Context:

Permissive licenses (commonly referred to as “cuck licenses”) like the MIT license allow others to modify your software and release it under an unfree license. Copyleft licenses (like the Gnu General Public License) mandate that all derivative works remain free.

Andrew Tanenbaum developed MINIX, a modular operating system kernel. Intel went ahead and used it to build Management Engine, arguably one of the most widespread and invasive pieces of malware in the world, without even as much as telling him. There’s nothing Tanenbaum could do, since the MIT license allows this.

Erik Andersen is one of the developers of Busybox, a minimal implementation of that’s suited for embedded systems. Many companies tried to steal his code and distribute it with their unfree products, but since it’s protected under the GPL, Busybox developers were able to sue them and gain some money in the process.

Interestingly enough, Tanenbaum doesn’t seem to mind what intel did. But there are some examples out there of people regretting releasing their work under a permissive license.

  • DreamlandLividity@lemmy.world
    4·
    1 year ago

    The “problem” is that those contributions can be taken and exploited by large corporations.

    You say exploited, I say used. Or on the other hand, you can argue that large FOSS projects like Linux distros are exploiting smaller projects they package, since they don’t share their donations…

    IMO there is no issue if the wishes of the author are respected. The authors wishing for companies to use their code is just as valid as wishing to restrict it to FOSS.

      • DreamlandLividity@lemmy.world
        2·
        1 year ago

        I disagree. Sure, for some larger crucial projects, companies would pay. But for the majority of (small) projects, we would just handwrite an inferior solution from scratch rather than handle the bureaucracy. The result would be wasted additional effort, inferior features and more bugs.

        And even if that was not the case and bureaucracy was not an issue, the question is how much better would the paid for “professional” FOSS software be compared to the free one. If it was so much better, that it justified the price, it would outcompete the free one anyway. And if it is not, then by definition it is better we use the free one.