| I think both this discussion, as well as last year's Facebook/React Patent License brouwhaha (and Redis, more recently) would all be far better if people assumed good faith, and tried to actually get at the core of the problem. It's clear that there's a gap in existing licences that some regard as unfair. It also seems plausible that many projects could have dramatically better resources if the companies they are attached to could find a way to capture a fraction of their product's worth to their largest users. Just offering service with their competitive advantage being only the result of name recognition seems to work only for a very select group of huge projects. And even there, the likes of Canonical or SUSE show how hard it is. Yet it is obviously challenging to write a license that adequately captures these facts. I think everyone would have something to gain from finding a way to make these situations work. A required part of that solution may be for the community to interpret licenses not with the current they-are-trying-to-screw-us mindset but with, say, the "reasonable person" standard often used by the courts in contract/license disputes. That's not going to be easy, considering "expect the worst and don't risk anything" always looks like sound advice, given that you will never know what you missed on the path not taken. But the GPL's success should be inspiring here: it was initially met with scepticism, especially among corporate lawyers. Their essential pessimism never changed (it's how they became corporate lawyers in the firs place). But as it happened, it was enough for just few to take the risk, and subsequently creating precedents in court affirming the GPL, that made the concept cross the chasm to being palatable even to initial sceptics. Once courts fill in the questions of interpretation currently clouding these (necessarily somewhat abstract) licence, some doubts may dissipate. |