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points by satvikpendem 4 days ago | 0 comments

MIT and other non copy left licenses were a mistake. In the 2000s and 2010s people were so concerned with usage and GitHub stars of their OSS that they just gave everything away to corporations and now don't have the right to complain anymore.

[–] brians 4 days ago

Can you point at projects that got abused that way? I see plenty of things that got written by corps or by conglomerates, many of which landed with Apache. And I see lots of copyleft software that pulls whole systems with it.

What’s something that was released as MIT but, had it been GPL2, would have seeded a community?

[–] Vaushite 3 days ago

Mostly it's not stuff that would've had a community if it was GPL - it's stuff that would've had a community either way, then Amazon took it and made it proprietary and took the community too.

[–] SR2Z 21 hours ago

I don't think it's quite correct to say that Amazon made these projects proprietary. They're perfectly willing to contribute upstream - the issue is they stole the margins from the companies that were trying to offer hosted versions of their products.

IMO this is unfortunate but must be allowed if we want to have truly open licenses.

[–] hkt 4 days ago

In fairness, it is easier to point out has-beens than never-weres.

[–] eagleal 4 days ago

Eh, I don't think Openai and Anthropic trained with only MIT licensed copy.

[–] ethbr1 4 days ago

Fair, there is the Uber model of 'When a founder does it, it's not illegal.'

[–] oblio 4 days ago

What do you mean? GPL licenses aren't truly free! They limit the right of corporations to abuse users! That can't be right! Better to use another license on the off chance you'll win the VC lottery.

[–] LoganDark 4 days ago

I generally agree with fighting corporate abuse, though IMO, GPLv3's anti-tivoization clause is kind of misguided. It may stop locked-down hardware makers from using your software, but it doesn't stop the hardware from being locked-down in the first place.

We have evidence that any hardware maker that would open up their hardware will do it already (see: reMarkable, Ubiquiti offering SSH root access). If you try to fight that battle by holding software from them, you only lose them as a contributor as they make their own, which is worse for everyone.

[–] Vaushite 3 days ago

If it's all your own work, or all yours except for a trivial amount (this is 99% of projects) you can always change the license later.