On 9 February 2015 at 04:51, Rob Lanphier robla@wikimedia.org wrote:
Also, one cost of copyleft licenses is that they are much, much more complicated than permissive licenses. Even though many people feel comfortable with the compliance requirements of most OSI-approved licenses, the permissive licenses can usually stand alone without an FAQ, whereas an FAQ is required for just about all of the copyleft licenses. That simplicity reduces a very real barrier to adoption.
Is this statement from anecdote or data? Otherwise you need to explain how LibreOffice (copyleft) has fifteen or so companies contributing, whereas Apache OpenOffice (permissive) has one and even they've given up actually paying people to work on it. The idea that permissive works better for getting contributions seems to me completely unevidenced.
- d.