How many people do you know, who write open source? If you've been in the tech industry at all its probably hundreds if not thousands. How many of them are okay with the GPL when someone used their GPL'd code in a product (and lets say they even provide an obscure URL with source code for that part of it) and that product is making them thousands if not millions of dollars in product revenue.
Nearly every person I know in that position, have been offended by someone making money off their work, and they don't get any of it. That latter bit is especially irksome in most cases. Usually its some rant of "I wrote that code for people to share, not get rich off of!" or something like that. The "Busybox" story[1] is like the poster child here. Once there were successful lawsuits these folks figured out how to have their cake and eat it to. Read up on the Linksys lawsuit[2]. Forcing compliance costs money (lawyers and such) and time and the payoff is pretty much always to the lawyers and not the people who were irritated their software was being profitably sold.
Contrast that with software that has an explicit non-commercial license but offers a commercial license, that stuff gets licensed and the developers get paid when it does, not a bunch of lawyers.
I realize not everyone has grown up with this stuff, the point I was trying to make (poorly it seems) is that as a legal tool to "protect" developers from having others steal their work and profit from it, I feel like it failed utterly to do that. When the company I was at was acquired by IBM back in 2015 I did all of the license clearance work for all of the software in our stack. People who had "permissive" licenses that offered a way for IBM to license it with legal cover, they got whatever they needed (some wanted a token licensing fee, others a donation to FSF or another non-profit), for the parts that were covered under GPL and not available under a different license, IBM just dropped on the floor because of their history with the whole SCO/Linux lawsuits.
I get that folks want to share their code with folks who can use it, I totally support that. I also know that absolutely nobody wants to be called at 3AM to fix. for free, a CVE that their code has because some Enterprise customer paying the caller is all in a twist. Having language in the license at the start that clarifies stuff like that is essential.
How many people do you know, who write open source? If you've been in the tech industry at all its probably hundreds if not thousands. How many of them are okay with the GPL when someone used their GPL'd code in a product (and lets say they even provide an obscure URL with source code for that part of it) and that product is making them thousands if not millions of dollars in product revenue.
Nearly every person I know in that position, have been offended by someone making money off their work, and they don't get any of it. That latter bit is especially irksome in most cases. Usually its some rant of "I wrote that code for people to share, not get rich off of!" or something like that. The "Busybox" story[1] is like the poster child here. Once there were successful lawsuits these folks figured out how to have their cake and eat it to. Read up on the Linksys lawsuit[2]. Forcing compliance costs money (lawyers and such) and time and the payoff is pretty much always to the lawyers and not the people who were irritated their software was being profitably sold.
Contrast that with software that has an explicit non-commercial license but offers a commercial license, that stuff gets licensed and the developers get paid when it does, not a bunch of lawyers.
I realize not everyone has grown up with this stuff, the point I was trying to make (poorly it seems) is that as a legal tool to "protect" developers from having others steal their work and profit from it, I feel like it failed utterly to do that. When the company I was at was acquired by IBM back in 2015 I did all of the license clearance work for all of the software in our stack. People who had "permissive" licenses that offered a way for IBM to license it with legal cover, they got whatever they needed (some wanted a token licensing fee, others a donation to FSF or another non-profit), for the parts that were covered under GPL and not available under a different license, IBM just dropped on the floor because of their history with the whole SCO/Linux lawsuits.
I get that folks want to share their code with folks who can use it, I totally support that. I also know that absolutely nobody wants to be called at 3AM to fix. for free, a CVE that their code has because some Enterprise customer paying the caller is all in a twist. Having language in the license at the start that clarifies stuff like that is essential.
[1] https://torquemag.io/2013/03/busybox/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Software_Foundation,_Inc.....