Thanks everyone for chiming in, I feel like we’ve either gotten smarter or emboldened eachother to take legal risks we shouldn’t take. Perhaps we need to get someone from the SFC to chime in on if they notice any inaccurate statements. I think the collective knowledge on how developer and consumer adoption is influenced by these license perceptions is valuable in its own right.
So hopefully some takeaways for the purpose of discussion on [this thread] (Add Hubzilla (add new category for "distributed application ecosystems?)):
- 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.
Anything I missed?