regard, and more socially considerate too, which is why it's the license of choice for most Linux distro vendors and other major open source vendors such as MySQL.

If this is newly written code not based on Skype code then there is clearly no copyright issue. Trademark is a potential problem but easily solved by removing the Skype name from the project.

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