Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Is the GPL Really Declining?

meshedinsights.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 242 posts

Re: Is the GPL Really Declining?

#141

Post by geokon »

dbcurtis wrote: post #132
geokon wrote: post #127

I'm a bit surprised "dual licensing" hasn't come up at all in this discussion. To me that is the most logical next-step from the GPL. (ex: The Qt/JUCE people are using it to great effect) - If you want to work on expanding on what I started and then sharing it with everyone, then that's great! - If you want to make money with my work - then lets get in touch and work out some compensation. Seems only fair.. no? It's…

Yes, indeed. The submitter needs to sign over copyright. Otherwise you don't have the right to relicense their work under some other for-compensation license. All GNU projects require copyright assignment, for an example. The GPL license is silent on copyright assignment of pull requests, so you have to execute a document outside the license. I believe some other open source licenses address this directly, but I'm no…

I haven't had a use for it myself, but it seems like it would be a nice thing for Github/lab to facilitate.

Maybe it'd be possible to somehow do it cleanly from within git? Have a license-transfer file that reading

FOR ALL WORK PERFORMED ON THIS REPOSITORY THE FOLLOWING PEOPLE TRANSFER ALL COPYRIGHT RIGHTS TO [name of owner] :

John Smith

Bob Bobberson

Whatever Whateverson

etc.

It's a little clunky.. a better solution would need some git integration I'd imagine. Maybe someone has a better idea? :)

Re: Is the GPL Really Declining?

#142

Post by ralmidani »

geokon wrote: post #127

I'm a bit surprised "dual licensing" hasn't come up at all in this discussion. To me that is the most logical next-step from the GPL. (ex: The Qt/JUCE people are using it to great effect) - If you want to work on expanding on what I started and then sharing it with everyone, then that's great! - If you want to make money with my work - then lets get in touch and work out some compensation. Seems only fair.. no? It's…

>It's a little fuzzy because you can have opensource projects that make money

As I see it, the purpose of copyleft is not to prevent anyone from making money; if someone does want to use a copylefted work to make money, they'll just have to play fair and release their source code under the same license.

In other words, what copyleft prevents is predatory use of "open source" which involves taking eagerly without giving back.

Re: Is the GPL Really Declining?

#143

Post by arglwarg »

libeclipse wrote: post #4

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…

> That's the first type I think. The second type is the more HN-style professional programmer.

nah

> As a small P.S. to this, I think the middle ground is using the GPL for actual end-user applications, but leaving libraries and developer tools completely open with something like Apache-2.0 or MIT.

Thats closer. Non-reciprocal licenses are fine for projects that provide no value themselves. But for everything that provides direct value, reciprocal licenses like MPLv2 or GPL are better suited.

Re: Is the GPL Really Declining?

#144

Post by gribbly »

alkonaut wrote: post #60

I could be inclined to use GPL if I made some end user application rather than library code. Simply because I'd prefer the project not to be forked. If someone invents a great feature for my app, I'd like that to be either merged or killed, not merged into a fork. 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…

>I could be inclined to use GPL if I made some end user application rather than library code.

This very much mirrors my own preference.

For popular end user applications there is a clear motive to do proprietary forks with extra features, which would lead to the original open project either lagging in features or having to spend effort in recreating the features of the proprietary fork while the latter can continously take any new features from the open project.

For libraries/frameworks however, there is little if any real incentive for proprietary forks since it will be hard get developers buying into that.

Re: Is the GPL Really Declining?

#145

Post by smichel17 »

libeclipse wrote: post #4

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 feel we've lost ourselves in the freedom of users and forgotten about the people that make the applications for the users.

First off, thank you for acknowledging that permissive vs copyleft licenses is a trade-off between developer and user freedom. So many people claim that one is strictly less restrictive than the other, and that's simply not the case. So, which style of license you should choose is a question of who needs the freedom more.

In my opinion, users have very little control in the current state of computing, so I am inclined to release as much of my work under the (a)GPL as possible. I think that's worth a little developer frustration.

I'd also like to point out, that this is a moral issue more than a practical one. It applies equally to my stance on things like limiting the power of law enforcement.

Re: Is the GPL Really Declining?

#146

Post by err4nt »

dagw wrote: post #18

Comparing the mid to late 90s with today it seems hackers have on the whole become more commercially minded. Back in the 90s there was a more idealistic and 'punk' ethos surrounding the hacker scene with documents like the Hacker Manifesto being a thing people actually believed in and aspired to. The GPL fit right into that. Then the world changed a bit and all of a sudden people realized that you could become both a…

I'll offer a little counterpoint to that. I had known 'free software' as shareware until ~2001 when I had my first introduction to Linux. I was very curious, and took to open source software AND the ideals very easily.

