[$] Permissive licenses, community, and copyleft
On the final day of LinuxCon Europe 2015, HP's Chief TechnologyOfficer Martin Fink delivered a bold keynote about softwarelicensing. Fink recapped the negative effects of licenseproliferation and addressed projects that use their choice of licenseas hostile act against the competition. He then ended the sessionwith an extended appeal to move the open-source software industry awayfrom permissive licenses like Apache 2.0 and toward copyleft licenseslike the GPL. Not doing so, he said, puts the FOSS community at justas much risk of collapse as license proliferation threatened to inyears past.