/dev/lawyer The Copyleft Bust Up

CRANK

What’s going on with new software license terms for businesses?Redis Labs has some. Neo4j, Dgraph, and Vespene, too. Mongo did its own. Midas guy’s in favor. A whole new VC firm wants more. Why?The two great camps of copyleft developers—software freedom activists and competitive upstarts—have split apart again. Upstarts can no longer achieve their goals with activist copyleft licenses. Activists don’t inhabit the same computing universe, or feel the same pain. So upstart copyleft developers are writing new licenses for themselves, on their own.That loss of copyleft cohesion threatens the historic balance that has kept open source broad-based. Permissive developers, riding a decade of adoption success and wary of copyleft to begin with, wonder now more than ever whether why they abide copyleft complexity and politics. Permissive points register all the more strongly, with copyleft developers too busy recriminating to answer them.None of this is new. Young software businesses with …