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by TuringTest 3930 days ago
The whole justification for share-alike (as opposed to permissive) licensing is traced back to the UNIX wars, where uncertain copyright attribution was a huge hindrance to developers and a source of commercial wars battled through litigation.

Share-alike protects against such fragmentation, allowing any developer to always take any improvements made to a different branch and merge it back to your version; with MIT licenses, that is often not an option.

A modern paradigmatic example is KHTML, the LGPL rendering engine that was the basis for Safari. Without the share-alike, it's uncertain that Apple would have released Webkit, and it would have been almost certainly impossible for Google to fork it as Blink - most improvements would have been unavailable to the public, with Apple using hidden changes as a competitive advantage.
1 comments
gsnedders 3930 days ago
> Without the share-alike, it's uncertain that Apple would have released Webkit, and it would have been almost certainly impossible for Google to fork it as Blink - most improvements would have been unavailable to the public, with Apple using hidden changes as a competitive advantage.

Hmm. They may well have eventually released it — WebKit did eventually get released (years after the code dumps of WebCore an JavaScriptCore).

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TuringTest 3930 days ago
Yes, maybe they would have released it, just like they released modified parts of FreeBSD. But the share-alike makes it less likely that they keep the best parts hidden, and more likely that there's a single reference implementation where improvements from competitors are kept close to one another.
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ArneBab 3930 days ago
WebKit did get released after the KDE developers attacked Apple for violating the license of KHTML.
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gsnedders 3929 days ago
Violating it? When did they ever do that, or get attacked for it?

They got complaints for just having code-dumps (or WebCore/JavaScriptCore) alongside releases, which made it hard to have any sort of individual patches. They were still in no way obliged to move to developing it in public, nor were they obliged to release WebKit.

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