Underfunding or why I am not interested

[Chris Travers]

On Sun, Feb 23, 2014 at 11:23 PM, HRJet <hrjet9 at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> 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.
>

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).

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.

The choice of license needs to be steered by the desire to  build a
community of contributors IMHO.

-- 
Best Wishes,
Chris Travers

Efficito:  Hosted Accounting and ERP.  Robust and Flexible.  No vendor
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