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by tantalic 1063 days ago
While that is true, it requires a very specific understanding of both intellectual property law and the inner workings of development tooling that is pretty rare in practice. As such, companies are generally conservative in such decisions. Most organizations have a single list of licenses allowed for use rather than getting into specific use cases for specific licenses. These types of environments will generally limit uptake of copyleft tools.

All that said, I'm not convinced the licensing is the issue here (although I wish them the best). We are in a world that has grown accustom to free development tools and building a commercially viable business in tooling is incredibly difficult. I'm always amazed by how many developers I know who make a living by creating software yet are unwilling to pay for software themselves.

2 comments

All of those companies have no issues using `ld` right? Binutils is GPL and has always been. Seems like a direct analogy.
AGPL and GPL are quite different beasts
> Most organizations have a single list of licenses allowed for use rather than getting into specific use cases for specific licenses.

Bullshit. Most organizations are absolutely fine with different ad-hoc licenses for various closed source software. Applying different standards to copyleft licenses is just due to FUD.