51–60 of 242 posts
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Non-developers don't care about the source.
A good chunk of my paycheck proves you wrong - we develop custom addons for an Open Source software for non-developers (individuals and companies).
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> The people who originally wrote a lot of OSS and Linux software were envisioning a world where Adobe tools would be replaced by Gimp/Inkspace and the Ubuntu desktop would make Windows obsolete except for specific MS software/tasks. That never happened. The reason that never happened has nothing to do with the licenses. It happened because most purely open source programs have abysmal UX. Every time I open Inkscape…
So I share your sentiment. I still open Photoshop/Lightroom on my Windows laptop when I need them (although lately I've been trying to use DarkTable and RawTherapee for some projects) but yes, Gimp is far from being a high end tool. Illustrator still kills Inkscape (I worked with a hardcore OSS guy who said it's just a matter of training, what you're use to and what you start with. I could tell he'd never done any re…
That's not a reason to stop believing and helping with small things. I don't say you don't contribute, I just say that "difficult" doesn't mean "impossible" in any way :-)
I think there's two split types of developers. When I was younger, mostly hanging around on IRC servers and forums, coding just my own cool projects, I strongly believed in the GPL. All of my projects had it, and I wouldn't even dream of allowing someone to use my code without making their entire project open too. That's the first type I think. The second type is the more HN-style professional programmer. Now as I've…
I tend to agree, up to a point, however I still use the GPL because it at least gives me a leg to stand on for people actually ripping your code and selling it as is... (What I call the packagers) I'm sure that if Linux wasn't GPL, you'd have 'vendors' selling 'HP Linux' and 'Corp Linux' to their locked in customers in no time at all. The only reason Linux grew up to this point is that the vendors are forced to contr…
I don't know. For such a complex project like linux you can't do all by yourself and you most likely want all the improvements and extensions done by other people.
To be able to incorporate all these changes you have to keep your code base compatible and the easiest way to do this is to give back your changes.
But even if this seems to be the most sensible way to go, an other license might have allowed people to be a lot more unreasonable.
I've always likened GPL promoters and promoters of the more permissive licenses to conservatives vs liberals. GPL users are more worried about someone taking and not giving back. Other license users are more worried about lost opportunity to proliferate. In the same way, conservatives are more worried about bad behavior among their fellow citizens, whereas liberals are more worried about lost opportunities for their…
I think there's two split types of developers. When I was younger, mostly hanging around on IRC servers and forums, coding just my own cool projects, I strongly believed in the GPL. All of my projects had it, and I wouldn't even dream of allowing someone to use my code without making their entire project open too. That's the first type I think. The second type is the more HN-style professional programmer. Now as I've…
I think this sums it up.
I think there's two split types of developers. When I was younger, mostly hanging around on IRC servers and forums, coding just my own cool projects, I strongly believed in the GPL. All of my projects had it, and I wouldn't even dream of allowing someone to use my code without making their entire project open too. That's the first type I think. The second type is the more HN-style professional programmer. Now as I've…
In the world the GPL envisioned, most people would also be developers, at least occasionally. That's obviously not true today, but as algorithms take over society, we may still see progress in that direction. There are some communities, such as many academic disciplines, where it has become a reality–economics may be a good example where a large majority of graduates today have done some coding, and where a field profits tremendously from OSS licensing.
Fundamentally, it's an argument analogous to the political fight about the meaning of a "free market": Are antitrust regulations a undue intrusion into the freedom of large companies, or are they necessary to preserve the freedom of consumers and competitors?
The essential shift since the GPL was written is the web, obviously. In one sense, OSS has flourished, with it becoming the default stack of most industries, including the web. On the other hand, end-users rarely see OSS. These issues may be linked, because the client/server model allows companies to use OSS, even GPL, to provide proprietary services.
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I totally understand where you're coming from and I shared some of this. I still believe heavily in the GPL and I think more permissive license have allowed a lot of companies to wave the banner of OSS while not having to really contribute things back to the community. I come from a perspective of hating the corporate world for the two decades I've been in it; feeling deeply overpaid compared to the guy who cleans my…
> The people who originally wrote a lot of OSS and Linux software were envisioning a world where Adobe tools would be replaced by Gimp/Inkspace and the Ubuntu desktop would make Windows obsolete except for specific MS software/tasks. That never happened. The reason that never happened has nothing to do with the licenses. It happened because most purely open source programs have abysmal UX. Every time I open Inkscape…
I think there's two split types of developers. When I was younger, mostly hanging around on IRC servers and forums, coding just my own cool projects, I strongly believed in the GPL. All of my projects had it, and I wouldn't even dream of allowing someone to use my code without making their entire project open too. That's the first type I think. The second type is the more HN-style professional programmer. Now as I've…
> I want anyone to be able to do whatever they want to with my code. That includes developers wanting to create a proprietary application. Telling them they can't is not freedom. This is clearly up for debate. Software-freedom as an interesting social factor is first and foremost about users, not software-publishers. Basically as a user of free software, I should be free to modify the code of the program I'm using. W…
No, it's about the software. Free software is free in the sense that it can't be owned, like a common good. Saying you shouldn't be able to own (i.e. control access to) software is very similar to the argument that you shouldn't be able to own land. This is a political ideal.
The rationalization of that ideal is often made to be about the users but the benefits are indirect and whether they hold up in practice has not yet been reliably demonstrated as far as I'm concerned.
Arguing whether permissive or restrictive open source licenses are freer is mostly and argument about the definition of what "freedom" actually means.
GPL advocates say open source is about the freedom of the user to get access to the source code of what they are using. Advocates of permissive licenses will say open source is about the freedom of the downstream developer to bundle and distribute the software in any way they please (including in the creation of closed source products).
Saying that one or the other of these "freedoms" is not really a freedom is literally just an argument about semantics and not meaningful unless you're specifically interested in having only that conversation.
EDIT: Pragmatically IMO the freedom of the end user matters less because they need more than just access to the source code to derive any value of having that access, whereas for a downstream developer the value of being able to do as they please is extremely direct. Especially when talking about libraries which by themselves exist merely to help developers create software and frequently only use the GPL to force the hand of downstream developers when picking a license.
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I am a huge supporter of GPLv3 and license most of my open source work with it. Still, the Linux kernel has been famously v2, and macos has removed as much v3 work as possible (to the point of using very outdated versions of many packages including bash). Things like CLang/LLVM, and don't get me wrong, they're technologically amazing, still have a huge focus of not being in the GPL world. Back in the early 2000s, the…
> Things like CLang/LLVM, and don't get me wrong, they're technologically amazing, still have a huge focus of not being in the GPL world. This is one of the key things. Generally, I see that BSD/MIT/ISC/Apache licensed software is made by people who just want to make amazing things, and let other people make amazing things with what they've made. The license is just a way to make their code (which is the focus) avail…
The problem of the GPL is that it assumes that infinite forking of software is a good thing (more choice!) when the opposite is normally true - it's better to have ONE project that isn't perfect for anyone, but that is easy to find and actively maintained, than it is to have a large number of forks each with the pet feature of different users.
For library code it's a different story. If I write a library I'd hope to get commercial use of it. I suppose you could argue that in that case you should be using the LGPL rather than BSD/MIT/CDDL/Apache, but I honesly think the LGPL is underused simply because of it sounds a bit like GPL and it makes people nervous.