@onekind
I’m less concerned about whether it could be enforced than I am about the incentives it creates.
Typically, a lawyer for a small company reads these licenses and decides it’s high risk. The outcome of litigation is uncertain and so avoiding it is the only affordable option. If the company uses the project internally, they can’t upstream bug fixes or new features to the project because that would expose them to risk. They often don’t even talk publicly about using the project.
Meanwhile, a lawyer at a big corporation reads the license. They see a bunch of loopholes that they can drive a truck through. They see a weak community who can’t afford a protracted legal battle. They see doing whatever they want as low risk.
Worse, it also makes it hard for companies to change their engagement strategy. In the BSD world, we’ve seen countless examples of companies that first look at a project and go ‘yay, free code! We don’t have to give back!’ And then they maintain an in-house fork and realise that more smart programmers don’t work for them than do. Their fork is lagging the community version in a bunch of important areas and they’re spending a load of money on just keeping up, in areas that aren’t their core business. They start upstreaming their patches. They see that their costs go down and their product improves (meanwhile, the community codebase also improves as a result of their contributions). They start to become advocates for the community.
This can’t happen in a GPL’d project because they’d have to admit that they had been violating the license all along and that would open them to liability.
Sep 15, 2026, 1:39 AM