Post #508152
2026-03-03 17:59 UTC
This debate is about as old as the existence of free licenses. I doubt anyone will have anything new to say in this thread.
One aspect that isn’t raised very much is that for a company to maintain software (including their own fork of any software however licensed) costs developer time (= money). It may be cheaper to contribute back anyway, no matter the license, just in order to outsource that effort. If we are talking about software where this is true, companies have an incentive to work with the existing maintainers even if they aren’t legally obliged to.
Replies (1)
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@jollyrogue@lemmy.ml 2026-03-03 23:33
This is the thing that people overlook. Carrying a patch set is a burden, and companies have to maintain the patch set. Upstream isn’t going to care about the patch set because not their problem, and they will make changes which benefit the open code in their repos. I’ve seen a company modify a FOSS project to fit their needs and get stuck with a multi-year old version because their changes were incompatible with never versions. They had to scrap the system and start over. Regardless of license, not contributing upstream creates a problem unless the company has the stomach to support the whole thing on their own.