Re: Upcoming time boundary events

On 6/5/2025 7:51 PM, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

On Thu, 5 Jun 2025 10:01:17 -0400, Arne Vajhøj wrote:

GPL/AGPL is less business friendly than Apache/MIT/BSD on the software
consumer side.
>
But GPL/AGPL is more business friendly than Apache/MIT/BSD on the
software producer side.

 Funny you should say that. Leaving aside the AGPL for a moment, I have
heard lots of people say that copyleft licences are not somehow “business-
friendly”. What they are is “competition-friendly”: they ensure that
market participants compete on a level playing field.
 Remember that, in Free Software, there is not this hard-and-fast
distinction between those who “produce” it and those who “consume” it.
Sheer numbers of passive users do not, on their own, make much difference
to the success of a Free Software project. What matters is the liveliness
of the community that contributes back to the project.
 And this is where copyleft comes in. Businesses are notorious for wanting
to take without giving back. Consider the difference between the BSD and
Linux worlds: one remains anaemic and relegated to the fringe, weighed
down by freeloaders who keep sucking the lifeblood from the community,
while the other continues to thrive and grow, even as it has come to
dominate the entire computing landscape.

Linux and FreeBSD/OpenBSD/NetBSD projects are really not that different.
They are not driven by a profit motive.
They have chosen different licenses, but each seems happy with their
choice and do not seem to wish to change license.
Linux is obviously much more widely used than FreeBSD/OpenBSD/NetBSD,
but I very much doubt that the FreeBSD/OpenBSD/NetBSD people
envy Linux - I believe they have different goals.
There are open source projects that started with a permissive
license and where the people and the company behind felt that
they were being treated unfairly (usually when the small
company's cloud service could not compete with Amazon/Microsoft/Google
offering the same service using the company's software) so they
decided to change license.
Some of the more well known examples:
Elastic : ElasticSerarch, Apache->SSPL->SSPL/AGPL
Redis : Redis, BSD->RSAL/SSPL->RSAL/SSPL/AGPL
HashiCorp : TerraForm, MPL->BSL
Cockroach Labs : CockroachDB, Apache->BSL
Lightbend : Akka, Apache->BSL
Arne