> One can still disagree with Carmack but it's still worth understanding what he's claiming.
Exactly, one can still disagree, and he is making a claim. Those are 2 things:
He does not know what would have happened, had they gone with BSD license. No one does ultimately. It might be a case of "the grass is always greener on the other side".
Second is, that he might write however good code he wants, but what is its use, if it can only be used in 1 product, and then gets copied into other people's proprietary products, with no modifications shared back to the community? His code could have been "trapped" in that one BSD licensed product, if they did not make use of it themselves later on. By going GPL, at least they got the people, who did in reality, not just in imagination of an alternative past future, use the code, to contribute back. Those are the facts and they were caused by the license choice. A BSD license does not ensure any such thing. Of course it is possible, that there would have been more adopters and more people sharing code back, but that is not guaranteed, which is kind of the point of GPL.
> Of course it is possible, that there would have been more adopters and more people sharing code back, but that is not guaranteed, which is kind of the point of GPL.
BSD/MIT/permissive and our use of them did make it a hell of a lot easier to approach my previous employer about contributing back on company time/pay (they now do). They even came back with "but no GPL." One of the biggest problems in OSS is paid time/contributions, and GPL discouraged it in at least this one case.
Which is a bit weird, considering, that those things, that are contributed back, are not ensured to remain available, when anyone else makes modifications and has the option to make their changes a proprietary thing.
One would think, that if any contributions flowing back are allowed by a company, then it is to GPL licensed projects, because competitors, who want to use it in their products, would have to also contribute back their modifications. Basically to ensure, that a competitor cannot gain an invisible advantage based on ones code. (If all play by the rules.)
Exactly, one can still disagree, and he is making a claim. Those are 2 things:
He does not know what would have happened, had they gone with BSD license. No one does ultimately. It might be a case of "the grass is always greener on the other side".
Second is, that he might write however good code he wants, but what is its use, if it can only be used in 1 product, and then gets copied into other people's proprietary products, with no modifications shared back to the community? His code could have been "trapped" in that one BSD licensed product, if they did not make use of it themselves later on. By going GPL, at least they got the people, who did in reality, not just in imagination of an alternative past future, use the code, to contribute back. Those are the facts and they were caused by the license choice. A BSD license does not ensure any such thing. Of course it is possible, that there would have been more adopters and more people sharing code back, but that is not guaranteed, which is kind of the point of GPL.