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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

#61

Post by kemitchell »

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…

I am a lawyer, and I really appreciated your "free" versus "fair" line.

One tidbit on the GPLs: They require you to share alike if you share the software with others, but do not require you to share the software with others. You can make changes and larger programs entirely for your own or your company's internal use, and not share anything.

The GPLs mention this explicitly, and implement it using concepts like "distribute" and "convey". Your obligation to share alike doesn't kick in unless you distribute or convey.

That got GPL into trouble later on, when it turned out folks often ran software for others to use over networks, rather than sharing with users in copies for them to install locally. That led eventually to AGPL, a kind of fork of GPL, but outside FSF, also to licenses that simply require sharing back whether you distribute your work or not.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#63

Post by ta0987 »

jameskilton wrote: post #14
ben509 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In a way, it's similar to the paradox of tolerance, and a tolerant society needing to be intolerant of those that are intolerant. That's not a paradox; you're just intolerant. Whether you're right or wrong to be so is immaterial, as is whether the people you're intolerant of are also intolerant.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

People keep posting this Wikipedia link as if it ended discussion on the topic. An idea is not automatically true just because it has a Wikipedia article. Even the linked article has quotes from people who disagree:

Thomas Jefferson had already addressed the notion of a tolerant society in his first inaugural speech, concerning those who might destabilise the United States and its unity, saying, "...let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it."

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#64

Post by TeMPOraL »

briandear wrote: post #31
kiliantics wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

capitalism was always about exploitation of others

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

No, capitalism is about enriching yourself by, among other ways, providing others with products and services they want.

There's a slight but important difference between providing people what they want/need in exchange for money, vs. trying to make people give you maximum amount of money for minimum value provided. A lot of the problems attributed to capitalism are consequences of companies doing the latter rather than former. Instead of serving customers, they mine them. The current euphemism for that is "monetizing".

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#65

Post by threwawasy1228 »

I can't relate to this at all, I feel like I went the opposite way. I started out putting all of my work out under GPL but slowly realized how restrictive and demanding such a license actually is, I think public domain is the license that provides the most good to the world as a whole. It enriches everyone, even those who I don't necessarily agree with. It is a much more powerful statement in my view to provide work in a way that allows the entire world, (corporations included) to enrich themselves and educate themselves in an open and free manner.

If this means that they are going to repackage and sell the work, that is their prerogative. If that means a professor wants to put the work into their course and help to instruct a class with it, that is great too. It is nice to attempt to force people to play by the rules I like in order to try to enforce the actions that I see as best for the world, like sharing, etc. But at a certain point you just have to realize that there are differing points of view, that is just the way things go, and "progress" includes all of them.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#66

Post by kemitchell »

mrob wrote: post #41
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?

From the Open Source Definition[0]: >The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research. From the FSF's "What is free software?" page[1]: >A free program must be available for commercial use, commercial development, and commercial distribution. Licenses…

In my experience advising clients who haven't already spent years reading about open source licenses, those lines confuse more than clarify.

The dominant mode of commercial software development is closed. Many commercial firms forbid the use of copyleft software components that might compel licensing choices about company work.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#67

Post by moftz »

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…

The decision between MIT-like licenses and copyleft licenses all depend on the contextual usage of the code. Is it just some quick and dirty script I wrote to convert some obscure binary format to another obscure binary format? I literally do not care who uses it and why/where/when/how. The script was complete the day I made it, it does everything it needs to do and nothing it doesn't. School assignments fall under the same category, they were useful for that moment and will never be needed again. Writing my own linked-list in C++ stopped being useful to me the moment I turned the assignment in so I don't care who uses it. It's not anything special and licensing it any other way would (in theory) only limit someone trying to learn. Did I actually write something clever that could actually be used somewhere helpful? Is it something that I can see others would want to build upon and improve? That's definitely copyleft worthy.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#68

Post by Arkanosis »

forkerenok wrote: post #16

I have a feeling that the jury is still out on this one. My observations are that: * MIT license increases adoption of OS projects, increasing pool of potential contributors and derivative works * People like sharing what they create, hence derivative works are likely to be shared with the world as well. I know there are companies that utilize tons of free code without contributing enough back. Overall to me the diff…

That's my observations as well. I'd add that people share derivative work not only because they like it, but because it makes sense: upstream means much less maintenance and infrastructure work, many more opportunities for improvements.

I believe in FOSS so much that I'm confident anyone smart enough will end up using it and contributing to it to some level. It might take a lot of time, but it'll happen. Companies not doing FOSS have a competing disadvantage in the long run.

Sure, not everything will be contributed back. And so what? It wouldn't have been anyway if the license terms had discouraged the use of FOSS in the first place. What matters to me it that /more/ is being contributed back.

Short version: part of much more > everything of much less.

So, I'm very fine with any non-FOSS reuse of FOSS projects. It directly increases the likehood of improvements to these projects and indirectly increases the likehood of improvements of FOSS in general, by making it more and more relevant in still-non-FOSS environments (the long tail of small FOSS projects is what makes it ubiquitous). Just don't ask me to use non-FOSS derivatives :)

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#69

Post by lone_haxx0r »

TuringTest wrote: post #49
briandear wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[dead]

Capitalism has an enormous blind spot, in that it doesn't contains ethic provisions on what happens in a free market to people not able to create value that others are willing to pay for. Given the relentless tendency of capitalism to optimize towards eradicating any inefficiency, it contains as a natural consequence the propensity to expel those people out of the system - i.e. the ethical proposition of capitalism i…

[flagged]

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#70

Post by haberman »

> If the people with their fingers on that button held these same ideals, we wouldn’t need the GPL. The reality, however, is that we live in a capitalist world. Our socialist free software utopia is ripe for exploitation by capitalists, and they’ll be rewarded for doing so. Capitalism is about enriching yourself - not enriching your users and certainly not enriching society.

We like to talk in favor of abstract ideals and moral arguments, but I think a lot of our underlying motivations come from our feelings towards (and relationships with) other people. If you see the world in this way (good socialist free software utopians vs. greedy capitalists) then all of the rest of the argument basically falls into place.

I'm not even saying that's right or wrong. I'm saying that no amount of abstract argument will convince someone out of their position if their underlying feeling towards other people is already firmly held. I'm including myself in this.

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