Replied to Ian’s licensing questions here. Please refer to that thread moving forward to continue the discussion on licensing.
UPDATE: There was a very long discussion that could be helpful to read over to get the various perspectives around licensing in the Privacy Guides community. I did my bust to summarize the takeaways from this conversation:
- Permissive licensing incentivizes sharing of ideas and deincentivizes big companies creating competing gamed permissive economies
- Copyleft licensing has a proven track record of deincentivizing big tech opportunism on open source and despite all the philisophical disparities of open source and copyrights, acknowledges the real world risks this imposes on sustainable open ecosystems.
- A mixture of both types of licensing that uses permissive licensing around the protocols and standards of the ecosystem abstractions that are necessary for interoperability and composability of systems and copyleft of implementations of these protocols draws on both licensing type strengths.
- You can’t mix GPLv2 licenses with Apache v2. It is like dropping gremlins into water.
- Users should be aware that the licensing and culture of a software project and its commercial equivalents shapes a lot of their freedoms, and having this cursory understanding can help you understand the incentive structures driving different technology that will future proof you, or cause you to do big painful migrations when a project folds or becomes the puppet of big tech.