this post was submitted on 02 May 2024
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That's true of any free software license, and as far as I know most formerly-free fauxpen source projects were licensed under a permissive license, because the intent was to be "business friendly" open source projects.
In fact, copyleft actually has an advantage here; other members of the community can sell your work, but they are also required to respect the copyleft. Stronger copyleft licenses like the Affero GPL even protect against proprietarizing free software as a "cloud" service, but "business friendly" projects don't want it.
Makes sense because if you want to make freely available code but want to allow commercial projects to use it you want to use a liberal license because if your code is copy left licensed businesses won’t want to use it.
I’ve seen this in action: I’ve seen a business reject working with one research group because their code was copyleft licensed, so instead they turned to another group offering a liberally licensed competitor.