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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

#71

Post by dbcurtis »

People should chose a software license the way they choose a screwdriver, not the way they chose a religion.

Choose the tool that accomplishes the job. Do you want to avoid commercial exploitation without repayment-in-kind in the form of contributing back? Use GPL or similar (although this is getting creaky in the case of SaaS deployments). Do you want total world domination for your new protocol? Release a reference implementation under MIT or similar.

License debates go off the rails because too often people try to compress a two-dimensional discussion (ideology and distribution rights) onto a single dimension and talk past each other.

So this blog post seems to say: "I have changed my religion." To which I say: "Consider choosing licenses more strategically."

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#72

Post by whatshisface »

zepto wrote: post #35
whatshisface wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software is full of tiny monopolies and it's standard consensus that monopolies cause the market to fail.

There’s no such thing as a tiny monopoly.

An example of a tiny monopoly would be a program with no alternatives that performed a task worth a few thousand bucks to 20 people on Earth. It doesn't have to be Standard Oil for monopoly pricing to take effect, if the market is small enough the mere fact that two vendors couldn't survive at the same time would be enough to keep out competition. Another example would be proprietary data formats, if your program is the only thing in the world that writes and reads an Oracle database, you can charge monopoly prices to anyone who has an Oracle database - and unsurprisingly, Oracle does.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#73

Post by TeMPOraL »

briandear wrote: post #26
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…

[dead]

> Capitalism requires that it’s participants provide value. Capitalism rewards providing others with things they want.

No, and it's surprising this is still believed even though most of the market economy around you screams otherwise.

Capitalism requires and rewards amassing capital. It may incidentally involve providing others with things they want, but it doesn't need to and frequently doesn't. Consider advertising, or the job of salesmen: the whole point is to convince people to buy your product/service where, left alone, they wouldn't. In a world where capitalism would reward providing others with value, these jobs would not exist. They're needed because there are more efficient ways of making money than giving people what they want.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#74

Post by Retra »

lone_haxx0r wrote: post #18
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.

It's the difference between political freedom and metaphorical freedom (knowledge & rights). Political freedom I define as not being subject to violence unless you're attacking someone or stealing (material objects) from someone. Metaphorical (software) freedom is being in control of your computer, that means: you run free software (you know what you're running) and you can use and distribute it freely. There is noth…

Violence is usually too far removed from the relevant abstractions. It's not difficult to see violence behind everything, because rules don't mean much if they aren't enforced, and it's all too easy to conflate violence with a threat of violence, or a threat of force with a threat of violence, etc.

But that's not a very useful perspective; a well-functioning society filters violence so that it is only applied when things go seriously awry, and most of us should only ever threatened by minor inconveniences. To focus on violence is to be reductive; it is like trying to talk about programming in terms of electromagnetic laws -- yes, computers ultimately run on electricity, and social powers are ultimately enforced through violence, but the abstractions we've built atop those facts are actually very relevant and useful.

Political freedom is not simply about establishing when violence is appropriate. It's broader than that -- it's about the functional ways we can convert violence into something softer without abdicating our ability to govern ourselves effectively.

More to the point, closed source software doesn't need to be 'inherently violent' for it to cause problems. Nothing is inherently violent, and political freedoms are not defined by violence any more than computer programming is defined by electricity use.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#75

Post by pas »

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.

Capitalism is not "about" anything really. It's a description that sometimes applies (if private individuals can own (and buy/sell) equity, and operate the means of production for profit) to economies.

Of course there are good and bad parts, of course there are good and bad implementations/representations/manifestations of such big concepts.

For example using a price system and voluntary exchange is usually a great way to get clear signals about what people want and value. But if the market is in a pathological state (monopoly, oligopoly, or monopsony, high barriers to entry, etc.), then the market becomes exploitative. Is this the systems's fault? Well, maybe, but it's not because people can own equity/machines, it's because that particular system/market is fucked due to various reasons. (Either due to historic reasons, eg. enormous income inequality led to a small clique of people owning all/most of capital coupled with a political system that wasn't able to represent the capitally-disadvantaged; or due to other failure of politics - eg. a group consolidated power into a totalitarian system which then dismantled competition.)

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#76

Post by TeMPOraL »

dbcurtis wrote: post #71

People should chose a software license the way they choose a screwdriver, not the way they chose a religion. Choose the tool that accomplishes the job. Do you want to avoid commercial exploitation without repayment-in-kind in the form of contributing back? Use GPL or similar (although this is getting creaky in the case of SaaS deployments). Do you want total world domination for your new protocol? Release a reference…

I'd s/religion/principles/, and then it becomes clearer why the topic isn't completely arbitrary and may have moral weight.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#77

Post by forkerenok »

Arkanosis wrote: post #68
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 no…

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

Well said. A net win for FOSS.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#78

Post by TeMPOraL »

dmm wrote: post #60
School-Cotton wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

That's the point people keep forgetting. GPL wasn't created to benefit developers, it was created to benefit end users.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#79

Post by TuringTest »

lone_haxx0r wrote: post #59
TuringTest wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

We are always going to depend on politics or society in deeming some resource as "public", as "commons" or as "property", because those are concepts that get their meanings from how people think about them. Whether they are defined by custom, by the legal system or because everybody shares the same ideology, they are necessarily social constructs - there's no such thing as "real" and "fake" property except as understood by people.

IMHO the biggest lie of our society is not property about physical vs intellectual goods, but the ideology that applies the same concept of "property" to the gadgets you can keep in your pocket and you can keep control personaly, and equate it to the large multinational company encompassing the work of thousands of people on several continents. They simply don't have the same behavior nor expectations, and yet somehow we're supposed to apply the same legal framework - in order to uphold the decisions made by the few people who are in control of the large organisation.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#80

Post by [deleted] »

School-Cotton wrote: post #56
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

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