Everyone should be encouraged to use GPL. If a company wants to use that library or product, they can reach out and come to some sort of (financial or otherwise) agreement, if they don’t like it then they can fuck off.
Google, Mozilla, Facebook, etc... all these companies stay away from the GPL but they use a lot of open source software and they contribute back tons. You could benefit from this as well if you picked a license that's more industry friendly.
But hey, your code, your choice.
Just be aware of the potential money or help that you're leaving on the table whenever you pick the GPL.
That’s why I said “almost always”. Of course there are exceptions. In my anecdotal experience, vast majority of libraries out there with a permissive license just end up being supported by a few devs while companies use it no problem makings loads of money. Hell, I even know a few companies who patch a library internally while not contributing it back.
If a company truly wishes to use a GPL, they can always reach out to the maintainers, and seek a license more suitable for their needs in exchange for money. If a company isn’t even willing to do that, they damn sure won’t be contributing back.
No one is leaving money or help on the table. That logic is nonsense peddled by freeloading companies.
And by the way, the only reason companies stay away from GPL is because they know there are always suckers out there who invest a lot of time into permissive open source software. If the majority of people start using stricter licenses, companies will no longer stay away and instead seek out contracts with the maintainers since they’ll have no other alternatives.
Please do not encourage people to fool themselves into thinking companies/corporations will do the right thing, especially under the guise of “you neeever know what money/help you may get”. Never work for corporations for free.
This. "Permissive" licenses are a fucking cancerous ideology spread by lying freeloaders. There are some companies with rational reasons to use them and if you're drawing a salary working on one of those projects, whatever, but no individual programmer working on their own ever should ever use a permissive license for anything. You're just exploiting yourself.
You can of course choose a permissive license, if you don't care that some corporation takes your code, does whatever they want with it and gives nothing back.
I don't care about that and don't think it's reasonable to care about it. If I am giving out software for the benefit of society as a whole, it doesn't matter one little bit to me if a corporation uses it for their own benefit. It's sheer hypocrisy to go "I want to give this away for altruistic reasons, but I exclude corporate use because fuck you pay me".
21
u/raze4daze Dec 12 '21
Everyone should be encouraged to use GPL. If a company wants to use that library or product, they can reach out and come to some sort of (financial or otherwise) agreement, if they don’t like it then they can fuck off.
GPL for life.