Originally posted by caligula
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What are you attempting to be a joke. OpenOffice under Apache 2.0 vs LibreOffice under Mozilla Public License you should have a serous look at. Yes Mozilla Public License is a copyleft license. Yes libreoffice has end up as the higher quality code and more paid full time developers.
This is not the only example of this. BSD and Apache licenses on a lot of projects end up losing out to the forks that go under other copyleft licenses.
Legal departments in many companies are more willing to sign off for their staff working on copyleft projects sharing their work out side the company than BSD or Apache ones. So yes non-copyleft might be able to claim to be more morally superior but the problem here is most companies we need to pay developer time are not morally superior. Also not all markets are filled with the same mix of companies either.
So depending on the companies who will use your code base and work on your code base serous-ally alters if you should use a copyleft license or not. Some areas like office suites and server kernels being copyleft has proven to be advantage.
Yes having a non copyleft code base in a market where the parties who will pay coders to work on the code are not morally superior but are morally inferior so will keep all their alterations in house will result the code base not developing.
Yes there are other markets where the companies are in the morally superior camp where they will give back without license requirement to BSD/Apache projects.
The horrible part here is a company can be morally superior in one market and morally inferior in another market this makes it very tricky at times to work out what the right license should be..
The choice between if a project should be copyleft or not is a very hard choice. The wrong choice could be the very reason the project fails to develop. Yes it very important to remember the world is filled with morally inferior people. Attempting to act morally superior is a good way to get laughed at as what you are attempting todo fails.
Interesting point here markets were large numbers people are willing to use commercial software without paying licenses they should are the markets in most cases you are better off using copyleft. Yes morally inferior people problem. This is a true one size does not fit all.
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