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A Licence is Not a Virus

I find something comical about people who refer to FOSS licences as ‘viral licensing’. In order to refer to it as a virus, the following has to occur:

1. Soydev wants to charge money for his amazing software idea, but doesn’t want to write the software.

2. Finding a slew of MIT-licensed (and therefore free to use) software, he cobbles together enough libraries to achieve his goal, and the mega-bucks app lies within sight.

3. Tragedy strikes as one of the ‘free’ projects he’s copied in fact uses the GPL, which then makes his project also GPL.

OH NO MY PROJECT GOT A VIRUS!!

In reality, nobody in the world has ever (not even once) had a malicious FOSS-licence thrust into their project unwillingly. Anyone who copied code with an open-source licence made that decision, or failed to read the licence, which speaks particularly badly of the Soydev since everyone writes these licences in plain English.

Every single one basically reads ‘you can copy this code, and change it, as long as I can copy your code and change it too’.

Licences such as MIT and the Apache licences exist as ‘Schroedinger’s Licences’, where anyone can copy them, but they will one-day become either proprietary, or FOSS.

When a copy of a project becomes closed-source, taking on a proprietary licence, the original creators never say ‘my project got a virus’, and if they did, we could only remind them of the time we already told them to use the GPL if they didn’t want their code used to make other people money, without any recognition or payment. The opposite cannot be said, because apparently having code open for anyone means it caught a virus, for reasons nobody has explained to me.