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Seeing big companies take advantage of BSD or MIT licensed projects without sharing their contributions will always pain me.
(lemmy.world)
this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2024
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Sometimes there's a benefit in getting open source code into proprietary software. Think libraries implementing interoperability APIs, communication protocols, file formats, etc
That's what permissive licenses are for.
If some company wants to keep their code closed and they have a choice between something interoperable or something proprietary that they will subsequently promote, and the licence is the only thing stopping them from going for the open source approach, that's worse.
Completely agree that a good breadth of everything else is suited to copyleft licensing though
This is a hypothetical that has no clear bearing connection to common practice.
In other words, I could just reverse this to contradict it and have equal weight to my hypothetical: devs should always use GPL, because if their software gets widely adopted to the point where companies are forced to use it, it's better that it's copyleft.
This is not a hypothetical and is in fact quite common. Say you're working for a non profit, write code for a standard specification that is better than all other open options. It is better for everyone that companies adopt this code for interoperability.