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by wizzwizz4 2055 days ago
MIT actually makes it harder for people to profit from their software than GPL, because the developer of GPL-licensed code has the exclusive right (by law, as author) to produce proprietary forks of that code; if the code's MIT'd, somebody else could fork, clone the proprietary features and add a few more (preferably going against the original program's general philosophy in doing so, to reduce the chances of those features being introduced into the original), aggressively market, and basically steal the whole project and its user base… then the developer's unemployed, the whole thing's proprietary and some unethical organisation is profiting off the work of another.

The “rolling release” model, where the latest version's proprietary but six months ago's version is libre, simply cannot be done with something like MIT unless you're willing to risk somebody else taking it all for themselves.
1 comments
dnautics 2055 days ago
> MIT actually makes it harder for people to profit from their software than GPL, because the developer of GPL-licensed code has the exclusive right

Can you name an IC that profits from their software with the GPL?

By contrast I know of a very well-known IC that profits (handsomely) from their software with an even looser license than the MIT - SQLite.

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cercatrova 2055 days ago
MongoDB, Sentry, Plausible Analytics et al. use GPL, AGPL or even stronger proprietary versions such as SSPL to prevent cloud vendors from using their products. Now imagine they used MIT instead, cloud vendors could rip them off without any contributions back.

This is exactly what happened even when they used AGPL, something that was thought to scare cloud vendors, but instead it wasn't scary enough, so these companies had to invent new proprietary licenses.

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dnautics 2055 days ago
I was under the impression that the implication of the parent comment was IC in the literally "individual" coder sense. If you're going to be that broad there are PLENTY of well known frameworks, not even worth listing, under both MIT and GPL, that are built by organizations, or VC-backed startups, and it's hard to compare "ease of making money".
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cercatrova 2055 days ago
Perhaps, but each of these organizations were started by a single person and then grew. Plausible is only 2 people if I recall correctly. So I'm not sure counting purely individuals makes sense. Sqlite even isn't one person, multiple people make pull requests.
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wizzwizz4 2055 days ago
> Now imagine they used MIT instead, cloud vendors could rip them off without any contributions back.

Plausible used to be MIT, and exactly this happened to them.

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cercatrova 2055 days ago
Yep, that's why I mentioned them specifically. It's happened to a lot of companies too.
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