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submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by carrylex@lemmy.world to c/programmer_humor@programming.dev
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[-] JATtho@lemmy.world 48 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

I hope we eventually get a copyleft lisence that states: "by using this product in a comercial product you have commited to supporting it, either by monetary fee or doing development work for it behalf, otherwise this product is entirely free of cost and is provided as-is".

Edit: and the developers can freely reproduce the GPL license exception for all their products:

// Under Section 7 of GPL version 3, you are granted additional
// permissions described in the GCC Runtime Library Exception, version
// 3.1, as published by the Free Software Foundation.

Currently, and I don't know why, this extremely useful license exception for (C++) headers, which is meant for compiled down to machine-code is not usable for anything else. If your library is not part of GCC, the GPL does not help you here. As such, if you publish a header only library under GPL, you cannot state that the code using your code is not under "API" boundary, ie. free of GPL, while keeping your precious header under GPL. And no, LGPL, does not save you here.

You only have non-copyleft lisences like MIT (disgusting), Apache (shitly less gross), BSL-1.0 (still non copyleft) or LGPL (not gross, but extremely limiting.)

And, if you still publish something, I plead it is at least under GPL, since this guarantees a life for the produce, non-negotioable, forever, which I think is still better than dying and giving up to pooh of public domain.

[-] CosmicTurtle0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 24 points 3 months ago

There is a "Commons Clause" that people can add but there is some controversy as to whether adding this clause is enforceable. It very much would violate the strict definition of "FOSS".

That said, I very much am against corporations that make full use of FOSS without contributing anything meaningful in return. I personally believe companies that make over $1M in revenue should absolutely donate something to the FOSS products they use.

Not only that but developers need to stop using permissive licenses like MIT or CC0. Moving to something like GPL3 (and specifically version 3) would go a long way for companies to stop treating open source as a well they can exploit.

[-] punchmesan@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 3 months ago

Discussion I've seen on the subject on Hacker News tends to veer towards MIT being the only license allowed for use in many orgs (with exceptions of course) because license compliance is hard to manage when you're using a lot of open source and you're a small org. So many developers release their code with MIT licenses so it gets used more and looks better on the portfolio.

While I can see their perspective I personally agree with your take and would love to see more GPLv3 adoption and fewer stupidly permissive licenses. There's tooling out there to help with the license compliance challenges, if enough developers moved away from MIT licenses then companies will be forced to deal with it.

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this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2026
1010 points (99.2% liked)

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