6 ms·
Various open source licenses offer varied and particular benefits to the right-holders and the users. You have outlined some of them that suits your particular
by webmobdev 3y ago
Various open source licenses offer varied and particular benefits to the right-holders and the users. You have outlined some of them that suits your particular needs. Let me expand on that.
The only open source license that preserves your right to repair (of both the contributor and the user) is the variants of the GNU Public License (GPL). Every other open source project with more permissive license can one day be "close-sourced". The GPL requires that source is always available with the distribution. That is why I feel contributing to any non-GPL project is an unproductive venture as your own source code could one day be denied to you (which I find ridiculous due to the free labour involved).
Linux is a very good example of this - many corporates in the US and China have been forced to share the Linux source code they customised for their device due to the GPL. This has helped developers and new features and / or users maintain the software for their devices longer (even after the product reached end-of-life - see https://thenewstack.io/the-open-source-lesson-of-the-linksys-wrt54g-router/ https://thenewstack.io/the-open-source-lesson-of-the-linksys... for a good example of this).
The only reason the corporates aggressively advocate for non-GPL permissive opensource license is because that is the only way they can freely convert it to "close-sourced" versions, ensuring that you have to depend solely on them for future development. To me, that trumps the real benefits of the open source philosophy.