[kwlug-disc] Permissive vs copyleft licenses

[Chris Frey]

On Sat, Dec 19, 2020 at 03:53:09PM -0500, Paul Nijjar via kwlug-disc wrote:
> And if you choose the GPL be prepared to be burned because nobody
> wants to use or contribute to your project.
> 
> As I get older and grumpier I increasingly feel that the FLOSS movement
> succeeded not because of the licensing, but because it was a movement
> (what we call "network effects" these days). If you have lots of users
> and enough contributors, you are powerful. If not then you are
> irrelevant. If GPL projects can attract the kind of momentum they need
> to thrive, then that is great. But it seems easier to attract
> contributors (in particular, contributors with deep pockets) for
> BSD-style licensing. 

Licenses do matter.  Although in practice, it's usually a restrictive
license that generates enough motivation to create something new and
free.

For example, if memory serves, KDE came first, then Gnome, and it was
entirely due to the restrictive license that KDE had to accept to use
the Qt library.  Only after Gnome was well on its way did Qt relax
the license.  And now we have two.  Just like Linux and BSD.

Again, as memory serves, Bitkeeper came first, then git, and it was
due to a restrictive license that Bitkeeper was released under.
When folks insisted on tools being free, and started to reverse engineer
(even slightly) the Bitkeeper interface, Bitkeeper withdrew permission,
and Linus ended up writing git.  In this case, the world flocked to
git, and Bitkeeper is barely remembered.  Although incidentally now
licensed under the Apache v2 license.  If they had done this at the
start, they might have been where git is now, but business concerns
took priority.  Alas, now they are left whining on bitkeeper.org
that "BitKeeper is the original distributed source management system."
Too bad, they had their chance, and what a glorious chance it was,
the Linux kernel.

It feels to me that as long as things are "good enough", there's no
change, but when enough motivation builds, look out.  Big changes
can happen fast.  And licenses can often trigger this.  The thirst
for freedom can be as motivating as scratching a pure technical itch.

- Chris