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I do think that your premise is correct, that permissive licenses produce more open-source and create a larger pool of authors.
But also allows more companies to shape the future of a project, the idea of copyleft is to limit the control of capital, copyleft by design is ment to reduce capital power in software, and that many times might be the desired outcome, especially if the project is of large importance, for smaller projects a copyleft or permisive license does not matter so much.
Also, to be honest, while copyleft licenses will affect capital interests, the Linux ecosystem is full of copyleft, and we can hardly say that the Linux ecosystem is a failure; in fact, it’s the backbone of what powers most of the online world. 2 replies
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And again I acknowledge that the 2025 landscape is very different from the one in the 90s, but it is very hard not to determine that copyleft licenses limit for-profit companies from being involved, all evidence point to that.
Even in your article, you argue that it will limit contributions by people who want to use the product commercially, if it had 0 effect on for-profit entities, then there would have been no meaningful difference between a copyleft and permissive license.
As you said in the first reply to this post, it’s an optimization issue. I already stated that I also think that, at least in the initial stages, copyleft will for sure have drawbacks, such as a lower number of contributions and interest, but at the same time, many for-profit entities will stay away.
I don’t pretend to know what is better for this project, but it’s my opinion that there are scenarios where success can exist with a copyleft license too. 1 reply
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