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by kstrauser 411 days ago
In general, people who license something as GPLv3 probably consider that a feature, not a bug.

I mentioned here recently that I released a personal project under the GPLv3. The very first issue someone filed in GitHub was to ask me to relicense it as something more business friendly. I don't think I've been so offended by an issue before. If I'm writing something for fun, I could not possibly be less interested in helping else someone monetize my work. They can play by Free Software rules, or they can write their own version for themselves and license it however they want. I don't owe them the freedom to make it un-Free.

The fact that this is hosted on a FSF-managed service indicates the author likely sees it similarly.

2 comments

I generally agree but it's worth noting that languages are a bit different. Obviously there are GPL'd compilers but those often make an explicit carveout for things like the runtime and standard library. Meanwhile in the Lisp world my impression is that most (but certainly not all) implementations are permissively licensed in part due to concerns that shipping an image file is essentially shipping the entire language implementation verbatim.
They can always reward the author, which mostly certainly will make a specific business friendly license for them.
Thanks for pointing that option out! Yes, I am a simple man: you can buy any software I've ever publicly released for the right price. I don't know what those prices are in advance because I've never thought of it, but if you want to give me $10M for some tool I wrote so that I can provide generational wealth to my family, drop me a line.

Of course, no one has expressed interest in doing that yet, so this is purely hypothetical.

That totally makes sense and I do appreciate why that would be a problem for some users.

And yet, this is a single-user labor of love by one person hosting it on FSF’s servers. I don't know them, and this is pure conjecture, but I suspect they probably couldn't care less if that made it challenging for commercial users. There are plenty of other Lisps for them to choose from.

Yeah that makes sense, if it’s it’s just for fun