On Wed, Feb 11, 2015 at 10:55 AM, Tyler Romeo <tylerro...@gmail.com> wrote: > On February 11, 2015 at 11:49:15, Bryan Davis (bd...@wikimedia.org) wrote: > > On Tue, Feb 10, 2015 at 8:48 PM, Tyler Romeo <tylerro...@gmail.com> wrote: >> What is more important: allowing as many people to use our libraries as >> possible, or protecting against our libraries from being used in proprietary >> software. > > For me, allowing as many people to use our libraries as possible. > > For the sake of the discussion, why? > > For me, the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. The advantage of getting > more companies to use our libraries is that (maybe) they will contribute > back, similar to what Apple does with LLVM. However, on the other side of > the same coin, we are allowing the possibility that companies will *not* > contribute back, and instead keep their improvements to themselves (to be > clear, I am not implying malicious intent).
My vanity site sums up my general opinion: > My professional career and the Internet in general are possible because > of free and open-source software. I’ve been designing, building and hosting > websites and web-based applications personally and professionally since > 1994 using predominantly free operating systems, compilers, interpreters, > application servers and editors. Without countless hours of work by > anonymous strangers, my career, lifestyle and hobbies would not be > possible. There’s no direct way I can repay all of those to whom I’m > indebted. The best thing I can do is share some of the things I’ve made in > the same spirit. I hope you can find something useful in my work. If you do, > you can repay me by sharing what you can with others. I write code to solve problems (and sometimes to entertain myself). If the problems I have are problems other people have then they are welcome to use my code. Its great when someone finds my problems engaging enough that they reciprocate by giving back patches that improve the solution for me as well, but creating a community and forcing reciprocal engagement is not my goal. Honestly I have no fears or qualms about code that I write being used in a commercial product. I worked as a commercial software developer for something like 18 years. All of the things I built during that time were in some way or another enabled by FOSS software. FOSS software helped me buy my first house and pay for my first real vacation. I also tried to be a good citizen of the open source community by upstreaming my little bug fixes and an occasional feature, but I did so of my own free will and not because of forced contracts. Bryan -- Bryan Davis Wikimedia Foundation <bd...@wikimedia.org> [[m:User:BDavis_(WMF)]] Sr Software Engineer Boise, ID USA irc: bd808 v:415.839.6885 x6855 _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
