I'm a very much pro free software person and I used to think that GPL is basically the only possible option when it comes to benefits for free software (and not commercial use), but I've recently realised this question is actually much more ambiguous.

I think there are two sides to this issue:

GPL forces all contributions to stay open-source which prevents commercialisation* of FOSS projects, but also causes possible interference of corporate software design philosophy and all kinds of commercial decisions, if contributions come from companies.
MIT-like permissive licenses, on the other hand, easily allow for making proprietary forks, which, however, separates commercial work from the rest of the project, therefore making the project more likely to stay free both of corporate influence and in general.

So it boils down to the fact, that in my opinion what makes free software free is not only the way it's distributed but also the whole philosophy behind it: centralisation vs. decentralisation, passive consumer vs. co-developper role of the user etc. And this is where things start to be a bit controversial.

What do you think?

*UPD: wrong word. I mean close-sourcing and turning into a profitable product instead of something that fulfils your needs

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[–] HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.org 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

but also causes possible interference of corporate software design philosophy and all kinds of commercial decisions, if contributions come from companies.

But companies almost never do contribute? They just want stuff for free. At least that's my experience in industrial automation / real-time systems.

Also, if your theory were true, BSD Unices would have much more contributions, better file systems, better real-time support, and much wider hardware support than Linux. But in reality, it is the opposite.

[–] myszka@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 month ago

But companies almost never do contribute?

Maybe compared to their passive usage, their contributions are small, but they still influence FOSS world a lot.

if your theory were true, BSD Unices would have much more contributions, better file systems, better real-time support, and much wider hardware support than Linux.

Why? I'm not saying projects would have more contributions. In fact, I realise there would be much fewer contributions which is a big downside and the reason why I called this question ambiguous in the first place. But, although my experience with BSDs is quite limited yet, I do think they are kind of "freer" than Linux (especially if you compare BSDs with most popular Linux distros)