💾 Archived View for uscoffings.net › tech › software-licensing.gmi captured on 2023-09-08 at 15:51:51. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Rethinking Software Licensing

I have thought before about arguments for selecting one open source license over another. But I recently re-read FreeBSD's comparison of the BSD and GPL licenses:

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/articles/bsdl-gpl/article.html

One line seemed key, to me:

A less publicized and unintended use of the GPL is that it is very favorable to large companies that want to undercut software companies.

Oddly enough, I have previously used the GPL license to "stick it to the man". I'm not part of the one percent, so fuck 'em. And yet, the GPL is oddly suited to further monopolistic behavior. If everyone has the software for free and must share equally, who will profit the most? The ultimate capitalist will, because the only differentiating factor is what capital can bring to bear (financing the support, etc). The small innovator gets locked out of this system.

I suspect this is why Red Hat has nearly a $10B capitalization (or more, when IBM bought them), with almost no direct competition. Mom-and-pop operations have the source code, but do not have capital to compete in the consulting space. These small innovators can only help in the GPL space by contributing code... to the current behemoth.

As labor costs are driven to zero, only the capitalist will acrete more capital.

So while I tend to prefer to _use_ BSD-licensed systems (because they tend to be better engineered and better unified, due to not having these software silos), I can now also put my finger on why I prefer to use the BSD license for my own code.