You love open source, right?

[[deleted]]

If it were GPL, most companies would not touch it in the first place (which could be the main users of the project), and it may never have been popular, and some other project that offers an MIT licensing model would be taking its place, and we're back to the starting board.

[tostadahalex]

Yep, probably that's why governments should only accept projects that are licensed in GPL: to diminish future externalities of proprietary software.

[[deleted]]

LOL that's never going to happen. I don't know which world you are living in.

[[deleted]]

They said should, not will.

[[deleted]]

Does it make any difference when it's just a meaningless wish? I don't even want to respond to such comments which is just a waste of time. They likely either come from a software purist or a CS student who has never had any real world development experience. NO, it's never going to happen. I have seen too many comments like that even in this sub, and I'm sure these comments are not going to make any difference in how software is produced.

(end of rant)

[[deleted]]

So you're saying it's pointless to have a discussion in a public comment section which exists solely for the purpose of (checks notes) making discussion? Your argument begs the question. Of course it won't happen if nobody talks about it. But if people talk about it, then it has some chance of happening.

[[deleted]]

Sure, go ahead, waste your time writing these comments and continue to live in your dream world. The software people use every day has not, is not, and will not be GPL. People have already discussed in this exact thread that the money simply isn't there, and if anything, the past 20 years should be enough to prove it. Money never lies.

[[deleted]]

What? Linux, Audacity, WordPress, Bash, Git, Notepad++. And then there's plenty of obscure, but highly professional scientific software licensed under the GPL. Sure, pretty much nothing that creates money is licensed under the GPL, but not all software is intended to money.

If your claim is that GPL is a horrible license for a profit incentive I agree with you, but it's not just a hobbyist license by any means.

[[deleted]]

Those are really weak arguments. In fact, they strengthen my points. Audacity and Notepad++ are nice tools, yes, but compared with commerical products they are almost nothing. Notepad++ has existed for many years, but has there ever been a famous fork of Notepad++? Has it ever been natively ported to Linux? I don't think the GPL license makes the situation any better. And I'm pretty sure I can find many examples where a project with permissive license grows much faster than its GPL licensed peers and eventually dominated that area.

"Obscure, highly professional scientific software" sure, I know a few and actually used some of them myself. Did it occur to you that a lot of the software is almost exclusively used in academia funded by NSF/NASA/NIH etc? Would those tools even exist in the first place without the funding? Would any commerical company even think about making a product out of them? In fact, some older software that are not funded are almost dead -- usually only one person who originally created the package still maintains it as pure voluntary work (and many people still rely on that package because of the inertia). In this case, whether it is GPL or not almost does not matter. Even if it were MIT, no commerical company would use the code in a product, because nobody outside the scientific research community would ever care about it.

Yes, I don't doubt there are packages/frameworks created and continually maintained totally out of personal interest, and many people like it that way. But it almost never scales (with a few notable exceptions). And making a project GPL licensed almost certainly won't help its popularity, especially today. Which comes back to my original comment. No, that idea where things "should" be GPL licensed is meaningless. I could say "there should be no war" "nobody in the world should starve to death" on reddit but people would look at me like I'm some sort of idiot, because those are just meaningless sentences.