• mholiv@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    Ask Cisco how they feel about it. There is a precedence of companies using copy left licensed software and the community benefiting from it.

    If companies are just going to be blatantly criminal and violate software licenses they were going to do that anyways. I’m not sure how much experience you have working in or with mega corps but the ones I have worked with in the past HATE the idea of opening themselves up to being so blatantly liable.

    When I worked in big tech we had a license scanner that checked the libraries we were using. Anything strongly copyleft would be flagged and we would be contacted by legal.

    You might have experienced working with companies that act otherwise. I encourage you to call them out, maybe work with the FSF to get another Cisco style ruling.

    Funny you mention ZFS though. It’s not the GPL that was the issue. It is CDDL that’s incompatible. GPL is generally comparable with foss licenses. MIT, MPL, Apache, BSD all are comparable. It’s just CDDL that’s incompatible with copyleft in general.

    If you think the community will benefit more from MIT licensed software than copyleft I think you need to look harder at the modern corporate world. Corporations are not altruistic.

    This being said I’m not sure there is much more to be said here. You’ve gone to saying I believe in magic and that there are corporate GPL conspiracies. I just don’t see the proof and I think there is not much more to be gained by such talk.

    • vovᴀɴıᴜᴍ⁺@quietplace.xyz
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      3 days ago

      @mholiv@lemmy.world Going criminal is not a goal in itself. I think you know, corporations exist for profit. If violating a licence gains profit they’ll do it. You know companies doing open source? I know too. Why do they do it? Because of GPL? No, they do because they profit from it. (And they like how copyleft licences restrict others from benefiting).

      You see problem with CDDL? Problem would be any other copyleft licence. No copyleft licence is compatible with GPL (except they include special exception), neither CDDL, nor GFDL (despite GNU in its name), nor any other. Funny you mention MIT, MPL, Apache and BSD in this list, because they’re all permissive that are compatible to both GPL and CDDL. It is not CDDL, but copyleft making these licences incompatible. I mentioned CDDL specifically because it is an iconic example how copyleft (allows a company to) hurt open source.

      You’re speaking about “conspiracies”, and ask me for proofs. But what proofs do you need? That companies violate licences? There are known cases of open source licence litigations. Actually problem is deeper, not that companies violate licences, but that there’s no effective way to enforce such licences (without totalitarism).