[leftcoaster]

I don't find his argument particularly convincing. He's assuming that the market can see that something that was open is now closed. And while that might be true for an end user application, it's not at all true for libraries and frameworks that are folded into closed applications.

I'm the author of an LGPL-ed library. It sees a modest amount of use and my goal in choosing that license is that any changes made to that library be shared back with the rest of the community. It's not GPL-ed, so you don't have to share your application code, but if you change my library, you do have to share your changes/improvements. If you don't want to share, then don't use my library. Simple, right?

Well, every few months I get a note from someone who has noticed an application that doesn't meet this simple test. And I have to send them a dunning notice about the license violation. How many applications are there that I don't get notes about? And absent a license, does anyone seriously think that the mass market would give up "desirable application X" because its creators were bad actors vis-a-vis some embedded library?