The value of the Apache and BSD-family of licenses for me is that we have source code that we can improve together and that we may learn from and that we may inspect, at the same time as we are free to use it for any purpose as long as we retain the copyright notice and license text in the distributions of source and binaries.
If someone wants to only take and not give that’s fine too. However, if they don’t want to give, they should not expect help. But they are still free to open issues about it. After all it may be something that someone else wants to do.
But as for the company that the guy works for. I would suggest that if they don’t want to contribute themselves, but they really need the problem solved, hire an external contractor to fix it and have him/her submit the patch. I suggest this because the alternative is for them to maintain a set of patches internally and that will only serve to hold them back because either it will take away time from focusing on their own product, or it will mean that no one ever updates the software they run so they are stuck with an old version that doesn’t get security fixes nor new features. So yeah.
The value of the Apache and BSD-family of licenses for me is that we have source code that we can improve together
Which "we"?!? The thing that differentiates the Apache and BSD-family licenses from the GPL that you can improve the source code for yourself, and not share your improvements. There is no "together".
It's like the old quip about keeping an open mind: "But not so open that your brains fall out". Sure, they're "even more open" than the GPL -- too "open" to preserve everyone's freedom, which is what the whole idea was about. Your definition of "value" serves fundamentally anti-freedom values.
Those of us that value contributing where and when it makes sense to us.
For example, I have submitted a trivial patch to one of the tools in FreeBSD. And it is now part of a base install of FreeBSD, which means that when I install FreeBSD from official media, my patch is already included “free of charge” – that is, I don’t have to apply the patch myself on top of the official sources, nor to maintain a separate build of the tool in question. I benefit, and other users benefit.
Likewise I have some software on GitHub that I have released under the terms of the ISC license. Others may submit pull-requests, and if their patch is in line with my goals for the software, or if does not burden me overly much to maintain my software with those changes merged, I will merge the patches. The people that submitted the changes benefit and I benefit.
Meanwhile, sometimes I may want to modify a piece of software and not share the change. Being free to choose whether or not to share my changes benefits me. Likewise, me not forcing others to share their changes to software that I release under the terms of the ISC license has the potential to benefit other people.
Yeah, fair cop to all of those. But OTOH not obliging others to share their changes to something that they got for free has the potential to not benefit even more other people, so on the whole I think it's usually and on the whole a net loss of freedom. (And in practice, I think the over-permissiveness of the ancestor BSD license is what made Linux, not BSD, the dominant open OS. Had BSD been able to use the GPL [I guess that was legally impossible, right?] it might very well, IMO, have been the other way around.)
But I'm just armchair quarterbacking; I haven't contributed anything at all (yet? Hopefully!) besides kvetching like this, so hats off to you!
Comments
The value of the Apache and BSD-family of licenses for me is that we have source code that we can improve together and that we may learn from and that we may inspect, at the same time as we are free to use it for any purpose as long as we retain the copyright notice and license text in the distributions of source and binaries.
If someone wants to only take and not give that’s fine too. However, if they don’t want to give, they should not expect help. But they are still free to open issues about it. After all it may be something that someone else wants to do.
But as for the company that the guy works for. I would suggest that if they don’t want to contribute themselves, but they really need the problem solved, hire an external contractor to fix it and have him/her submit the patch. I suggest this because the alternative is for them to maintain a set of patches internally and that will only serve to hold them back because either it will take away time from focusing on their own product, or it will mean that no one ever updates the software they run so they are stuck with an old version that doesn’t get security fixes nor new features. So yeah.
Which "we"?!? The thing that differentiates the Apache and BSD-family licenses from the GPL that you can improve the source code for yourself, and not share your improvements. There is no "together".
It's like the old quip about keeping an open mind: "But not so open that your brains fall out". Sure, they're "even more open" than the GPL -- too "open" to preserve everyone's freedom, which is what the whole idea was about. Your definition of "value" serves fundamentally anti-freedom values.
Those of us that value contributing where and when it makes sense to us.
For example, I have submitted a trivial patch to one of the tools in FreeBSD. And it is now part of a base install of FreeBSD, which means that when I install FreeBSD from official media, my patch is already included “free of charge” – that is, I don’t have to apply the patch myself on top of the official sources, nor to maintain a separate build of the tool in question. I benefit, and other users benefit.
Likewise I have some software on GitHub that I have released under the terms of the ISC license. Others may submit pull-requests, and if their patch is in line with my goals for the software, or if does not burden me overly much to maintain my software with those changes merged, I will merge the patches. The people that submitted the changes benefit and I benefit.
Meanwhile, sometimes I may want to modify a piece of software and not share the change. Being free to choose whether or not to share my changes benefits me. Likewise, me not forcing others to share their changes to software that I release under the terms of the ISC license has the potential to benefit other people.
Yeah, fair cop to all of those. But OTOH not obliging others to share their changes to something that they got for free has the potential to not benefit even more other people, so on the whole I think it's usually and on the whole a net loss of freedom. (And in practice, I think the over-permissiveness of the ancestor BSD license is what made Linux, not BSD, the dominant open OS. Had BSD been able to use the GPL [I guess that was legally impossible, right?] it might very well, IMO, have been the other way around.)
But I'm just armchair quarterbacking; I haven't contributed anything at all (yet? Hopefully!) besides kvetching like this, so hats off to you!