Companies like Amazon and Google are smart enough to understand the licenses and know that they don't need to contribute anything back or pay for a license though. I guess providing a license can work in some weird cases like the useless $6000 SQLite license that's available.
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Apple flat out bans GPL anything for example. They’re a big company that’d rather not bother at all. Smaller companies also frequently have the same kind of approach. I’ve worked for a few of them too.
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In the Apple case, I think it's really the other way around. In the past, they incorporated tons of GPL2 software and released some of their own. It's the GPL3 that they're allergic to, maybe due to the patent grant but it also directly forbids having an immutable root of trust.
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It's GPL3 that bans using the software as part of firmware or an OS with signature verification based on an immutable key in hardware. Apple couldn't have used it on the iPhone unless they supported users setting the key like many other devices. Patent grant may also scare them.
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If someone is using GPL3 because they believe in the ideology behind it, then I don't think they would want to sell a license for creating a locked down device. You could use GPL3 to force companies to pay for a license for this case, but it's a tiny subset of commercial use.
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I'm providing my thoughts on it as someone that has struggled to earn money from my open source work for many years, including trying and failing to monetize it by (ab)using GPL3 to coerce companies into paying. If you don't want my thoughts, I'll gladly not waste my time here...
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The approach of simply requiring payment for commercial usage worked much better, but ultimately I prefer just writing permissively licensed software if I can get funding to do that in a sustainable way. I didn't even like GPL3 since projects I wanted to support couldn't use it.
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Using GPL3 instead of permissive licensing didn't work for making it sustainable. It didn't deter any usage. I would have needed to buy a device, demand sources, hope they supplied them and I doubt they made any real improvements. It would take work to incorporate those anyway.
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My overall point is just that based on both my personal experiences in my own projects, those I've been involved in and many that I've closely observed, I don't think GPL achieves much in terms of sustainability. If anything using MIT licensing leads to more use and more support.
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I certainly agree there's a serious problem with funding for open source work. I don't think the solution is licensing, other than forbidding commercial usage which stops it from being open source per the OSI definition, although it can be modified / distributed non-commercially.

