[purpleidea]

This is great work and good news, however if you want to guarantee a long-term public benefit, use copyleft without a CLA! A more well-funded company can fork this and make the new work proprietary, meaning you did all that initial development work for them for free.

Apple and Microsoft are the two most likely parties to do so here. This isn't a theoretical risk.

[simonw]

Using a copyleft license can add friction that reduces the amount of value your software can create in the world.

I'd honestly rather Apple and Microsoft ripped off my work if it meant that my work provided more utility to a larger number of people.

[purpleidea]

> Using a copyleft license can add friction that reduces the amount of value your software can create in the world.

That "friction" is by design. It prevents someone else from screwing over the users.

The people that oppose copyleft are those it was specifically design to protect against.

[thewebguyd]

It's sad, people have really been shitting on copyleft licenses the past few years, when they are critical to ensuring our computing freedoms are preserved.

Copyleft protects the user. The friction is, like you said, by design. It ensures that something that started free, stays free, and can't be rug pulled out from under you.

Big monied interests have been trying, and succeeding, in changing the discourse around free software away from free and to simply just "open source" and moving toward permissive licenses, specifically so community effort can be extracted and monetized without contributing back.

[dulvui]

On the other hand having a copyleft license without CLA makes rug pulls nearly impossible (once there are multiple contributors and copyright holders). But you are right, from a (commercial) value perspective, permissive wins.

[progmetaldev]

I truly respect this statement, and position. I always hope that the benefit I've provided through my software is felt, even if I don't directly benefit from it. It's about taking pride in your work, and what it has brought others. I think of it as a craft, like woodworking, brewing, art, music, etc. While there are far more rules, the love of it is what makes it viable.

I suspect that those who express concern over your work being ripped off are just showing that they are extremely happy with how you run things. Rather than being under the control of another entity, the actual value is in your personal involvement. That's just my two cents, I hope I'm not putting words in anyone's mouth.

EDIT: I realize that you aren't the creator of Ghostty, but my original statement seemed like I was stating this.

[miclill]

I recently heard the argument that the license-friction of copyleft sometimes is actually a good thing. Think linux kernel that arguably is more successful than all the BSDs combined (citation needed)...

[knowknow]

Keep in mind that Linux doesn’t use the GPL3 and stuck with the GPL2 since the maintainers and Linus Torvalds thought that it was overly restrictive [1]. So at some point the license friction becomes too large to be practical for organizations to use or contribute to.

[1] https://youtu.be/PaKIZ7gJlRU

[simonw]

I'd be really interested in hearing more about that argument.

I can take a guess with respect to Linux: that's the kind of software where forcing companies to submit code back to it is enormously beneficial due to the need for an operating system to have drivers for vast ranges of different hardware.

[kragen]

Yeah. Also things like filesystems. More generally, the history of BSD is full of proprietary forks that never got merged back in: Ultrix, SunOS, BSDI's BSD/386 (later BSD/OS), Winsock, and the Wollongong TCP/IP stack on UNICOS and, I think, also on VMS. The most famous fork is macOS Darwin, which I think is still in fact open source, but it's been many years since I saw someone successfully running the open-source Darwin.

Also, though, GCC got Objective-C support, and still has it, because the FSF told NeXT it would violate the GPL for them to attempt to make Objective-C a proprietary add-on to the GCC compiler, even if it wasn't literally linked with it. And a lot of GCC backends probably would have been kept proprietary by one or another hardware company if the license had allowed it.

[eviks]

How does Windows without such force to contribute code back have better drivers?

[simonw]

I imagine because the Windows team at Microsoft have an annual budget measured in billions of dollars.

[oblio]

> Think linux kernel that arguably is more successful than all the BSDs combined (citation needed)

I don't think there is any citation needed. Linux powers all the cloud providers, 80% of the mobile market, a ton of random devices. At this point Linux is the most important OS on the planet, ahead of Windows and Apple OSes. It's just not as visible.

[bsimpson]

BSD-0 is a public-domain-equivalent license. The guy who published it is one of the few people who has actually been involved in a lawsuit to try to assert a copyleft license. The whole thing was such a bad experience for him that he decided copyleft licenses are a false goal.

You should watch his talk:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkJkyMuBm3g

(He used to be a maintainer of busybox, a GNU clone for embedded devices. He then ended up writing toybox, a similar project under the more free MIT license.)

[Karliss]

Does anyone have good examples of this actually happening for end user software (like Ghostty is) and where in the long term proprietary fork won? Most of the recent variations of this that come to my mind are related to cloud infrastructure. Stuff where you have serious business customers.

And in some of those cases GPL wasn't enough to prevent it. Niche end user utilities, where original is available for free have little room for monetization. And in many cases existing users are already choosing the open source option despite the existence of commercial solutions, or where it's too niche for commercial solutions to exist.

Only thing that comes to my mind is VScode with all the AI craze. But that doesn't quite fit the pattern neither is the Microsoft underdog, nor it's clear that any of AI based editors derived from VScode will survive by themselves long term.

There are also occasional grifters trying to sell open source software with little long term impact.

[tristan957]

> Does anyone have good examples of this actually happening for end user software (like Ghostty is) and where in the long term proprietary fork won?

VSCode is a proprietary fork of code-oss, the product located at https://github.com/microsoft/vscode. It might not be an example that you're looking for though.