<div dir="ltr"><br><div class="gmail_extra"><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Sun, Feb 23, 2014 at 11:23 PM, HRJet <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:hrjet9@gmail.com" target="_blank">hrjet9@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_extra"><div style="font-size:small"><br></div><div style="font-size:small">I guess my point in a nutshell is: restrictions in GPL/AGPL are futile because businesses that didn't want to contribute back will find a way to move their proprietary stuff elsewhere in the stack. And those that did want to contribute back need not be restricted anyway.<br>
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</blockquote></div><div><br></div><div>I think the larger point is this: You aren't going to get contributions IMO just by virtue of the license. Or if you do, you won't get many. You get contributions by building a community of contributors and this would be the case with the MIT license as with the AGPL (taking the two extremes here).</div>
<div><br></div><div>If you get a good, vital body of contributors with a permissive license (like PostgreSQL has, for example) than even proprietary spinoffs end up playing second fiddle to the official version. If you fail to get a good vital body of contributors, then someone who doesn't like the license will just re-implement the API and license differently. And then if it is a library it becomes a lot harder for someone to argue "you used my library so it is derivative of my work so you need to abide by the license" since the software might be able to run on any of a number of compatible implementations.</div>
<div><br></div><div>The choice of license needs to be steered by the desire to build a community of contributors IMHO.</div><div><br></div>-- <br><div dir="ltr">Best Wishes,<div>Chris Travers</div><div><br></div><div>Efficito: Hosted Accounting and ERP. Robust and Flexible. No vendor lock-in.</div>
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