[petcat]

The biggest scam the mega-clouds and the Githubs ever pulled was convincing open source developers that the GPL was somehow out of vogue and BSD/MIT/Apache was better.

All so they could just vacuum it all up and resell it with impunity.

[xorcist]

The big cloud providers are perfectly happy to use GPL'd stuff (see: Elastic, MySQL). They don't need to use embrace-and-extend, they're content with hosting.

The ones pushing for permissive licenses are rather companies like Apple, Android (and to some extent other parts of Google), Microsoft, Oracle. They want to push their proprietary stuff and one way to do that in the face of open source competition is by proprietary extensions.

[tomnipotent]

> ones pushing for permissive licenses are rather companies like Apple, Android

The FOSS community at large embraced permissive licenses and it had nothing to do with the interests of big corporations.

[kjksf]

I don't remember GitHub or Amazon advocating MIT over GPL.

Feel free to prove me wrong by pointing out this massive amount of advocacy from "mega-clouds" that changed people's minds.

The ads, the mailing list posts, social media comments. Anything at all you can trace to "mega-clouds" execs.

[colesantiago]

https://choosealicense.com/

https://choosealicense.com/about/

> "GitHub wants to help developers choose an open source license for their source code."

This was built by GitHub Inc a very very long time ago.

[Master_Odin]

The site puts the MIT and GPLv3 front and center with a nice quick informative blurb on them. How are they pushing MIT over GPL?

[kpcyrd]

I think this was more about "please choose _any_ license" because of the problem outlined here:

https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1150/is-my-co...

[supern0va]

>This was built by GitHub Inc a very very long time ago.

So long ago, in fact, that it was five years before their acquisition by Microsoft.

[thayne]

I don't see anything on there saying that non-copyleft licenses are better, unless you are in an ecosystem that prefers a different license.

[LtWorf]

Does the CEO of github count? https://youtu.be/-bAAlPXB2-c?t=180

[leetrout]

I remember a somewhat prominent dev in the DC area putting on Twitter around 2012 or so something like "I do plenty of open source coding and I don't put a fucking license on it" and it stuck with me for all these years that it was a weird stance to take.

[roryirvine]

Dan Bernstein took that attitude back in the 90s - I think his personal theory of copyright went something like "if it doesn't have a license, then it's obviously public domain", which ran counter to the mainstream position of "if it doesn't have a license, then you have to treat it as proprietary".

And, sure, djb wasn't actually likely to sue you if you went ahead and distributed modified versions of his software... but no-one else was willing to take that risk, and it ended up killing qmail, djbdns, etc stone dead. His work ended up going to waste as a result.

[chuckadams]

I doubt the lack of license was the reason DJB's projects didn't take over the world. Most of them required heavy forking to break away from hardwired assumptions about the filesystem and play nice with the OS distribution, and DJB is himself notoriously difficult to work with. Still, qmail managed to establish maildir as the standard format and kill off mbox, and for that alone I'm eternally grateful.

[roryirvine]

Well, there were always plenty of patches available - it's just that lots of them conflicted with each other, and that was a product of the licensing.

Agreed with the rest, though. I relied heavily on qmail for about a decade, and learned a lot from the experience, even if it was a little terrifying on occasion!

[chuckadams]

These days one would just most likely create a fork on github. Vim was also maintained through separate patches for a long time, but Bram was a lot more accepting about integrating and distributing those patches himself.

[12_throw_away]

> his personal theory of copyright went something like "if it doesn't have a license, then it's obviously public domain"

I mean philosophically and morally, sure, one can take that position ... but copyright law does not work like that, at least not for anything published in the US after 1989 [1].

[1] https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ03.pdf

[DANmode]

> mainstream position

Not everybody is dictated by corporate attorneys; I don’t think this is an accurate portrayal.

[skeeter2020]

John Carmack said that about a week ago.

[benterix]

You probably mean AGPL. Companies hated GPL from the start and nothing has changed to this day. But the cloud is specifically against AGPL.

[DANmode]

They do sort the list of default licenses by alphabetical,

and that seems like a strange choice…

Could you say more?

[eru]

Huh? When you deploy something in the cloud, you don't have to share your GPL'ed stuff either. Google doesn't.