Open Source is beginning to lose all of its value as a term...

...as in a river delivering "open source" water.

Let's get back to dealing with "Free Software" and the clear GPL license.

@Algot How ya figure, open-source seems to be a rather useful and meaningful term.

Personally as an open-source contributor I refuse to contribute to GPL due to its vital nature. As a license it simply doesnt work or play well with others.

Generally MIT like licenses like BSD and Apache are the way to go. They can thankfully play nice with each other, and unlike GPL free means free (As in freedom).

I disagree. I can understand from the perspective of people who use copyleft, that they don't want their work taken by a competitor, then outcompeted with no compensation.

In the case of software, for example, someone writes code, then a company takes it, and deprecates the original (by scale of effort such as marketing, etc). It maybe is too stringent, if the code is something like a library meant to be used by applications.

But conceptually, for example, an author writes a book and distributes under CC-BY. It'd be unfair for the author if Hollywood later uses it to make a blockbuster movie with no type of obligation to compensate said author.

Additionally, if someone does not want to use GPL to infect the codebase AFAIK, there can still be negotiations under acceptable terms e.g the many proprietary video games made under GPL game engines. (Call of Duty games, and Quake engine)

@licho
GPL usually cant be negotiated due to the viral nature. You'fd have to get permission from every author, every gpl libraries author, etc. Usually not possible.

If I wrote a book and released it to be open-source I would be happy if someone made a movie out of it. I had no intentions of making money off of it in the first place, so why would I find it unfair?

The other part your forgetting is the act of it being open-source is already reducing how much they can make off of it such that they are essentially making money off their additions.

Consider the book example. If someone takes the book, adds a single line of text, and then sells it. Well under a permissive license they must still indicate it comes from open-source. So anyone looking at the book on a shelf will quickly see that a free and open version (sans the one line) is availible for free. So if someone wants to purchase the new one they arent buying the full book, they are only considering the value of the one additional line and if that is worth buying the book.

In short they arent making money off your open-sourced book, they are only making money off of their ADDITIONS to that book. Which I dont see as even remotely unfair.

@rmbl @vaeringjar

Please don't @ those other people, there is a ghost reply issue on GS!
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