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by petercooper 1395 days ago
Just a guess, but I think a lot of people immediately see the letters "GPL" anywhere and back out, rightly or wrongly. The nuances of licenses are poorly understood by many developers (and even legal departments) and there's a "I can't be bothered" attitude a lot of the time, even where AGPL makes a lot of sense and isn't particularly restrictive on the average end user. There certainly needs to be a lot more education in this area.
1 comments
keithwinstein 1395 days ago
We hear this a ton from our friends at big companies, but... surely most of them use Linux? Or Git? Or x264, OpenJDK, GIMP, or VLC? Or (if you include LGPL) the WebCore portions of Chrome/Safari/Edge, which originated in KHTML/Konqueror? Or GTK, Cairo, ffmpeg, or WINE?

It's a little hard to believe the "GPL" is that much of a problem to the industry given how popular *GPL software remains in most places.

GPLv3 I realize is a different story, but even then, the companies seem to find a way to hold their nose when they want to. (When we first released Mosh as GPL 3+, we got a call from Apple, who were unhappy that their employees were using Mosh to connect to servers because Apple apparently doesn't want employees to be installing any GPL v3 software on their company-owned Macs. On the phone call, I told them that (a) I didn't think they had anything to worry about in terms of actual problems from the GPLv3, and (b) if they really disagreed, we're open to the conversation, but it would cost them a lot of money for me to want to think about what it would take to give them Mosh under a different license. Somehow they ended up concluding that the GPLv3 wasn't that bad after all...)

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petercooper 1395 days ago
Most of the examples you cite are situations where the software is being used as a client or at a distance (in terms of being far down the stack) and not as part of a deliverable. I think using such software is considered straight forward by most (if not by paranoid corporate policies, such as those you've encountered).

Where it gets more difficult is when potential dependencies are (A)GPL licensed. While I support the use of these licenses (particularly the AGPL for protecting cloud deployment of open source tools), I recognize the "friction" they can cause for certain classes of users who might just use something else to avoid thinking about it. (Which, you might say, is their loss.)

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