On Tuesday, 5 September 2017 at 22:25:57 UTC, Jonathan M Davis
wrote:
If you go with a BSD or Boost license, you're maximizing who
can use your software, but you have no guarantees that any
improvements will be made available, whereas the (L)GPL does
guarantee that those improvements will be made available
(assuming that folks behave themselves and follow the license
anyway), but that means that there are a lot of projects that
can't use your software, because those restrictions are
unacceptable to those developing it.
I'll also note that if a developer uses GPL software on the
server, he doesn't have to give any source to users who access
apps on the server remotely. For example, Google uses a linux
kernel with proprietary modifications on a million servers
running their search engine, yet my understanding is that they
have not made most of those modifications available, as they're
not required to under the GPL. By contrast, every Android vendor
has to release the source for their linux kernel. It's not a
coincidence that GPL software took off on the sever, until and
except for Android's kernel.
That's why some devs then came up with the Affero GPL, to close
the server loophole, though it hasn't been used for linux:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affero_General_Public_License
