I thought companies could bribe through the legal system, so why not licenses?

  • Amicese@lemmy.mlOP
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    2 years ago

    If a company had money to “bribe” why wouldn’t they just pay off the original creators for a license change?

    That can get expensive. If the companies could systematically subvert copyleft licenses; then they wouldn’t have to bribe each creator for a license change.

    It’s not the 90s anymore

    OK. It’s the 2020s and it’s still relevant.

    the majority of new software is released under permissive licensing.

    1. Source?
    2. And? Popularity doesn’t reduce the relevancy of permissive or copyleft licensing.

    Permissive licensing is still flawed; because it allows companies to remove the freedoms set by the license and not contribute to the original project. The Amazon-Elastisearch scandal is a modern example of abusing permissive licenses.[1][2]

    If you want a time-relevant example, Microsoft’s ‘Embrace, Extend, Extinguish’ tactic preyed on noncopyleft programs by copying the standard and then adding proprietary features to lock people out of it.[3] Copyleft is designed to prevent this tactic from working.

    And companies are more willing to upstream their code,

    Open-source is an irrelevant topic here. I am debating about copyleft licenses, not open-source licenses.


    1. Amazon: NOT OK - why we had to change Elastic licensing ↩︎

    2. Amazon responds to Elastic changing its open-source software license, SDTimes ↩︎

    3. The Microsoft Monopoly, The Science Elf ↩︎