The GPL won't do squat to prevent businesses from fucking you over. If you have an idea that's profitable, they'll take it by hook or by crook and give you the shaft. Likely they'll rewrite it so as not to be encumbered by the license - OR - (and I've seen this happen), they'll just remove the GPL from the files and then alter them so nobody will ever recognise from whence they came. "Found it on the net - nope - no license, no author." If you think this doesn't happen - or you think you can shame these people into doing the right thing, you're delusional.

In fact the only thing the GPL will do is to ensure that your software is not allowed behind the firewall in most of corporate America. The employees can't use it, and they can't host it internally - because this puts their intellectual property at risk - potentially putting all the corporate IP under the GPL. Binaries (such as GIMP) are allowed, but any scripts or "source code" are poison. Download some "source" software (let's say "Diaspora"), change one byte of a config file and you're fired. I nearly got fired for using "simplepie" in a fortune500 company. Tucked away in simplepie is a punycode library that is lgpl. I didn't see it until the boss called me in and asked me what the fuck I was doing putting GPL code in the corporate source repository. I nuked it immediately. Either that or my job.


Incidentally, Jquery is now single license. Was MIT and GPL. Now it's just MIT. The world has changed. GPL is a liability to many open source projects - because it means that much of corporate America cannot and will not use your software.

I'm not complaining out Friendica licensing, and, if you think friendica can/will be useful to corporations, that's cool,
Just, that's never a concern of mine when writing code, because, like I said, corporate America (or global corporations, etc.), can all just go fuck themselves.
Corporations have contributed more to the exploitation and destruction of people and natural resources, and accumulation and funneling of resources, financial, natural, and human, into the hands of a greedy, evil few than anything else, ever.
So what's good for corporations is never anywhere even remotely close to my priority list. I think they all need to die.
Unlike @Thomas Willingham , I'm not exactly mysanthoropist. I think most people are pretty stupid, and in large numbers, people are definitely stupid, and people often really annoy me, a lot, but in general, I often like people, too, at least some people, and I like this planet we live on, and considering we haven't any other options at this point, I think we need to take care of it.
So corporations can all go fuck themselves. All of them.
(Okay, perhaps some are less evil than others, but still, what is their purpose? To "generate revenue/value for their shareholders", i.e., funnel resources into the hands of a few, generally at the expense of the many, and frequently at the expense of the environment, too.)

This might sound weird, too, but I've kind of lost interest in Friendica's growth, in terms of proliferation of servers or numbers of users.

And me. Sort of.

I'm done with retarded shit like the fucking stupid smiley pack. I'm not selling my soul to offer normals the things they say will make them change, even though when I give them it, they don't. I'm done with that.

Pen15 is a giant up yours, not an "appeal to mass market".

I am, on the other hand, interested in making Friendica easy to find. I'm much more interested in the people who come looking for it, than the people we go looking for.


Fred, I'm interested in growth, but for different reasons. I want the various forums I use to implement zot. I don't really care if their existing members connect to anything else in the network, I just want to be able to use them from my own site (and I want to be able to use it instead of SMS, and email, etc, etc - that doesn't even necessarily mean users will even know they're using Zot - just like how everyone uses WhatsApp and doesn't know it's a retarded version of XMPP with all the good bits stripped out). Plus, I wouldn't mind making at least enough money to pay my Friendica hosting from Fred subscriptions.