Especially the MIT license lends itself super well to exploitation by big tech. I just don’t get why it’s become all the rage in the open source space the past couple decades. It feels like every cool new thing is MIT licensed.
Comment on Hero of Free Software
bearboiblake@pawb.social 2 months ago
Ehhhh, it’s not really so clear cut, especially with non-GPL licensed open source software - corporations love unpaid labor
bennypr0fane@discuss.tchncs.de 2 months ago
bearboiblake@pawb.social 2 months ago
Especially the MIT license lends itself super well to exploitation by big tech. I just don’t get why it’s become all the rage in the open source space the past couple decades.
There’s a few reasons I think, some cool new things have big corporate sponsorships to get them off the ground and those sponsors would want a permissive license, MIT license has also long been linked to BSD so BSD fanboys like it, and also the open source community is pretty split between libertarians and leftists, MIT is generally popular with the libertarians, and GPL is generally popular with the leftists. Just in my personal experience!
StellarSt0rm@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I understand why a corporation would wanna contribute to projects with the MIT license, but they can contribute just fine with the GPL too, they just have to make those changes public, which is the contribution.
With MIT a lot of corporations will improve the project but not share it back to the community, which is the opposite of contribution, with GPL they’re forced to share it.
DacoTaco@lemmy.world 2 months ago
This.
Facebook messenger was ( still is?) Xmp and they sure profit. Same goes for stuff like xz, openssl, …
Nothing stops companies from using open source packages. Hell, as a software developer i can tell you they are build on top of them lol