Re: [gnugo-devel] OT: licenses (was Go Board and Go Stone Images)

[Darren Cook]

> With MIT (i.e. X11) or BSD type license someone could take your
> program, improve it, keep the source code to their improvements
> private and sell it as proprietary software. ...

This is a bit of myth; it turns out that MIT projects attract just as
many project members, and they are just as active (*). Mainly this is
self-interest: if you fix a bug or add a feature, but then keep it
inside your company, maybe only half a dozen people test it for you. If
you get it merged back into the project, thousands of people test it for
you.

Darren

*: In fact they appear to attract more. E.g. all of the top-ten most
active projects on GitHub use an MIT license. (impress.js is a
semi-exception: it is dual-licensed, MIT and GPL; node.js is a mix of
MIT and Apache licenses, but the actual Node.js code is MIT)