Hi!
And is also infeasible. For a web service. GPL is
effectively weak
copyleft already; I think that's quite weak enough. (As I noted, there
is no actual evidence that permissive licenses secure more
This is very plausible, as the decision to contribute is rarely driven
by the license as a primary factor - you don't say "here's random
GPL-licensed project, I don't know anything about its domain, language,
goals, community, status or needs, but I feel compelled to contribute
because it's GPL!" - or at least, most people won't say that. As long as
the license is not completely un-acceptable, I would assume other
factors would dominate such decision. However, I know cases where I
personally had to write code or otherwise work around GPL libraries
because of license incompatibility with other open-source projects.
That, of course, can be also counted as "more contributions" but I don't
think that's what you meant :)
contributions than copyleft, and some evidence the
other way; despite
Out of curiosity, what evidence you mean?
fans of permissive licenses repeating the claims ad
nauseam over the
last fifteen years, they're notably short on examples.)
You must already know examples of successful projects under permissive
licenses. So you probably seeking the examples of why permissive license
solicits _more_ contributions that if the same project was under GPL.
Such example would require a rather rare occurrence of a project
changing the license while at mature stage and measuring the
contributions before and after the license change, otherwise we'd be
comparing apples to oranges. My personal opinion is, as I described
above, that license doesn't matter too much provided it's not
unacceptably restrictive. Thus, for me looking for such examples would
be a waste of time :)
--
Stas Malyshev
smalyshev(a)wikimedia.org