[purpleidea]

This is great work and good news, however if you want to guarantee a long-term public benefit, use copyleft without a CLA! A more well-funded company can fork this and make the new work proprietary, meaning you did all that initial development work for them for free.

Apple and Microsoft are the two most likely parties to do so here. This isn't a theoretical risk.

[simonw]

Using a copyleft license can add friction that reduces the amount of value your software can create in the world.

I'd honestly rather Apple and Microsoft ripped off my work if it meant that my work provided more utility to a larger number of people.

[purpleidea]

> Using a copyleft license can add friction that reduces the amount of value your software can create in the world.

That "friction" is by design. It prevents someone else from screwing over the users.

The people that oppose copyleft are those it was specifically design to protect against.

[dulvui]

On the other hand having a copyleft license without CLA makes rug pulls nearly impossible (once there are multiple contributors and copyright holders). But you are right, from a (commercial) value perspective, permissive wins.

[progmetaldev]

I truly respect this statement, and position. I always hope that the benefit I've provided through my software is felt, even if I don't directly benefit from it. It's about taking pride in your work, and what it has brought others. I think of it as a craft, like woodworking, brewing, art, music, etc. While there are far more rules, the love of it is what makes it viable.

I suspect that those who express concern over your work being ripped off are just showing that they are extremely happy with how you run things. Rather than being under the control of another entity, the actual value is in your personal involvement. That's just my two cents, I hope I'm not putting words in anyone's mouth.

EDIT: I realize that you aren't the creator of Ghostty, but my original statement seemed like I was stating this.

[miclill]

I recently heard the argument that the license-friction of copyleft sometimes is actually a good thing. Think linux kernel that arguably is more successful than all the BSDs combined (citation needed)...

[bsimpson]

BSD-0 is a public-domain-equivalent license. The guy who published it is one of the few people who has actually been involved in a lawsuit to try to assert a copyleft license. The whole thing was such a bad experience for him that he decided copyleft licenses are a false goal.

You should watch his talk:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkJkyMuBm3g

(He used to be a maintainer of busybox, a GNU clone for embedded devices. He then ended up writing toybox, a similar project under the more free MIT license.)

[Karliss]

Does anyone have good examples of this actually happening for end user software (like Ghostty is) and where in the long term proprietary fork won? Most of the recent variations of this that come to my mind are related to cloud infrastructure. Stuff where you have serious business customers.

And in some of those cases GPL wasn't enough to prevent it. Niche end user utilities, where original is available for free have little room for monetization. And in many cases existing users are already choosing the open source option despite the existence of commercial solutions, or where it's too niche for commercial solutions to exist.

Only thing that comes to my mind is VScode with all the AI craze. But that doesn't quite fit the pattern neither is the Microsoft underdog, nor it's clear that any of AI based editors derived from VScode will survive by themselves long term.

There are also occasional grifters trying to sell open source software with little long term impact.

[tristan957]

> Does anyone have good examples of this actually happening for end user software (like Ghostty is) and where in the long term proprietary fork won?

VSCode is a proprietary fork of code-oss, the product located at https://github.com/microsoft/vscode. It might not be an example that you're looking for though.