On Wed, Feb 11, 2015 at 9:55 AM, Tyler Romeo <tylerromeo(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On February 11, 2015 at 11:49:15, Bryan Davis
(bd808(a)wikimedia.org) wrote:
On Tue, Feb 10, 2015 at 8:48 PM, Tyler Romeo <tylerromeo(a)gmail.com> wrote:
What is more important: allowing as many people
to use our libraries as
possible, or protecting against our libraries from being
used in
proprietary software.
For me, allowing as many people to use our libraries as possible.
For the sake of the discussion, why?
For me, the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. The advantage of
getting more companies to use our libraries is that (maybe) they will
contribute back, similar to what Apple does with LLVM. However, on the
other side of the same coin, we are allowing the possibility that companies
will *not* contribute back, and instead keep their improvements to
themselves (to be clear, I am not implying malicious intent).
Companies don't need to give back with GPL either, even if they make mods.
They only need to do so if they distribute. There's lots of Apache2
projects that have a very large amount of contribution, so maybe this would
happen, but I doubt it. Not having to maintain your own fork is a really
strong motivator for most companies.
- Ryan