Comment by palata

Comment by palata 2 months ago

Respectfully, I think you have it completely wrong. Copyleft licences don't force you to sue anyone.

> Because many things are too small to be worth paying a lawyer to write a letter to license violators.

Then don't! I would advice you never even consider it, that would be absolutely crazy!

But what you miss is that big companies using your library have a lot of money, and therefore it is a risk for them to not comply with your licence. What does that mean in practice?

* Big companies will favour permissive licences. If you publish your library under a permissive licence, you screw the other small libraries that have a copyleft licence (that would be an argument for a permissive licence). * Big companies can't use strong copyleft libraries in proprietary software, so that would be a no-go. * Big companies can TOTALLY use weak copyleft libraries in their proprietary software. But if they do, they have to distribute their changes. Because not doing it would be a risk they are not willing to take.

kelnos 2 months ago

> Respectfully, I think you have it completely wrong.

Whenever someone starts a sentence with "respectfully", it's usually because they're about to say something disrespectful. Definitely the case here.

GP doesn't have it completely wrong. There is no wrong or right. The person who is doing the building gets to decide the license, and any reason or motivation they have for picking a particular license is by definition correct, because that's what they want to do.

> If you publish your library under a permissive licence, you screw the other small libraries that have a copyleft licence (that would be an argument for a permissive licence)

No one releasing something under an open source license has any sort of responsibility or obligation to some random other open source project they may not even know about.

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palata 2 months ago

> There is no wrong or right.
Only alternate facts?
I answered to a comment that said "I don't use copyleft because I don't want to have to pay a lawyer", which to me is a completely invalid point. It's like saying "I don't use copyleft because I don't want to eat bananas". You can use copyleft and not sue, just like you can use copyleft and not eat bananas.
> No one releasing something under an open source license has any sort of responsibility or obligation to some random other open source project they may not even know about.
I meant that permissively-licensed libraries tend to be favored, so that's an advantage when competing with similar libraries. If you care enough to choose a license but you are not trying to compete with other open source alternatives, then it would be nicer to go for copyleft.
I know permissively-licensed projects that were inferior to copyleft alternatives but got more traction because... well because companies could freeride on the permissive license. In that case those who chose the permissive license knew exactly what they were doing and decided to compete this way instead of technical merit.

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ekidd 2 months ago

> Big companies can't use strong copyleft libraries in proprietary software, so that would be a no-go.

Just to clarify: I have actually been involved in open source license enforcement efforts, because big companies do violate strong copyleft licenses regularly. Or their subcontractors do.

Usually, if you're willing to pay a good lawyer to yell at them, you can get the domestic ones to stop. And I know of some enforcement organizations that manage to get voluntary settlements on the order US$15,000, or who get the violators to appoint a "compliance officer."

For a big, commercially important project? This is often worth it. For a modest CLI tool, or something which I put a few weeks of full-time effort into? It is not remotely worth my time to enforce a strict license. This is a purely personal tradeoff. But if it's not worth $400 to me to have a lawyer write a letter, then I'm going to use a permissive license.

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palata 2 months ago

> But if it's not worth $400 to me to have a lawyer write a letter, then I'm going to use a permissive license.
Again: if it's not worth $400 to have a lawyer write a letter, just don't have a lawyer write the letter! But you can still have the copyleft license... for the situation where it may be worth a lot more in the future. Or just to give leverage to fellow developers: if I use a copyleft library at work, then I can tell my managers that I must contribute my changes upstream, during my working hours.

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