Some organisations think of Free Software as the panacea.
To think that Free Software which is distributed under permissive licences, for example the MIT license, is the panacea, is to miss that permissively-licensed software can become proprietary software:
when you publish source code under a permissive license, you are writing software which can increase the supply of proprietary software.
Who cares? Most of us aren’t software developers.
So what’s the risk?
The risk, as a business owner, to use applications which are permissively licensed, is that you could be building the digital premises of your business in a digital field which is seemingly free to use, but could become the property of someone (not you) overnight.
In other words, a permissive license grants the maintainer of an application the right to enclose this free field anytime. That’s what permissive licenses are: an option for the maintainer to make his software proprietary at anytime in the future.
The analogy has limitations (e.g. in such event the penultimate release could be forked), but the risk is there. Obviously, this is to say that you should not use software licensed permissively; they are superior to proprietary software.
The remedy to permissive license is the copyleft license which requires a software as well as “all modified and extended versions”1 to remain freely distributed, by law; however, copyleft also misses the point.
What is Copyleft?} https://www.gnu.org/licenses/copyleft.en.html↩︎