PREFACE: Hopefully this is taken as constructive criticism, as I love this show and network. Also, I am not a lawyer…just a humble software developer. Take with a hefty dose of salt.

Oof, the license section was difficult to listen to. I understand not wanting to start license wars, but by not having any developers or open source project leaders on this segment it sounded…uninformed to say the least. You need people with some stake or skin the game to give full opinions and nuance. There are huge, non-inflammatory discussions to be had around things like:

• Why are licenses like the MIT or Apache 2.0 license so popular?
• Why are major companies explicitly avoiding GPL licensed software?
• Is it better to release a GPL project that isn’t used, or an Apache 2.0 project which gains massive adoption?
• What are the ethics behind “open core” models, or changing/restricting the license in future version?
• What are the ethics of “open source adjacent” license models which restrict massive (Amazon/Google scale) users only
• What are the ethics of licenses that restrict only certain types of industries (i.e. weapons, etc.)
• Noah says the GPL is good because it has teeth, whereby one must also release modiffications under the same terms…but this presupposes that anyone downstream will 1) comply with the license at all, 2) that you original author are willing to go through a complicated and expensive legal system (not even considering multi-national issues) and 3) the GPL will actually withstand and hold up in said court. How should project owners consider these facets when picking a license?
• What about GPLv2 vs GPLv3? Why does Linux stay v2?
• How far does one need to take a “clean room” approach when re-implementing open source?
• For non-viral licenses (i.e. non-GPL), how do people feel about changing the license for future versions? i.e. Nothing prevents it, just like in proprietary, but does that then mean the GPL is the only license Noah would feel comfortable building a business on? Is that only for service based business? Does it affect development shops differently? (Aside, sorry to pick on Noah! I didn’t plan these hypotheticals in advance )

There are also more in-depth conversions that could be had too like, when should one pick the AGPL over the GPL (i.e. they’re actually for different types of projects. But people may not know that pick GPL just because that’s what they’ve heard of, and end up hurting themselves or their project because of it). etc.

A good resource for the quick and dirty with software licenses is https://tldrlegal.com which gives the plain English terms of most licenses.

Other than that, great show Keep up the great work.

Thank you for posting the link. It’s a good starting point for further investigation.