Open Source Licenses

[kristoff]

@prokoprandacek

Because zig is licensed under permissive license, it has allowed somebody to fork zig and started to sell their own fork. That is a shame not because they are making a profit from free software but because they are improving the software and not sharing the improvements back upstream, resulting in worse software overall for the user!

That fork is dead and has been for a long time, they were even in violation of the terms of the MIT license (they did not properly credit Zig contributors), but none of that played a role, what actually killed that fork was:

• writing a blog post in Japanese explaining the abuse perpetuated by the other project in order to cancel the language-barrier advantage the fork had (it was aimed at a Japanese audience and leveraged hard the fact that a lot of Japanese people don’t speak japanese)
• the post getting on hn which caused the ceo of that company to get blasted hard by the court of public opinion

@prokoprandacek

As a user, I don’t want the program author to restrict what I want to do with it.

Sure but as an author you do want to put limits. Case in point, MIT is more permissive than GPL :^)

Here’s Scott’s post I mentioned earlier Help me choose a license for my project - #5 by ScottRedig