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by jwells89 1002 days ago
I think a lot of distaste towards GPL comes from devs with corporate day jobs who feel frustrated that anything GPL licensed is functionally off-limits at work because there’s no way legal would approve of using it, and certainly would not approve of open sourcing whatever project is built with the GPL thing. I can see where such an individual might think to themselves, “I don’t want to put other devs in my position in the same pickle, so I’m licensing my thing as MIT/BSD”.
2 comments
freedomben 1002 days ago
Absolutely. I'm personally a big fan of the GPL but I've felt that way before as well. When there's a great library that I want to use but it's GPL and the program I'm writing is IP, the request/proposal is dead on arrival. From that dev's perspective there's not much difference between an extant but GPLed library and a non-existent library.

That said, I do wish people would be a little more nuanced about it. IMHO (generally speaking) make libraries permissive, make applications GPL

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downWidOutaFite 1002 days ago
Right, corporate lawyers are ideological activists trying to kill GPL. But the campaign to denigrate the ideological activists on the other side is much more successful.
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freedomben 1002 days ago
> Right, corporate lawyers are ideological activists trying to kill GPL.

This is a pretty cynical "assume the worst" outlook, and it badly violates Occam's Razor. I think a much more likely reason that corporate lawyers disapprove of the GPL is that one of their main jobs (in some cases their entire job) is to protect the company's IP, and the GPL is a huge threat to IP. Any lawyer who didn't advise avoiding the GPL would be negligent. I personally love the GPL and encourage its use whenever possible, but I avoid it in decisions for my employers and customers because of the risks. I think generally speaking the risks are not nearly as serious as most people I think, but they do exist (otherwise the copyleft philosophy of the GPL would be pointless!)

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downWidOutaFite 1002 days ago
I've seen too many cases, recent example comes to mind is apple switching from bash to zsh, that are done not for technical or even business reason but ideological.
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