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by WD-42 452 days ago
It's not 100% of nothing. If the choice is proprietary because they legally can't freeload off FOSS due to it being GPL, the company in question still needs to pay a developer to write the alternative. That's still a positive, and nothing lost. Permissive licenses just grant to freedom to freeload, nothing more.
1 comments
ddulaney 452 days ago
I don’t think it would’ve in our case, at least. I actually quite like our OSS policy: basically, we don’t want to be in the business of maintaining forks, so all changes should try to get upstreamed if at all possible. It‘s good client service as well: when our clients ask about the libraries we use, we’d much rather be able to tell them “the latest public version” than “here’s our fork”.

We also want to engage with and donate to the projects we use, mostly out of risk management: if they go unmaintained that’s bad for us.

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WD-42 452 days ago
If you truly want to upstream changes to libraries then I don’t see why lgpl code isn’t a choice for you. Use it in your proprietary code if you want, no changes no foul. If you make changes you just need to upstream or make the source available.
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jcranmer 452 days ago
> If you truly want to upstream changes to libraries then I don’t see why lgpl code isn’t a choice for you.

Read LGPL a little more carefully. LGPL requires you to use it in a particular manner that lets any user swap out your version for their version, which basically means you're only allowed to dynamically link it as a shared library. Even if you make no changes to the library!

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joshuaissac 452 days ago
> that lets any user swap out your version for their version, which basically means you're only allowed to dynamically link it as a shared library

I had thought that the dynamic linking requirement was the only option according to the licence, but apparently not. According to 6.a. of v2 and 4.d.0. of v3 of the LGPL, it would be enough to give the user access to the source/object code of the main application and the compilation scripts under non-open-source terms, so that they can recompile and statically link it against their own version of the library.

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