TV is SOCIAL, again: The Honest Public License:

What motivated this new license now? We have a general availability version of Funambol coming out in September. I already know there are commercial companies that are live with our code and do not return anything. More than two years ago, we did something similar, switching Sync4j from BSD to GPL. There were companies taking our code and running away with it, without returning anything. One even managed to get public with software based on our code, and our community never saw a line of their modifications. Now is no different.

I've seen this argument for using GPLv2 libraries with edits on commercial web servers before, and from some large companies and government organizations.

Most interesting to me in that post was seeing someone with good, FSF values outside of FSF.  But I'm also reminded of my "GNG Manifeso" post years ago (over 11.  What traction!).  You can't really get mad at someone for "getting public" if you release under BSD.

From me:

This is also why I dislike the X11, BSD, and MIT licenses. These licenses don't do enough to protect the contributions of the people that made the code -- they essentially enable legalized plagiarism. It's certainly one's right to make code that's this unregulated, but these licenses are nearly overly altruistic motivations.

And, as we see here, the mistaken use of the BSD didn't match the intent either. But does that require GPL?  I don't think so.  I'd like to think you can strike a balance between making a company release everything and making a company release any improvements to the logic you helped create in your OSS lib.

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