The assertion I was addressing is that copyfree code "just ends up being incorporated into someone else's commercial product, with no contributions".

My post proved that copyfree code bases actually do receive contributions back from the commercial users of their code. Certainly not 100% of users, but the same is true for the GPL. Every company I've worked for after college has used Linux extensively and none of them have contributed back to Linux in either patches or dollars.

Why do you both keep incorrectly referring to the license as "MIT"? The BSDs are under the various BSD licenses, not the MIT license. If you're trying to refer to the whole category then I would suggest using the words "copyleft" for GPL-style licenses and "copyfree" for BSD-style licenses.

> If you're fit to even be in this conversation then you have enough logic to know this, which makes the comment not merely in error but knowingly disingenuous.

I would like to direct you to the HN guidelines since this is a clear violation of them: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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Brian_K_White an hour ago | parent [-]

It did not prove any such thing except in the meaningless pedantic technicality way. No reasonably rational person read that comment and thought they meant literally 100% not a single example. The existence of exceptions does not disprove anything. Everything has exceptions.

Numbers prove or disprove it. Which neither of us has. The fact that everything you showed even fits in a little comment like that compared to the scope of all software actually proves what a joke it was to even try to present this as any sort of argument.

"why do you keep saying MIT?" Oh FFS really? MIT, or BSD, is perfectly understandable shorthand for any of the mit/bsd/x11/etc in a general discussion like this. They are all of a class. How do you know? Because no one has attempted to discuss any fine points here that would make any of those any different from any of the others. You have to go out of your way to say they are different, and then cannot say in what way that matters or changes anything. So why do you yet again pretend an insignificant detail in any way affects the thrust of the argument?

Go ahead and substitute "MIT" with "BSD" or any of the specific "various BSD licences". Ok now that you did that, what changed? The argument was valid or invalid before, and the opposite now?

	▲	craftkiller an hour ago \| parent [-]
		So far I'm the only one here who has provided any numbers. All you and soperj have provided are unsubstantiated claims. Why don't you do some analysis on the "scope of all software" and get back to me? Given the scale, I imagine it will take you at least a couple of years.