Having developed and released something under the GPL a long time ago, I am not anti-GPL, but that doesn't mean I'm not wary of it.
> Obviously you want to release only code that will help you code less in the future
No, I want to release code other people might find useful.
> ie: let others maintain feature X for FREE for us
This sounds naive. Virtually nobody writes a library then abandons it when other people start helping out.
> don't give them what MATTERS
"What matters" is highly subjective and different to different people. What matters to Twitter is the userbase and user experience. So they open-source their database stuff, Bootstrap, and a plethora of other things. And why not?
It's not hypocritical. The GPL was critical to the fight against closed OSes and the closed tools that made writing software essentially limited and pay-to-program.
My view of open-source and programming in general is that there are many things that programming can help you do. More often than not, these are the same things. The more programmers can help each other to spend more time writing things that are great, the better off we all are.
The GPL fights proprietary software, but for things that are not products on their own, but are designed to be a component of or integrated into other products, it can also fight other programmers as well. I use GPL software, but I don't use GPL libraries or frameworks. (The LGPL is less selfish - the whole software ecosystem doesn't need to open for it to play its part, but the library damn well stay open.)
> Obviously you want to release only code that will help you code less in the future
No, I want to release code other people might find useful.
> ie: let others maintain feature X for FREE for us
This sounds naive. Virtually nobody writes a library then abandons it when other people start helping out.
> don't give them what MATTERS
"What matters" is highly subjective and different to different people. What matters to Twitter is the userbase and user experience. So they open-source their database stuff, Bootstrap, and a plethora of other things. And why not?
It's not hypocritical. The GPL was critical to the fight against closed OSes and the closed tools that made writing software essentially limited and pay-to-program.
My view of open-source and programming in general is that there are many things that programming can help you do. More often than not, these are the same things. The more programmers can help each other to spend more time writing things that are great, the better off we all are.
The GPL fights proprietary software, but for things that are not products on their own, but are designed to be a component of or integrated into other products, it can also fight other programmers as well. I use GPL software, but I don't use GPL libraries or frameworks. (The LGPL is less selfish - the whole software ecosystem doesn't need to open for it to play its part, but the library damn well stay open.)