Let's say you want to develop software as a job, and make enough money to live. You also have the ethics not to go into the ad-supported track-everything mobile apps business. There is still good money to be made without selling your soul, but most of it is in the B2B not the B2C market. And there, you negotiate the terms of who owns what individually for each contract anyway, at least if you have any sense.
The problem with the GPL is that its "infectious" nature does not play nicely with how the B2B world works, where you might link against your client's in-house proprietary libraries, which even though they're never planning to distribute them, they very much don't want their own IP to become GPLed as a result.
So if you want to bring in a library to make pretty graphs or something, it very much matters what the licence is - MIT is generally fine though.
(How and whether a FOSS library author should be paid for the fact that one corporation used their library to develop software for another corporation, is an entirely separate matter.)
> The problem with the GPL is that its "infectious" nature does not play nicely with how the B2B world works, where you might link against your client's in-house proprietary libraries, which even though they're never planning to distribute them, they very much don't want their own IP to become GPLed as a result.
Standard GPL FUD. Firstly, linking against proprietary libraries is fine as long as you don’t distribute the result to any third party. Secondly, no IP can “become GPLed” unless anybody chooses to make it so.
Some of the companies I've worked with, and their lawyers especially, have explicitly said that for them anything GPL in the application layer was a no-no (Linux as OS was fine though). This is on code that will never be distributed outside internal systems.
Copy-left licenses can work better for companies than non-copy-left licenses, if those companies are actually interested in improving the thing or creating the thing. They can release as GPL or AGPL and then profit from others contributing. If they released as MIT or other non-copy-left license, any competitor can use and modify without contributing back, which is the actual scenario any company should be afraid of. Copy-left actually helps companies that are not simply leeching.
Google uses GPL software all the time and links it to proprietary software all the time. Since it runs on their servers and is never distributed, this is perfectly fine.
> don't want their own IP to become GPLed as a result
This is not how copyright works. No license can magically turn other code into GPL.
You can choose between using GPL libraries in internal proprietary products, or use LGPL libraries in published products or release your product as FOSS.
The problem with the GPL is that its "infectious" nature does not play nicely with how the B2B world works, where you might link against your client's in-house proprietary libraries, which even though they're never planning to distribute them, they very much don't want their own IP to become GPLed as a result.
So if you want to bring in a library to make pretty graphs or something, it very much matters what the licence is - MIT is generally fine though.
(How and whether a FOSS library author should be paid for the fact that one corporation used their library to develop software for another corporation, is an entirely separate matter.)