111–120 of 431 posts
I work on an open source system which is over 20 years old. For a long time it was GPL v2. We had to either go GPL v2+, which assumes the FSF will never go crazy, or stick with GPL v2, which is incompatible with v3, which causes various problems.
The GPL v2 and v3 are really strict compared to most other licenses, they don't really "play nice" with anything, including each other.
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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 o…
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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 un…
Jefferson may have changed his mind had he seen the horrors that Nazi ideology led to in WW2 -- and may do so again, the way Europe (and the US) is going.
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> 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?
CentOS is the difference; it is one of the most widely used distributions has the same stability and longevity characteristics and gets security fixes just as fast as RHEL.
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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…
> Why don't you 'steal' from your own pocket and help the poor?
See? That's exactly what I was referring to with "frowned upon by those who see capitalism as an ethical system" and with "capitalism has an enormous blind spot".
There's a rational argument perfectly consistent with libertarian free market principles, by which a government collecting taxes is not "stealing", as long as you don't take "anything a government do is evil" as a premise. If you begin from the assumption that people can willingly enter into contracts as long as their terms are legal and free from coertion, the argument goes like this:
- A country's land is owned by the state (or by its ruler, in case of a monarchy or a tyranny).
- There's a "social contract", willingly enforced by the citizens in that country (either explicitly or tacitly)[1], that the government has a duty to protect its citizens, and the citizens in turn will obey the government and pay due taxes in order to support the country.
- You were signed into that contract by your parents when you were born, as they had the legal authority over your rights to decide on your behalf.
- As soon as you legally become an adult, you can step out of that social contract by leaving the country at any time. By remaining in your country, you consent to its social contract, so you pay taxes to the government by your own will.
- Therefore, as an adult, you are not forced to pay taxes to that country where you acquired citizenship; but you don't have a right to be a free-rider by using the services provided by that country (military, roads, social welfare) without paying the required fee for those services.
- There's a free market of countries with open borders; people can vote with their feet in this market and migrate to their preferred one. You have no obligation to pay taxes at any one of them, but they have no obligation to accept you nor provide you with services if you're not willing to play by their rules.
TLDR version: creating governments and establishing taxes is the strategy we use to "'steal' from our own pocket and help the poor" in a sistematic way. Anyone not willing to participate is free to leave, but good luck finding a country that will not do the same.
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the paradox isn't about what you are or aren't. but about what you should be. it is certainly a subtle nuanced issue.
It's really not all that subtle. If you want to laud yourself as tolerant and pure, and then do bad and intolerant things, one way to avoid the obvious inconsistency is to furrow your brow and say, "well, it's a paradox," and then change the subject. Look, I was in the Army. My job was to close with and kill the enemy. I can say, "well, a peaceful society sometimes has to make war, it's a paradox!" Or I can cut the b…
I'm peaceful. But I'd violently defend my peace - I think it's a paradox.
The "paradox of tolerance" was formally defined in 1945, at the height of WWII. It's the result of grappling with a complicated moral issue - how do you remain peaceful when Nazis are dropping bombs on your city so as to march in and start rounding up minority populations for extermination? You have to abandon your peace value, at least for a moment.
"Cut the bullshit" is an extremely dismissive thing to say about a highly debated philosophical moral concept. Maybe it feels good to say, maybe it feels like an intellectual high ground, but I say it's intellectually dishonest. It's the imposition of your philosophical viewpoint as "right" because you claim your viewpoint is more "simple" or "natural."
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…
Here's an example: you buy some embedded hardware for a personal project, but you find out that the toolchain for that chipset is a pile of proprietary blobs built on Clang and it only runs on Windows. If it were built on GCC, then the GPL would force them to make the source available and people could adapt/update/rebuild it as needed.
Making something MIT/public domain is free for one hop, from you to the next person. After that it can become even more restrictive and demanding than the GPL (i.e. proprietary binaries).
edit: it seems obvious that a doctor's obligations should be to the patient, then to medicine, then to the particular institution they work for. A lawyer should protect the client, protect the legal profession, then protect whatever firm they happen to work for.
Programmers should make sure that users have access to inspect the code that affects their lives; that other programmers can work with, learn from, and help the users to interpret that code; and that their company makes money. The only way that companies can accept being pushed to the third priority is by a united front of programmers who unambiguously swear to uphold the first two without compromise, and making what you do GPL is attaching an oath to that effect to everything you write.
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>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…
I was looking at it from the programmer's perspective. Specifically, from the perspective of someone who built something themselves and distributed it. From what I can tell, the user's freedoms (assuming no changes) are pretty much the same. They can use the software without worry.
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…
> People should chose a software license the way they choose a screwdriver, not the way they chose a religion. But your claim of what people should do is itself an ideological argument. