Ask HN: How does the GPL affect open-source contributions?

13 points

11 years ago

At my work, we're about to open-source a bunch of projects. Prior to now, we have released all of our projects under the terms of the GPL. But there is some healthy discussion going on as to what effects the GPL may be having on the likelihood of their receiving contributions from outside our organisation.

With that debate in mind, I set up this survey to try and get some broad data about the subject:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1pBe1R-GBHUju0bbG4mnAdEVN8dJIjZHQvhQ_ZMCKexY/viewform?usp=send_form

Just to clarify, we're not talking about usage here. The projects that we've released thus far have done pretty well on that front. It is specifically the topic of contributions to the codebase that we are interested in.

If you have time to fill in the survey, that would be great and very much appreciated. It is only four multiple-choice questions, and I will share the results here. If they're interesting enough, I may blog about them too.

Thanks.

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