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> A hyperscaler clause such that any managed offering has to (1) be fully open source, (2) has to pay a fee, or (3) is prevented outright.

A copyleft licence (not necessarily GPL, there is also MPL and EUPL) from the beginning on would result in (1), no need for a new license.

But people "don't want strings attached" and are happier with permissive licences, and then they complain.






No you are wrong. People want adoption by any company other than hyperscalers. People would be happy to sell service contracts and the like while keeping their code foss, if only hyperscalers weren’t direct competitors to that.

But the reality is that current copyleft licenses means immediate blacklist by most companies legal department.

Which is why almost all cooyleft companies offer copyleft plus some corporate licensing even though in 99 percent of the cases it has nothing to do with the spirit of copyleft as companies just want to import and use the damn package in some completely unrelated internal project or whatever

The combination of unclear legal precedent and corporate governance means that copyleft in it’s current state exactly does not work as most people want


> But the reality is that current copyleft licenses means immediate blacklist by most companies legal department.

Because they always manage to find permissively-licenced alternatives! There are many different copyleft licences (not only the GPL family, take e.g. MPL or EUPL) that can be used and that are not "viral".

> The combination of unclear legal precedent and corporate governance means that copyleft in it’s current state exactly does not work as most people want

This is wrong. What it means is that corporate governance doesn't handle it correctly, because they don't need to.

If a project goes permissive because they want to please corporations, they shouldn't whine when they do. Otherwise they should just use a copyleft licence and teach the smaller companies that they can actually totally use that!


that copyleft licenses have disputed consequences in the EU is a fact, which makes them inherently risky

I read papers about copyleft in general but I personally have run in with this for agpl, i should say



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