Because of my experience as a teenager poking around operating systems, fixing xorg.conf files after compiling nVidia drivers, and running and using thousands of different software applications - tools for many many different jobs I had never been exposed to before. I consider open-source being an education I received that has helped me to use computers and software today.

Because I have benefitted so much from open-source, now that I'm in a position where I can write and release software I am very motivated to give back to the same community that first gave to me. I hope that by producing work and releasing it to open-source I can help build up those who follow in my footsteps - and that's a richer treasure than dollars in my pocket.

Having said all of this, I can't choose GPL for giving away my own software because the viral nature of it feels like a chain letter. It leaves a really bad taste in your mouth and I wouldn't want anybody to feel compelled to pick between using something I'm TRYING to give away for free and having to GPL their project, or not be able to use something I'm trying to give away for free just because of the license. So I keep choosing MIT, which basically says: 'you have to acknowledge that I wrote it, and you can't sue me because of damages you got from using it' but leaves pretty much any other use (even commercial reselling) open.

I can't imagine anybody looking at a piece of code under MIT and having objections, or a reason why the license prevents them from using it - and THAT is the point of free software to me. GPL software is arguably LESS free than the more liberal licenses :D

Re: Is the GPL Really Declining?

#147

Post by gribbly »

icebraining wrote: post #85
alkonaut wrote: post #60

I could be inclined to use GPL if I made some end user application rather than library code. Simply because I'd prefer the project not to be forked. If someone invents a great feature for my app, I'd like that to be either merged or killed, not merged into a fork. 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…

The GPL doesn't prevent others from forking your project, we've seen quite a bit of hostile forks over the years.

True, but this is typically a good thing in my opinion, the code remains fully open all the same and the developers/userbase will determine which project is the better.

Re: Is the GPL Really Declining?

#148

Post by the8472 »

dbcurtis wrote: post #132
geokon wrote: post #127

I'm a bit surprised "dual licensing" hasn't come up at all in this discussion. To me that is the most logical next-step from the GPL. (ex: The Qt/JUCE people are using it to great effect) - If you want to work on expanding on what I started and then sharing it with everyone, then that's great! - If you want to make money with my work - then lets get in touch and work out some compensation. Seems only fair.. no? It's…

Yes, indeed. The submitter needs to sign over copyright. Otherwise you don't have the right to relicense their work under some other for-compensation license. All GNU projects require copyright assignment, for an example. The GPL license is silent on copyright assignment of pull requests, so you have to execute a document outside the license. I believe some other open source licenses address this directly, but I'm no…

> Yes, indeed. The submitter needs to sign over copyright. Otherwise you don't have the right to relicense their work under some other for-compensation license.

Wouldn't it be possible to require patches to be supplied under CC-0, which would allow the maintainer to take the patch and incorporate it in the GPLed source?

Re: Is the GPL Really Declining?

#149

Post by sctb »

rbanffy wrote: post #104
lorenzhs wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the dupe detector was changed about a year ago to allow for resubmission of articles that failed to gain traction. If you have questions for the mods, email them. Discussing the dupe detector is off-topic and boring.

Do you have a link to that announcement? I tried to look it up to gather more information without bothering the mods.

This is all I could quickly find: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10203933. This change was just to bring the software in line with the FAQ, which has mentioned this since 2014.

Re: Is the GPL Really Declining?

#150

Post by megous »

geokon wrote: post #127

I'm a bit surprised "dual licensing" hasn't come up at all in this discussion. To me that is the most logical next-step from the GPL. (ex: The Qt/JUCE people are using it to great effect) - If you want to work on expanding on what I started and then sharing it with everyone, then that's great! - If you want to make money with my work - then lets get in touch and work out some compensation. Seems only fair.. no? It's…

Well, I contributed to the dual licensed project, only to see the company increasing the price of their (somewhat related) monetized project 7 fold or so, screwing people over on the related product. Of course the contributors get nothing for their copyright assignment. It's like thank you for your contribution to our documentation system, now pay 7 times more for our main product you're also using.

I'm wary of these schemes as a potential contributor. It limits the reciprocity.

I'm much happier with projects that don't require free copyright assignment from their contributors.

Post reply on HN