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by paulryanrogers 2576 days ago
Are you saying that choosing a permissive license is like "pissing-in-the-pool"? As if do so contaminates the market for everyone?
2 comments

> Are you saying that choosing a permissive license is like "pissing-in-the-pool"?

Yes, choosing overly permissible licenses (non-GPL OSS ones, in particular) contaminates the market for other software projects operating in that market.

Yes. The whole AWS problem stems from having too much software under "permissive" licenses and now enough under reciprocal licenses.

Reciprocal licenses work like herd immunity: you need a large enough ecosystem to effectively keep freeloaders at bay while rewarding those who cooperate often.

How would less permissive software existing have helped e.g. MongoDB with their "AWS problem"?
MongoDB did not have an "AWS problem". AWS did not release anything related to MongoDB until after they stopped making open-source releases.

MongoDB had a "We gave others freedoms we didn't like" problem, so they rescinded those freedoms. Freedoms that they'd given in the first place to profit off of the reputation of Open Source Software. If they'd never given those freedoms out, they'd never have had any problems.