Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

drewdevault.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 431 posts

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#91

Post by mcv »

ben509 wrote: post #4
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.

> 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.

I think you're not getting the paradox part.

If you're tolerant of intolerance, you may be tolerant, but others will be intolerant. If you want a tolerant society, you need to be intolerant of intolerance.

Of course to write it down like that, it sounds like they're the same kind of intolerance, but they're not, and that's also the solution to the paradox: it's intolerance of people who are simply being who they are, that's oppressive and therefore unacceptable, but intolerance of oppression is necessary if you don't want oppression.

Copyleft vs permissive is kinda the same thing. I hadn't really looked at it that way yet, but I see the similarity.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#92

Post by TheMagicHorsey »

I feel like OP is naive. If he thinks Capitalism is so bad, why is he insisting that people pay him back in their own labor when they use his code? Isn't that what the GPL is? You use my code, and then you must pay back to me your improvements on the code.

What if someone doesn't want payment in labor, but instead wants some carrots? If they make a license that says, use my code, but send me carrots, is that worse than OP's insistence that he should get paid in the code of his users? And if asking for carrots is okay, then why not asking for cash, which is more fungible?

This isn't about morality. Everyone is seeking something ... even those that use BSD or MIT are seeking something. They are seeking recognition, or adoption of their protocol so they can build a symbiotic business, etc. True altruism exists, but it doesn't have a widespread impact. If altruism really did work like that, without a care for personal well being and on a large scale, then we would all be immigrating to a thriving Soviet Block right now, while the USA would be collapsing ... instead of the other way around.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#93

Post by ghaff »

It's a very natural human reaction to push back against the idea that someone else might profit from your work--whether or not you have any real opportunity to profit yourself. That was really one of the geniuses of open source licensing (including the GPL) as it developed. By contrast, in the PC world for example, there were a lot of licenses along the lines of "free for educational use only" or "you can't use this software if you're an evil defense contractor."

You still see this usage restriction thread of licensing in Creative Commons for example with non-commercial and no-derivatives being common--even though CC has basically been unable to come up with a workable definition of NC in a decade of trying and ND runs completely counter to the whole idea of remixing that partly drove CC in the first place.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#94

Post by ekianjo »

> The reality, however, is that we live in a capitalist world. Our socialist free software utopia is ripe for exploitation by capitalists

Amusing point of view, when you realize that the largest GPL (or FOSS) projects (like the Linux Kernel for example) are developed and maintained by capitalistic corporations more than anything else - GNOME is developed/maintained by RedHat/IBM, Confluent develops Kafka, Facebook develops React, Google develops Android and Chromium, Dart, Go, Kubernetes, Tensorflow... the list goes on and on.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#95

Post by ben509 »

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

Please post your thoughts rather than dropping a link with no commentary.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#96

Post by wrs »

simion314 wrote: post #51
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 a…

If “users” = “not programmers” (which I think must be the definition here) then neither license gives users anything except the freedom to hire programmers to do something they want more cheaply. (I include buying software and downloading free-as-in-beer software in “hiring programmers”.) With MIT/GPL the programmers can afford to charge a lot less to do the same job.

It’s fundamentally programmer freedom in either case. Any user freedom is an indirect side effect.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#97

Post by kickopotomus »

kemitchell wrote: post #61
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 "dist…

That is fascinating. Do you happen to know of any good resources for pitfalls/downsides of other popular licenses (bonus if layman friendly)?

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#98

Post by dbcurtis »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #76
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.

No, that substitution completely misses my point. One can have deep and well thought out principles and morals and apply that to the strategic selection of a license, and also in choosing which projects are worthy of contribution. Ideology-based decisions are in a different category.

When I look at RMS, I see someone who has thought deeply about the implications of various licenses, and has decided firmly what kind of projects are worthy of his time. He has an agenda, and acts upon it thoughtfully. Some of his followers are not nearly so thoughtful.

All I am saying here is this: before choosing a license, be clear in your own mind about your agenda.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#99

Post by Quekid5 »

threwawasy1228 wrote: post #65

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…

> It enriches everyone, even those who I don't necessarily agree with.

That's definitely a valid PoV, but you just have to realize/accept that it may empower people who have power over you. I'm mostly talking about economic power here, but with the absurd expansion of lobbying, etc., this may extend to political power, cf. Turbotax[1].

Again: It's ultimately up to you, but for me... I don't want to give big conglomerates an inch if I can avoid it. Both as an individual and as a software-development business owner. (We do bespoke software, so "overly-permissive" licensing isn't really much of threat in that space -- from either perspective: There's no software that does what we provide, nor would what we provide do much for anyone else except our clients.)

I'm not sure if this is too controversial, but I think BSD (permissive for developers, maybe restrictive for users) vs. GPL (restrictive for developers, permissive for users) is very similar to the Paradox of Tolerance in a way.

[1] Who knows if they're using MIT/BSD licensed code, but I think it serves as a good example of the power of lobbying at least.

EDIT: I don't grammar so good.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#100

Post by darkpuma »

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.

Of course there is. What else would you call a company store in a remote logging camp? When the market is small, a monopoly can be small.
Post reply on HN