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Is the GPL Really Declining?

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Re: Is the GPL Really Declining?

#151

Post by sounds »

dleslie wrote: post #113
sgentle wrote: post #62

> The GPL is a fine open source license that grants all the permissions needed by developer communities that adopt it. There is no sense in which it is not "permissive", so to use that term as an antonym to "copyleft" verges on abuse. Sigh. This attitude makes it enormously difficult to have any kind of conversation about the tradeoffs of open source licenses, because it reveals a profound lack of perspective or will…

An anarchist ought not care what the license terms are; they are already operating in an ethical framework that revokes concern for a collection of words that rely on state violence to have meaning.

Cool! A discussion where the anarchists are represented clearly!

Do I understand libertarianism the way sgentle does? He compares anarchism:libertarianism::permissive license:GPL, so I guess he's using libertarianism in the sense of "absolute minimum amount of government necessary to enforce property rights."

As to whether you preserve freedom best by causing "unfreedoms," philosophy already has some pretty useful things to say, such as ue_'s comment:

  Hegel ... described the freedom of the savage being a kind
  of unrefined freedom
Some freedoms are conflicting by their very definition. Resolving the conflict is at its core the imposition of an ordering over the set of all freedoms, or in other words, a value system. Almost all the discussion on this article can be reduced to a comparison of well known value systems and attempts to sway readers to one or another.

Re: Is the GPL Really Declining?

#152

Post by smichel17 »

watwut wrote: post #109
belorn wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When your workplace distribute the software you write to their customers, what political ideology does the license force onto them?

What does that have to do with anything? OSS and tech generally likes to praise itself as more rational fact based, but demagoguery is sometimes downright ridiculous. If I distribute open source library under GPL, the advantage of GPL is supposed to be that users of my library have to provide source code to their users. Making it "viral" and preventing them to do close source business. It was written this way because…

That's just the thing: software freedom does have moral value.

Power imbalances are abused. That's how you end up with stuff like nsa backdoors. Software freedom helps fix the power imbalance between users and developers.

Re: Is the GPL Really Declining?

#153

Post by smichel17 »

kstenerud wrote: post #61
wiz21c wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To put it in a more positive way : GPL users think about others first and themselves second. Anti-GPL people think the other way around. I wouldn't say either is good or bad, but I'd say they sure don't mix well together.

Wow, that was fast. You're pro-GPL, and it shows in how you colored your words to favor your side and denigrate the other.

To put it a more neutral way, pro-GPL people put user freedom first; anti-GPL people put developer freedom first.

There's nothing inherently wrong with either view; I personally stand with users.

Re: Is the GPL Really Declining?

#154

Post by s73ver »

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 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."

That sounds like the "if you can't sell yourself into slavery, then you're not free" line of reasoning.

And it sounds weird that you want anyone to be able to do stuff with your code, but you support people taking that freedom away from others.

Re: Is the GPL Really Declining?

#155

Post by dbcurtis »

the8472 wrote: post #148
dbcurtis wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

CC0 is a disclaimer of copyright, so yes. The essential test you need to pass for dual licensing is "no one else has copyright in this work". Good clarifying question.

IANAL

Re: Is the GPL Really Declining?

#156

Post by tanderson92 »

oblio wrote: post #140
erikbye wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok. You are talking about problems with the software on a proprietary system... Sorry, I don't support closed platforms. These problems do not exist on the Linux version.

You're both right. The problem is, his side is "winning". Linux is quite hostile to proprietary software, so not that many people will use Linux since apps > OS. So if OSS doesn't push for better apps even on proprietary systems, it won't even get out of this catch 22.

erikbye never indicated that he cares whether OSS gets out of the catch 22. I develop a Linux distribution and I know that I do not care. I care about my experience and other users' experiences, but not people who use MacOS. I value software freedom of the things I work on much more than a Mac user.

Re: Is the GPL Really Declining?

#157

Post by dbcurtis »

geokon wrote: post #141
dbcurtis wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes, it would be nice to be able to set up a click-through for pull requests.

Re: Is the GPL Really Declining?

#158

Post by pjmlp »

pmoriarty wrote: post #124
pjmlp wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The *BSDs show clearly what would have happened, most hardware vendors that ship some BSD variant on their hardware don't contribute anything back.

Most of the people who are anti-GPL are either naive or want to profit off of someone else's code without contributing anything back. For me, GPL doesn't go nearly far enough, and I licence everything I write under AGPL.

For several reasons I use mostly commercial commercial software, but everything I write outside work regardless of how useless it may be, is always released under GPL.

Re: Is the GPL Really Declining?

#159

Post by cwyers »

josephg wrote: post #20
djsumdog wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If open source licensed software has a pervasive problem like this, how can you be sure it has "nothing" to do with the licenses?

Re: Is the GPL Really Declining?

#160

Post by tanderson92 »

sgentle wrote: post #62

> The GPL is a fine open source license that grants all the permissions needed by developer communities that adopt it. There is no sense in which it is not "permissive", so to use that term as an antonym to "copyleft" verges on abuse. Sigh. This attitude makes it enormously difficult to have any kind of conversation about the tradeoffs of open source licenses, because it reveals a profound lack of perspective or will…

I'm curious, can you expand on how you see the Stewart vs. Maher analogy in this case?

full disclaimer: I love Stewart and think Maher is a smug prick, while being far to the left of both of them.

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