On 9 February 2015 at 04:51, Rob Lanphier <robla(a)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.