innocenat

Copyleft license stated that any code that incorporated works under copyleft license (“derived work”) need to be licensed under same license. Their purpose is to make everyone contribute back to community, as in “Free as in Freedom” phrase by RMS. This idea look very good, and is in fact a very good idea to promote free and open source software.

But people do need to eat, drink have needs. They also need money to survive. And while technically it is possible to have commercial open source software under most popular copyleft license, the GNU GPL, it will be too easy to pirate.

Instead, commercials and other open source project who more open licenses (for example, the Apache Software Foundation) cannot reuse code under copyleft.

And how much of those that change their license to Copyleft to incorporated copyleft code? Almost none. They just completely reinvent it.

And that’s the problem. Big problem.

Instead of encourage sharing, I find that copyleft license encourage reinventing the wheel.

Now, the pro-GPL people will argue that GPL saves your work from being use commercially. Answer me, have any projects in FFmpeg Hall of Shame been sued? No, and not likely ever will.

Either people will reinvent the wheel, or they don’t care and use the code anyway. So please, if you can, don’t use GPL. Even LGPL is better, but Apache or MIT license is the best.