The problem with a copyleft license is it’s hard to make a commercial software open source because a competitor can simply copy your work and sell it for cheaper.
I know. It’s obviously better for the consumer, but it makes it harder to base your business around it, as noted in that article.
So if I want to build a business, I have to look for libraries that are not copy left, and if I want businesses to use my software, I should not license my software as copy left.
No. You should think in terms of offsetting development cost. When you choose non-copyleft you do it to keep code private, which means you will support all dev costs. It limits how the software can grow because it’s basically vertical scalability — not to mention being culturally limited inside the company.
When you choose copyleft you commit to open source and so does everybody who wants a piece of that software, which makes it much easier for everybody interested in it to offset their development through everybody’s efforts.
With open source there are documented positive feedback effects. Companies who grow to depend on specific software find it cheaper and more efficient for their own interests and benefit to maintain fewer permanent developers as high upstream as possible — as opposed to having many occasional developers downstream, dealing with stuff as it trickles down.
FOSS creates reliable, diverse and ultimately healthy software ecosystems because everybody competes to improve the software first and foremost.
These days selling the software itself is rarely successful nor a particularly good business model. Basically only computer games still work like that, and the commercially really successful ones not any more either.
Hard agree on this. Sell software and services to companies, only sell services to end users. I believe both selling your service as a dev and selling a service behind a free app are compatible with copyleft.
@WolfLink@poVoq open source is a development model, not a business model, if you don’t provide value beyond the bits then you’re going to have a hard time but a copyleft license ensures the playing field is level and no vendor can take your code and extend it with added functionality without releasing that code too
That’s true of any free software license, and as far as I know most formerly-free fauxpen source projects were licensed under a permissive license, because the intent was to be “business friendly” open source projects.
In fact, copyleft actually has an advantage here; other members of the community can sell your work, but they are also required to respect the copyleft. Stronger copyleft licenses like the Affero GPL even protect against proprietarizing free software as a “cloud” service, but “business friendly” projects don’t want it.
Makes sense because if you want to make freely available code but want to allow commercial projects to use it you want to use a liberal license because if your code is copy left licensed businesses won’t want to use it.
I’ve seen this in action: I’ve seen a business reject working with one research group because their code was copyleft licensed, so instead they turned to another group offering a liberally licensed competitor.
The problem with a copyleft license is it’s hard to make a commercial software open source because a competitor can simply copy your work and sell it for cheaper.
That isn’t a problem, but a feature, see: https://opensource.net/why-single-vendor-is-the-new-proprietary/
I know. It’s obviously better for the consumer, but it makes it harder to base your business around it, as noted in that article.
So if I want to build a business, I have to look for libraries that are not copy left, and if I want businesses to use my software, I should not license my software as copy left.
No. You should think in terms of offsetting development cost. When you choose non-copyleft you do it to keep code private, which means you will support all dev costs. It limits how the software can grow because it’s basically vertical scalability — not to mention being culturally limited inside the company.
When you choose copyleft you commit to open source and so does everybody who wants a piece of that software, which makes it much easier for everybody interested in it to offset their development through everybody’s efforts.
With open source there are documented positive feedback effects. Companies who grow to depend on specific software find it cheaper and more efficient for their own interests and benefit to maintain fewer permanent developers as high upstream as possible — as opposed to having many occasional developers downstream, dealing with stuff as it trickles down.
FOSS creates reliable, diverse and ultimately healthy software ecosystems because everybody competes to improve the software first and foremost.
These days selling the software itself is rarely successful nor a particularly good business model. Basically only computer games still work like that, and the commercially really successful ones not any more either.
And this is how we got everything must be online/subscription or everything is a web app. And people complain about that too.
Hard agree on this. Sell software and services to companies, only sell services to end users. I believe both selling your service as a dev and selling a service behind a free app are compatible with copyleft.
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@WolfLink @poVoq open source is a development model, not a business model, if you don’t provide value beyond the bits then you’re going to have a hard time but a copyleft license ensures the playing field is level and no vendor can take your code and extend it with added functionality without releasing that code too
That’s true of any free software license, and as far as I know most formerly-free fauxpen source projects were licensed under a permissive license, because the intent was to be “business friendly” open source projects.
In fact, copyleft actually has an advantage here; other members of the community can sell your work, but they are also required to respect the copyleft. Stronger copyleft licenses like the Affero GPL even protect against proprietarizing free software as a “cloud” service, but “business friendly” projects don’t want it.
Makes sense because if you want to make freely available code but want to allow commercial projects to use it you want to use a liberal license because if your code is copy left licensed businesses won’t want to use it.
I’ve seen this in action: I’ve seen a business reject working with one research group because their code was copyleft licensed, so instead they turned to another group offering a liberally licensed competitor.