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My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

drewdevault.com

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Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#31

Post by briandear »

kiliantics wrote: post #19
phkahler wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Self preservation or self interest is important. You can't really do much for others if you dont have your own stuff together. Having said that, modern capitalism is moving toward pure self interest and even exploitation of others. The author correctly identified the one freedom the GPL denies - the freedom to exploit the work of others purely for your own gain.

capitalism was always about exploitation of others

Capitalism is about providing others with products and services they want.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#32

Post by cryptonector »

> The GPL is the legal embodiment of this Golden Rule

Sort of. It's a bit more like a golden pact with teeth. You can get excommunicated for not following the pact you agreed to. I suppose that's fine. But I prefer not to tempt others to agree -- let them find their own way. Contributing helps the contributor by avoiding having to have local patches, and by getting them reputation and good will points. Sure, a big company might fork an MIT codebase forever and keep it closed, but that's OK with me.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#33

Post by beefhash »

One thing that's worth considering making an exception for, no matter your ideological stand point, is cryptography libraries.

I want everyone to get cryptographic code right, ideally with one implementation that is correct, and then that's the end of it for everyone. Because if commerical vendors do their own thing because of copyleft on a piece of cryptographic code, the one that really ends up suffering is all the users that didn't have a choice in the matter of using said commercial software.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#34

Post by neuland »

oarsinsync wrote: post #21
neuland wrote: post #15

> The GPL is the legal embodiment of this Golden Rule: in exchange for benefiting from my hard work, you just have to extend me the same courtesy. This is a great article that's focused on just explaining why GPL is good. But I'm wondering what people think about enforcing this part of the GPL. I was very disheartened to see the Linux community's and other GPL projects' attitude to enforcement actions brought by indi…

> I was very disheartened to see the Linux community's and other GPL projects' attitude to enforcement actions brought by individuals. Can you share some examples of what's happened that's disheartening? I'm assuming based on context that the reaction to individuals enforcing GPL violations have been negative, which I would agree is disheartening. If you don't enforce the terms, the terms are valueless, and you might…

The big case recently was in Germany against VMWare [0]. They lost that case. But it was controversial partly because the person (who contributed a non-trivial amount of networking code) was asking for monetary damages in addition to bringing the company into compliance.

But setting the money aside, even the enforcement part was flamed by Torvalds and Greg KH [1]. The gist was that they're able to bring more people into compliance by working with companies behind the scenes. And lawsuits shut down all that backroom handholding. So ultimately, the lawsuits result in less compliance and less Linux adoption.

Linus mentions BusyBox specifically, where attempting to bring companies into compliance just led to fewer users and a shitty closed source alternative that these companies started using instead.

From Linus' perspective that's lose-lose: fewer users and more closed source software. But from people interested in GPL enforcement, they are more interested in not having their contributions abused by companies for profit. So if they won't give up their bad attitude, that's not the GPL projects' problem.

[0] https://lwn.net/Articles/635290/

[1] https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/ksummit-discuss/...

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#36

Post by CarVac »

godshatter wrote: post #24

First, I'm not a lawyer, but I've always seen the MIT license as being more "free", whereas the GPL is more "fair". Both licenses are pretty much the same for users of the code. Where they differ is that the MIT license gives you the freedom to make an awesome change to the free code you were given, and add it to your closed source application with no obligation to give those enhancements you made to the code to anyo…

Permissive licenses give freedom to the developers who use code under that license. The developer is free to restrict the users' freedoms.

Copyleft licenses grant freedom to the users of software: a developer cannot restrict a user.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#37

Post by Wowfunhappy »

godshatter wrote: post #24

First, I'm not a lawyer, but I've always seen the MIT license as being more "free", whereas the GPL is more "fair". Both licenses are pretty much the same for users of the code. Where they differ is that the MIT license gives you the freedom to make an awesome change to the free code you were given, and add it to your closed source application with no obligation to give those enhancements you made to the code to anyo…

> the MIT license gives you the freedom to make an awesome change to the free code you were given, and add it to your closed source application with no obligation to give those enhancements you made to the code to anyone else.

It's also the freedom to make zero changes to the free code you were given, reuse it in your closed source software, and pass it off as your own.

In a way, I feel like I should be a big enough person to be okay with this, but I'm not. The possibility bothers me.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#38

Post by lone_haxx0r »

Certhas wrote: post #27
lone_haxx0r wrote: post #6

> Capitalism is about enriching yourself - not enriching your users and certainly not enriching society. Capitalism is not about enriching anyone, it's about being free to do whatever you want with your resources. Free software developers use their resources to enrich society (and I applaud their work). Mark Zuckerberg uses his resources to enrich himself. Both are being capitalistic, as long as they don't steal or k…

Wikipedia states both, operation for profit and private ownership, as defining characteristics: "Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit." Classically free software works more like a gift economy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gift_economy No capitalist society ever worked without a state that enforces rules and social constructs (such…

> A capitalist (ideas) economy requires a state enforcing copyright.

No. Copyright has nothing to do with capitalism. In a completely capitalistic system, there would be no intellectual "property".

If you read the founders of right libertarian (pure capitalist) thought, the whole system is based around freedom. And property is justified based on the fact that it's necessary for freedom. Intellectual "property" doesn't enhance freedom in any way, to the contrary.

Granted, Marx created the term 'capitalism' to refer to the private ownership, and he conveniently bonded that private ownership to for-profit operation. But there can be ownership that's not for profit, and libertarian theory considers owning things without operating them for profit a perfectly acceptable stance.

Marx doesn't say anything about copyright or intellectual property, as far as I know.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#39

Post by abstractbarista »

School-Cotton wrote: post #22
oarsinsync wrote: post #2

This very clearly and simply describes the differences between absolute freedom, limited freedom, and the value of limiting freedom. In a way, it's similar to the paradox of tolerance, and a tolerant society needing to be intolerant of those that are intolerant. Or to quote Team America: freedom isn't free. I may be re-thinking my own use of BSD licensing in favour of something more copyleft in future too.

My view is: if you don’t care what people do with your software and just want anyone who finds it useful to use it, including anyone from Stallman-esque ideologues to cogs in the FAANG machine and everyone in between, then use BSD, MIT or similar. If you care about “free software” as an ideological movement and only want to give your software to people who are, in exchange, willing to help advance it, then use copyle…

Exactly the same for me. For most personal creations, I seriously do not care at all what happens to it. I just don't want to be successfully sued over it.
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