this post was submitted on 02 May 2024
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[–] [email protected] 16 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

No. You should think in terms of offsetting development cost. When you choose non-copyleft you do it to keep code private, which means you will support all dev costs. It limits how the software can grow because it's basically vertical scalability — not to mention being culturally limited inside the company.

When you choose copyleft you commit to open source and so does everybody who wants a piece of that software, which makes it much easier for everybody interested in it to offset their development through everybody's efforts.

With open source there are documented positive feedback effects. Companies who grow to depend on specific software find it cheaper and more efficient for their own interests and benefit to maintain fewer permanent developers as high upstream as possible — as opposed to having many occasional developers downstream, dealing with stuff as it trickles down.

FOSS creates reliable, diverse and ultimately healthy software ecosystems because everybody competes to improve the software first and foremost.