Replying to Avatar gsovereignty

Apple captured the value created by freebsd. It was a non-reciprocal one-way value transfer from freebsd open source contributors to apple.

Apple relicensed freebsd, making it illegal for freebsd (the open-source competition) to use apple's improvements and to leverage to State to enforce an ongoing one-way value transfer.

This is why Linux is GPL.
Avatar
signal_and_rage 2y ago

But at the same time Google uses the OS and contributes to the open source project, right?

And the cofounder worked at Apple for 12 years.

Apple has gotten caught even when they didn’t have the license and had to pay, but for every bad Apple there appears to be a net benefit from other contributors and a larger pie with private business investing in the space.

Each space and situation is different and might find a different license more appropriate.

For projects around bitcoin there’s a push for MIT so you can’t get rugged, and with nostr being “Public domain” grown has absolutely skyrocketed because of it prolly.

But devs need to decide where they want to see their code in the world as long as they still can.

Reply to this note

Please Login to reply.

Discussion

Avatar
gsovereignty 2y ago

Google is kind of better but not by much. When they first launched android they got a heap of open source developers to contribute for free under the belief it would always be fully open, then they started closing it off and changing the licenses when forks began popping up.

I'm pretty sure that two-way remixing GPL/MPL provides will win out. I understand why people like the no-questions-asked one-way value transfer model, and it gets investors on your side early, but I don't think it's sustainable long term.