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> Linux won because the GPL has proven to be more suitable to businesses, and especially commercial open source business models as practiced by companies such as Cygnus and Red Hat.

That's an interesting take, but I'm not sure I understand.

Are you saying Linux would've lost (presumably to proprietary OSs?) if it used a permissive license?

If the GPL has been proven to be more suitable for business, why is the use of GNU GPL licenses declining in favor of permissive licenses?

I don't have a hog in this pen and so I'm not trying to provoke. I'd just like to hear thoughts on why it looks so different from where I sit.




Not the parent, but here's my thoughts:

The size and quantity of companies working on things related to a project determines whether a strong copyleft license or a permissive license makes the project more successful

Say you want to make a business around a FOSS project. Which license should you choose for that project?

If your business starts gaining traction, people may realize it's a good business opportunity, and create companies that compete against you.

I'll simplify to two licenses, GPL and MIT. Then there's two options, based on which one you chose originally:

1) If you chose the GPL, then you can be sure that no competitor will get to use your code without allowing you to use theirs too. You can think of this as protection, ensuring no other company can make a product that's better than yours without starting from scratch. Because everyone is forced to publish their changes, your product will get better the more competition you have. However, your competitors will always be just a little behind you because you can't legally deny them access to the code.

2) OTOH if you chose MIT, a competitor can just take your project, make a proprietary improved version of it and drive you out of the market. The upside is if you get to be big enough, you can do exactly that to _your_ competitors.

You can see that when you are a small company the benefits of GPL outweigh the cons, but for big ones it's more convenient to use MIT or other permissive licenses. In fact, I think the answer to your question "why is the use of GNU GPL licenses declining?" is because tech companies tend to be bigger than before.

Now say you want to make a business around some already existing software. And say there's two alternative versions of that software, one under the GPL and one under the MIT license (for example, Linux and BSD). Which one should base your business on? And contribute to? Well, it's the same logic as before.


In the context of Linux, think of the GPL as a joint development agreement, with teeth.

I used to follow LLVM development. There was lots of mailing list traffic of the form "I'll send you guys a patch as soon as management approves it..." followed by crickets.

Basically, RMS was exactly correct about the impact that loadable modules would have on GCC's development.


Basically, RMS was exactly correct...

The last thirty years in a nutshell.


> If the GPL has been proven to be more suitable for business, why is the use of GNU GPL licenses declining in favor of permissive licenses?

It isn't, at least not exactly. It's declining in favor of a combined permissive/commercial license model. And it's only doing that for products that are meant to be software components.

The typical model there is that you use a permissive license for your core product as a way of getting a foot in the door. Apache 2.0 is permissive enough that most businesses aren't going to be afraid that integrating your component poses any real strategic risk. GPL, on the other hand, is more worrisome - even if you're currently a SAAS product, a critical dependency on GPLv2 components could become problematic if you ever want to ship an on-prem product, and might also become a sticking point if you're trying to sell the company.

But it's really just a foot in the door. The free bits are typically enough to keep people happy just long enough to take a proper dependency on your product, but not sufficient to cover someone's long-term needs. Maybe it's not up to snuff on compliance. Or the physical management of the system is kind of a hassle. Something like that. That stuff, you supply as commercial components.




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