this post was submitted on 16 Nov 2025
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With permissive license, corporations are allowed publish a modified version of the software while restricting their code modifications from release to the community. That is not collaboration. Permissive license benefits corporations more than the community.
Which is why they choose permissive licenses for their projects. They receive code contributions from the community and then suddenly: rugpull! Starting from next version the software will be proprietary. The community contributors are of course having pikachu face when they realize the corporations are legally permitted to take the fruit of their labor from them because their contributions are under permissive license.
My time and effort has been lost. The fruit of my labor has been lost. When i contribute or make to a Free Software project, i wish for it to benefit the community the most. If corporations want to release a software based on modified version of my code, I want a guarantee that the modified code to be available to the community too. The corporations benefit from my labor, but the community receives the company's modified code too. That's collaboration. Copyleft licenses such as GPL guarantees this.
Of course, such guarantee is considered "restriction" if one never intends the community to be the primary beneficiary in the first place.
With permissive license your free labor benefits corporations the most. Corporations that take things and enshittify them and do not give back to the community, all the while they get rich. Your choice your prerogative.
We disagree and you have not addressed my points. So let me stress them.
Again, totally agree. Under a permissive license , they do not have to share their work if they do not want to.
How? We both have access to the exact same code. We can license our modifications as we wish including GPL or proprietary. They can do the same. We mutually benefit when we choose the original license.
As I have pointed out elsewhere, permissive licenses tend to attract more corporate contribution (and collaboration between corporations). That benefits me a lot.
Google probably has an “extended” version of Clang internally. That is ok with me. I enjoy the substantial code that they do share with me. Same with Microsoft and Apple that collaborate in the same project. I enjoy innovations like Rust and Zig that get built on top. I enjoy FreeBSD that uses it and my main distro Chimera Linux that uses it as well.
I seem to benefit quite a lot.
Hard to know how to respond here. Corporations can use you code under any Open Source license, including copyleft (GPL). They do not get one line extra from you because it is permissively licensed.
I guess I will say “pikachu face” when corporations realize that I can take their permissive code and use it for free for any purpose or even compete directly against them! And I can combine their code with any code I want including proprietary and GPL! And I I think preventing this kind of thing is the main reason Red Hat likes the GPL (you know, the biggest Open Source corporation).
How? Real question. How is that statement accurate?
You put time and effort into advancing an Open Source project. All of that code is still there. It can be modified, studied, enhanced, and shared. What code is available to you and what you can do with it is entirely unchanged when a corporation adds proprietary code on top of it. You have not gained their code, true. But you have not lost yours. And you can keep anything they gave you previously (or in the future). Nothing has been lost.
And it does. All “4 freedoms” for example. Permissive or copyleft the same.
Ah. Ok. Ya, permissive licenses don’t do that. It sounds like you will prefer copyleft licenses if this is something you want. Fine of course. But it has nothing to do with your other points. As I said, I fully support the idea of copyleft licenses. You should be free to license your work as you wish.
Do what you want. That is not what everybody wants though. I hope you can respect that.
Well, if that is what they are going to do, thank God they did not contribute the enshitification to the Open Source repos. We can go on using the Open Source version because it is better and we like the freedom. Sounds like a point in favour of permissive licenses to me.
How does this happen unless their version is better? And how is it better unless it is their changes that made it better?
It sounds like what we are really upset about is companies making better software than us and not letting us use it. That sounds like the exact opposite of what you are trying to say happens.
But again, nobody can take the Open Source away. It is still there untarnished. It may not be enhanced by their efforts but it is not harmed either.
What you are saying is, if they extend the Open Source software, you do not want the Open Source version anymore. You only want theirs. Because only when you use theirs do you lose any freedom. That is true collectively for “the community”.
Finally. We agree.