Yes, that article doesn't read much like "Lawyer's perception of open source licenses" and more like "Licenses liked by companies”. Companies don't like copyleft or responsibility, and want a clear patent clause, that's it.
The pain rating is "how difficult is compliance" and the confusion rating is "do I trivially understand the concepts" (and apparently copyleft is hard). It was a bit of a disappointing read as I was expecting some more analysis than one-line descriptions.
edit: that was probably a bit unfair of me, since the author has dissected several free software licenses on their blog in separate articles, which I recommend reading
Why just companies? Surely the pain and confusion applies to anyone wanting to incorporate open source code into something else that may or may not carry the same licence. The patent granting is rather critical even to other open source projects.
Software patents are a US thing, and it's a good thing many don't care about them.
I should have said for-profit software instead of companies, really; the legal entity is quite irrelevant in this case. I said companies because they are entities that: 1) stand to be sued in case of license violations (you typically don't sue a hobbyist project) 2) have the perceived need to maximize profits, and as a consequence want to veer off from anything that might require releasing source code, which might offset a competitive advantage. Thus a hobbyist project being a licensing clusterfuck is a less critical issue, although it is of course an important one (and certainly, depending on the project’s popularity, there may be a vocal portion of people wanting to clarify the situation).
The pain and confusion ratings also do not go into the details which are useful for OSS projects, such as how do licenses interact with each other, how is attribution and re-licensing managed, etc. Not to mention the ratings do not differentiate between pain/confusion for the developer, and pain/confusion for other future developers (e.g. in case of a lib).
(I admit that I tend to forget that there is also hobbyist closed-source software, for reasons I never understand)
Software patents also exist in most of the EU and Asia as well, unfortunately. Check out one of the MPEG-LA license portfolios and look at the countries represented if you want your day ruined.
Because most for-profit closed-source software is made by companies. It's in their best interest to use Open Source libraries in their software - it's free work and they don't have to give anything back.
I've heard this again and again, and yet every time I see open source used by a company, there are patches being applied, compliance concerns and audits, and integration efforts.
Sometimes this effort costs less than writing the code yourself (such as integrating with a database), but not always.
> It was a bit of a disappointing read as I was expecting some more analysis than one-line descriptions.
Fair criticism. This was by design.
I'd originally set out to follow the table with a commentary section on each license. But judging by the first few sections drafted, that was shaping up to be a very long read. The pain-and-confusion bit is terse and cartoonish to begin with. Blocks of additional text weren't going to change that. So I erred on the side of brevity.
No, it wasn't unfair of you. He puts ?? for all the GPL variants while also saying it's easy to hire compliance experts. In other words, GPL is one of the most widely understood licenses and yet he finds it confusing.
The GPL variants are not widely understood. They are closer to widely misunderstood. But due to their popularity and importance, specialized experts who do understand them, well and in detail, are available for hire. Heather Meeker, for example.
I like the GPLs and what they stand for. In another post, also popular here on HN, I wrote:
> The last [great idea in open-source licensing], not found in The MIT License, builds off license conditions: “Copyleft” licenses like the GNU General Public License use license conditions to control how those making changes can license and distribute their changed versions.
In another post, again channeling my own thoughts and feelings, rather than those of a broader, abstracted business community, I wrote:
> As an attorney, for one, and a coder who came up on FSF software, for two, it kills me to see students and pre-exit programmers write off good licensing hygiene as unnecessary. It makes me queasy to read, via the closed, hood-welded-shut social network du jour, that "open source has won". How smoothly both disdain for "corporate interests" assailing community values, on the one hand, and utter disdain for the GPL, its politics and its moralism, on the other, roll off the tongue. It’s a cruel, cruel world.
Copyleft licenses are more complex than permissive licenses by design. GPL-family licenses add idiosyncratic style and politics to that mix. There is a whole body of signals and accepted practices filling in interpretive fissures in that complexity---for FSF projects, for Linux, for MongoDB (AGPL). Consider the recent "enforcement principles" release and the disagreements that led to it. Corporate copyleft users have to do that homework. Corporate permissive users get the night off.
The pain rating is "how difficult is compliance" and the confusion rating is "do I trivially understand the concepts" (and apparently copyleft is hard). It was a bit of a disappointing read as I was expecting some more analysis than one-line descriptions.
edit: that was probably a bit unfair of me, since the author has dissected several free software licenses on their blog in separate articles, which I recommend reading