Subject: A capital explanation for the GPL (no flames)
Message: Hi Mike and Chris,
I am running a little behind, but your recent ..erm..thoughts....on the GPL could have been interpreted by those not so strong in the force as slightly one sided.
I wanted to chime in on some rational thoughts, for why the GPL is great from a purely capitalist perspective in *some* cases.

I started, or contribute significantly, to a few small GPL projects which attract around 5-15 individual contributors. I don't want to list them, because I don't want to speak on behalf of the projects. We don't have a donations page or any means to donate funds monitarily and I doubt we would consider a re-license under any realistic conditions. I think the rational would go something like this:


 * Most of us would probably be on 80k-130k + super salaries. So any "fee" to change the license, when split up is going to be somewhat small on an individual basis.
 * Our infra costs are minimal (esp with github et al.) and most of us are happy to contribute the small amount we do.
 * Any contribution is likely to create some feelings of in-equity, in-equality or resentment which has the real potential to drive the community apart.
 * We can't really pay anyone to add features for a similar reason, and the bottle neck is time of the existing developers or lack of developers. Not money.

So the only real thing of value anyone can give us, is code. Features, fixes etc... or some project using our code as a backbone for it.

Which is the only thing the GPL is asking for. So while I do think it's unreasonable to say tweet, "hey you should have used our GPL software", I don't think it's unreasonable to highlight, "hey if you were using our software, yes you'd have to give back your code, but you would have all this extra revenue". Especially where you need infrastructure and servers and artwork etc.... which do not fall under the GPL . So it's not like someone can just grab your game wholesale.

I think there is a general misconception that because money is the most valuable thing to "us" (being the company) that it's the most valuable thing to these projects, and highlighting, that the code is the currency, might help to frame the conversation in a way that makes more sense to that capitalist Jar Jar bastard.

love the show, even the vitriol..
your friendly Go, Java, C# (on Linux) and PHP developer

Andrew