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notarobot123 parent
At this point, why shouldn't the licences change?

Sharing the result of collaborative efforts liberally makes sense. Wanting to be able to modify software and redistribute modifications makes sense. Allowing software to evolve in a broader eco-system makes sense.

What isn't seeming to make sense is how OSS software is used commercially and the way that skews the culture and priorities of open source projects. What purpose does the lack of commercial restrictions serve?

No restrictions on commercial use at all seems naive (and perhaps plain ideological) at this point. I used to think that things were too embedded to change but it does feel like a major shift is fermenting and has been for a while.


Arainach
There's always a tradeoff in use or contribution. If a project is under a more restrictive license the odds of individuals or companies contributing (or for certain licenses even using) drops radically.

If your intent is just "I wrote this thing, sharing the code" license as restrictively as you'd like. If your intent is "I want to build (and/or get others to help build) a bigger thing", restrictions scare folks off.

It's trivial for me to get approval from my employer to do almost anything in almost any MIT-licensed codebase; we use and contribute to a number of GPLv2 codebases. However GPLv3 is a very rigid line in the sand that I do not expect to ever change.

What is it about GPLv3 that causes a line in the sand?

The source distribution, modification and reinstallation requirements are pretty much identical, at least according to the main folks doing Linux kernel GPL enforcement for the last decades.

https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2021/mar/25/install-gplv2/ https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2021/jul/23/tivoization-and-t... https://events19.linuxfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017...

Arainach
The patent clauses are significant, and for any product which interacts with DRM the DRM clauses are a showstopper.
NoGravitas
The Peer Production License and its relatives are pretty good generally. The problem is always license compatibility. One of the benefits of Open Source licensing being kind of standardized has been composability. There's been a pretty clear gradient of "restrictiveness" of licenses, so when you mix software together, you just have to use the most restrictive license of your dependencies (or one that is more restrictive). Copyfarleft licenses are a good thing, but they make the restrictiveness dimension diverge in different ways, so you can't necessarily mix them with each other, or with the GPL (say).

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