Comments on: Yet another overblown open source debate

Two years after the open-source licensing wars over "badgeware" and license proliferation, it's clear that customers simply don't care.

[jrepenning]

What is the point of quoting statistics based on the number of open-source projects? One of the great inventions of the open source movement is "cheap failure," and there are, as we all know, many many FOSS projects that are simply dead and irrelevant. It's tough on flip statisticians, I know, but there it is.

In any case, AGPL and/or CPAL have their full effect if even one FOSS component uses them, if I want to use that component, just as GPL would matter hugely even if only Linux used it.

[alamp23]

jrpenning, you make a fantastic point on the community side. And indeed the open source community recognizes that. But it does not help much from a commercial open source perspective if only a small number of companies adopt your license. To thrive commercially, a commercial open source vendor needs broad adoption of their product. So in that case, statistics matter.

[jgodse]

You are absolutely right. Most software folks just don't care. Web application providers that host their applications care even less. If you are a business that hosts web apps, you only really have to worry about AGPL (which forces you to give up your code) and licenses such as MPL or EPL that require you to send improvements back to the originator.

If you are a software distributor, then you only have to worry about GPL 2.x or 3.x because they require you to distribute the source to the entire derivative work. However anything that is MIT/BSD or Apache 2.0 is very safe for the business to use in terms of software licenses.

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