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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

#51

Post by simion314 »

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…

>First, I'm not a lawyer, but I've always seen the MIT license as being more "free",

If you are a lawyer can you maybe be more clear about "more free" , more free relative to what? AFAIK GPL protects the user freedom and I think you are referring at the programmers freedom, GPL is a license that respects the users/society as a group, most people here are developers sothey will say that this is less free for them as an individual, less free to take freedom from others(the freedom to study,modify and distribute).

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#52

Post by detaro »

pas wrote: post #42
theturtletalks wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry I was under the impression copyleft meant that commercial users must purchase a license and normal users could use it for free. Is this what CockroachBD just did?

They moved from Apache2 (a permissive license) to a no-compete license basically. Copyleft means the license leaves the right-to-copy for the user. But copyleft (AGPL, GPL, LGPL) means that you can't remove the copyleft itself even from the new parts, whereas permissive (Apache, MIT) means that you can. edit: I mixed up weak copyleft and permissive :o

Apache and MIT are not copyleft, since you do not need to share your code modifications.

weak copyleft would be things like MPL, that limit the modifications you have to share to only parts of the program.

CockroachDBs new license isn't even Open Source following the common OSI definition of the term.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#53

Post by [deleted] »

theturtletalks wrote: post #25
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, copyleft doesn't prevent commercial use. In fact, preventing commercial use is impossible with the GPL.

Sorry I was under the impression copyleft meant that commercial users must purchase a license and normal users could use it for free. Is this what CockroachBD just did?

[deleted]

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#54

Post by seba_dos1 »

theturtletalks wrote: post #25
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, copyleft doesn't prevent commercial use. In fact, preventing commercial use is impossible with the GPL.

Sorry I was under the impression copyleft meant that commercial users must purchase a license and normal users could use it for free. Is this what CockroachBD just did?

That's absolutely not what copyleft means. The concept of copyleft is the core of viral open source licenses like GPL. CockroachDB did something completely opposite - they migrated away from open source licenses.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#56

Post by School-Cotton »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #37
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…

Is this meaningfully different from being able to build a multi-billion dollar company like Red Hat on top of other people’s GPLed work?

Yes, because of the GPL, they have to give RHEL customers the source to all their patches, but what difference does this make in practice?

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#57

Post by TuringTest »

pas wrote: post #42
theturtletalks wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry I was under the impression copyleft meant that commercial users must purchase a license and normal users could use it for free. Is this what CockroachBD just did?

They moved from Apache2 (a permissive license) to a no-compete license basically. Copyleft means the license leaves the right-to-copy for the user. But copyleft (AGPL, GPL, LGPL) means that you can't remove the copyleft itself even from the new parts, whereas permissive (Apache, MIT) means that you can. edit: I mixed up weak copyleft and permissive :o

> weak copyleft (Apache, MIT)

The term you're looking for is "permissive license". [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permissive_software_license

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#58

Post by monocasa »

I'm a big fan of Social Architecture by Pieter Hintjens, and it's explanation for why he picked GPL instead a BSD license.

BSD tends to fracture the community, and the community is generally even more important than the code, per se.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#59

Post by lone_haxx0r »

TuringTest wrote: post #28
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…

There's a category error in treating commons as property. Even though Wikipedia copyright is nominally owned by the respective writer of each individual edit, the fact that it's licensed as copyleft allow anyone to treat it as a public good an benefit from something that you don't own. See a framework like the Universal Basic Assets (UBA)[1] manifesto: it distinguishes between Private assets, Public assets, and Open…

Ideas can't be property in the capitalistic sense. Intellectual "property" doesn't enhance freedom in any way.

Conflating real (material) property with false, intellectual "property" is one of the biggest lies that have been fed upon our society.

I approve the efforts of Creative Commons and other initiatives to get around the sick copyright system. But I don't believe in their premise of "commons" because it implies a dependence in a political system or society at large deeming things as commons.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#60

Post by dmm »

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…

I use the GPL because I want every user of my software to have the right to use, examine, modify and create derivative works. Every user, not just programmer and entrepreneurs making products.

I want to live in a world where software, which plays an increasingly important role in our lives, can be modified by anyone. Imagine if only google could fix your plumbing

I've found that programmers tend to frame licenses in they way you have, placing emphasis on how the GPL affects them and describing the GPL as a way to enforce tit-for-tat but software is such an important part of everyone's life now that it's worth considering how licenses affect non-developers too.

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