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by 4gotunameagain 310 days ago
Hey mate, I would just like to say that I wish they at least find it in their hearts to reward you for the value you have provided to them. Knowing cut throat american corps, I'm afraid the chances are nil. Even if a good amount for you is peanuts to them.

Which is why my position is GPL > MIT..

3 comments

They could literally give him 100k, 1mil or even 10mil which would still be a rounding error in their books.
Don't know. A company can have a huge valuation on the stock market but that does not necessarily mean that they have cash to pay wages or can afford to pay a large team. If all they have are stocks they have to find somebody that buys those stocks with cash, then find a way not to run out of those money before selling more stocks. Eventually do an exit and stop worrying or become profitable.
they are raising another billion dollar round
Are they even profitable?
Profitable schmofitable! But seriously, that is orthogonal to whether those figures are rounding errors at anthropic's financial level.
I have always preferred permissive over copy-left, because I've historically been unable to use packages at work, which puts food in my mouth, as a developer who spends some time contributing to projects, especially those that I use at work.

This has changed everything. AGPL and GFDL from now on.

you're right about MIT vs GPL confusion. people brainwashed themselves into thinking MIT is "more open", because it's more permissive, but it lets others profit off your code without contributing back.

GPL makes them share or pay to relicense, since you own the copyright. with MIT, they don’t need to ask. MIT just benefits big corps. GPL better protects the open-source spirit, and paradoxically, the ownership of your work.

And yes, people being able to use your code for whatever they want is absolutely more open than having restrictions on how/who gets to use it.

One other model that can also work well is to dual license as GPL + commercial, so people who want to publish their work can use the GPL license but you can potentially fund the project from license sales to closed source users using the commercial licensing option. I see this a fair bit in the audio community I work within.

>And yes, people being able to use your code for whatever they want is absolutely more open than having restrictions on how/who gets to use it.

Yes, this is why people should use free not open , and GPL is more free when you report to the entire community otherwise you are in the famous case from a story where an USAian was claiming "Amerika is the land of the free, we are free to own slaves"

Why would it be unfeasible to just share the code parts that are GPL?
If you link against GPL code, your code needs to be GPL compatible. There are some IPC based workarounds, but they are too annoying and slow in most cases.
LGPL exists too.
Sure, but the thread was initially about GPL.
Yeah, basically MIT is "more open" in the short term, while GPL is more open on the long term. GPL, while restricting some freedoms right now, is actually enabling the remaining freedoms to be sustainable in the future. Very similar to how law enforcement works out with regards to a sustainable society, and how market restrictions work out to create a sustainable and diverse market.