this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2023
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Programming
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What the article fails to address and what I’ve been struggling with personally is… We all need food. Yeah it’s great working on GPL code and ensuring it’s all open. But when companies consider your gpl library vs someone else’s mit library they will naturally go with mit. And then they’ll say “well we’re using this free library already might as well donate/fund it”. So suddenly this MIT dev is able to put way more time into the mit library than your gpl library because it becomes their job. Something that feeds them. Their library gets better faster… And more and more companies use it and fund it. GPL is great if absolutely everyone is on board and everyone is fed. But that’s not the world we live in.
Not sure reality agrees here. Unless the project is huge, it will most likely not see any money. With copy-left code they are at least required to share their improvements and contribute that way. (I am aware of the no-gpl policies of many companies)
What's probably a better Model are Nextcloud's "SupportaaS", Sourcehut's consultancy, or mailcow's SaaS. (I also see SaaS critically, but if it's Libre I'm okay with it)
it isn't weird to fight for good, public code.
It’s not, I agree, but I think if GPL proponents find revenue streams they can use open code will get much better adaptation
But it being MIT also makes it easy for the company to just work internally by themselves to make improvements for their version of the software without paying anything at all to the original dev. They can even release a better product than the original dev using his own changes and unfairly compete against them without sharing anything back.
Whereas, if the license is GPL, they would need to hire the original dev and colaborate with him fairly if they ever want to make a proprietary version of the software (which can be done, as long as the dev is the sole copyright holder).
The issue is not only one of funding, but also of publicity - GPL code is great, but not profitable. For widespread adoption of a software, it needs to get enough publicity. A very large number of people will never even have heard of any of the most used GPL-licensed pieces of software floating around.
Without publicity, projects get less attention, fewer developers, users, revenue, etc.