this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2026
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[โ€“] JATtho@lemmy.world 45 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (15 children)

I hope we eventually get a copyleft lisence that states: "by using this product in a comercial product you have commited to supporting it, either by monetary fee or doing development work for it behalf, otherwise this product is entirely free of cost and is provided as-is".

Edit: and the developers can freely reproduce the GPL license exception for all their products:

// Under Section 7 of GPL version 3, you are granted additional
// permissions described in the GCC Runtime Library Exception, version
// 3.1, as published by the Free Software Foundation.

Currently, and I don't know why, this extremely useful license exception for (C++) headers, which is meant for compiled down to machine-code is not usable for anything else. If your library is not part of GCC, the GPL does not help you here. As such, if you publish a header only library under GPL, you cannot state that the code using your code is not under "API" boundary, ie. free of GPL, while keeping your precious header under GPL. And no, LGPL, does not save you here.

You only have non-copyleft lisences like MIT (disgusting), Apache (shitly less gross), BSL-1.0 (still non copyleft) or LGPL (not gross, but extremely limiting.)

And, if you still publish something, I plead it is at least under GPL, since this guarantees a life for the produce, non-negotioable, forever, which I think is still better than dying and giving up to pooh of public domain.

You can just dual-license as AGPL and a separate commercial license that you negotiate on a case-by-case basis.

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