On 23/01/2013 4:41 AM, Nukeador wrote:
In terms of contributions, I think BSD-licensed code gets less contributors
because they don't have to, there is no social pressure, if the license
doesn't force you to contribute back, there are a lot of people that won't
do it.
There's a lot of assumptions baked into this statement. Let's break
them down:
* People making significant improvements to a Mozilla codebase will be
more motivated by copyleft than any other factor.
I think this dramatically understates the cost of maintaining a
downstream fork. If we're talking about major improvements, keeping
those up to date is going to be more work than just contributing them back.
* People who do not want to contribute back are still going to depend on
a copyleft-licensed codebase
If a company doesn't want to contribute back, or has reasons why they
don't want to publicly share any of their code, a copyleft license
represents a cost and risk that they may not want to accept.
* Forcing people to contribute will yield positive interactions and
outcomes.
If people who don't want to contribute are forced by circumstance to
adopt our code, they're more likely to do the minimum requirement, which
would be to publish their diffs, not going through the process of
contributing and landing upstream. Throwing changes over the wall
doesn't do us much good.
* The most important metric is how many code contributions we get back
I don't think that's true, though it's an appealing coder-centric
mindset. I don't think our goals in writing code are to get other
people to write code. We build software for people to use as a lever to
drive towards making the Internet better. If no one gives code back,
but the code we write becomes widely adopted and a key factor in keeping
the Web open, Mozilla is a success. If we have a ton of awesome people
contributing a ton of awesome code that no one uses, we're irrelevant.
Any license policy change we consider should be focused on maximizing
the reach and usage of our software. Obviously we should do that in a
way that provides us with adequate protections for contributors, but
given the choice between creating more involuntary contributors and
gaining voluntary users of our software, the latter _must_ win.
-- Mike
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