I don't understand what's up with the .NET community and the perpetuation of proprietary licenses for frameworks. I do not understand how developers can build on top of proprietary platforms.
I think you mean restrictive license. There items nothing wrong with corner case proprietary licences. What is every license before it is stamped 'open source' or 'free software' but a proprietary license? Many people consider copy left licenses more restrictive than your average commercial license anyhow.
No, I really do mean anything that is not open source and I do not agree with you. For software development at least, everything is wrong with proprietary licenses that forbid ANY of these freedoms: http://opensource.org/osd-annotated
And any would-be license that isn't already stamped as open-source by OSI or as free software by the FSF is an instant red flag, simply because there are plenty of licenses available to pick from.
> Many people consider copy left licenses more restrictive than your average commercial license anyhow.
Even though some people might say that, that's only because they don't know what they are talking about. A license for proprietary software does not give you the right to fork. As a recent example for why that is important, ask the people that have invested in FoundationDB how they feel about that, then read the story of MariaDB on Wikipedia to understand the difference.
Honestly I do not understand that you really would not understand. So here is a typical example of why developpers do build on top of proprietary platforms: startup creating hardware which gets interest almost exclusively from the industry where due to all kind of reasons a common proprietary platform, Windows, is used. Hardware came first and then at one point early on they have to decide what toolset/frameworks will be used for lowlevel and toplevel applications. But really there is not a lot of choice at all: either do what the others do and develop for Windows and as such assure customers will come in, interoperability with other hardware is easy and so on. Or do 'the right thing' and go open source which has the benefit of open source but that is about it. Good luck finding customers willing to embrace your product and use it in their production lines if it runs on some, to them, alien platform of which they couldn't care less what license it has and if there is no straightforward way to make it work together with the hardware they currently own. So basically you are choosing between keeping your startup alive and well and making an income, or bakruptcy.
