Why have just one license when you can have 5?
Conversation
I'd love to learn more about the background of this strategy
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Seem very complicated to me, my experience with other companies is usually 'if its not MIT/Apache2' we can't /won't use it out of principle. So this requires a lot of understanding from the other side to even attempt it.
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Especially bigger corps have rather stodgy/non-understanding legal departments. So i'm curious why the license is the way it is.
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Two core principles:
1. Be as permissive as possible (i.e. most of the project is Apache)
2. If I need to support my work later by offering some paid premium tier, deter free-riding commercial competitors (i.e. application layer is copyleft)
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We have a similar worry around 2., however our plan currently is 'yolo' if people try to compete with our own product with us that seems.. possibly not a big deal.
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I think it is a big deal! It's happened again and again in the COSS space. Additionally, Khan Academy had to deal with people who repackaged the source with a new name then charged people for it, which caused confusion and indirectly harmed the brand.
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Yea but is a license going to save you from these people/activities? And does focussing on fixing it actually help much? I'm thinking you just need to go faster than everyone and keep a grip on your community.
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Yes, these are reasonable counterpoints. It's just a deterrence. And I have to hope that it's a greater deterrence to copycats than to potential contributors. If that's not the case, I'll change it! :)
I also really don't know right, i'm simply testing the theory of 'you can't stop them anyway' best you can do is just go fullsteam ahead. If this all fails we can always lock down a bit more / delay the open code or something similar. If you have dev momentum that will fix it.
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