A developer explains why ArgyPilot switched from GPLv3 to BSD licensing. GPLv3's copyleft requirements made commercialization harder and split the community, while the BSD-licensed PX4 stack attracted companies and became the industry standard for courses like Udacity's air taxi program.
Chapters
It's really important to structure the open source project, both in terms of its governance structure and its license, in a way that can be commercialized if that's what you ultimately aim to do. So normally when you look at the continuum of open innovation, it starts with things like app stores, APIs, SDKs, et cetera. And then as you go into actual open source software, there's a bunch of licenses. And there's a general sense that the more sort of copyleft, the more radical the license, the better it is. And the GPL v3 is the most radical of the licenses. And in 2009, when we were setting up the license, we had these community members who are amazing developers, just the best I've seen, but they were open source zealots. And I'm an open source zealot, or so I thought. And they were like, GPL v3 is the most viral. It will get the most developer engagement. People are required when they use this to give back. And I'm like, that sounds good. That definitely spurs developer engagement. I hadn't thought about what else that might mean, but it turns out that the GPLv3, and this is super controversial, I'm going to get shot for this metaphorically. The GPLv3 is, I think, was a crisis in the open source community. It has essentially been banned by all the big companies here. I would go as far as to say it's toxic for business. I think it is fantastic. For developers, but because of its viral nature, because everything you, every time you change the software, you must publish it, it discourages companies from using it because it can infect everything else with this force to expose your IP. And as a result, nobody will touch it anymore. Now this is not to be confused with the GPLv2, which is what Linux is. The GPLv3 was a quite extreme deviation of it, and I think that fissure in the open source software community is gonna be felt for years. And I made the wrong bet. I went GPLv3 with ArgyPilot, and as a result, once we decided to commercialize it, no one would touch it. So we fortunately had another group called PX4 based out of ETH in Zurich, another university, and they had chosen the BSD license. And so this one here is copyleft, and this one's permissive, the BSD license. The BSD license is also completely open source, but you don't have to distribute if you make modifications. You can choose to, but you don't have to. And the BSD, the permissive licenses, are the ones that companies embrace. And so we had to divorce. And so one community went off GPL, and they're doing great, fantastic software, fantastic community, but really hard to commercialize. And then we created a new competing stack on the BSD license, and that's the one that's now gonna be used by most companies, including air taxis. And for example, the new Udacity air taxi course is based on this stack, the drone code stack, which is BSD licensed. So that was super painful. I had to be a complete jerk and essentially fire the community I started because I made a mistake on the license. And I don't feel good about it, but it had to be done. And I think that was something that we've learned a lot about over the last few years about the differences between those licenses.
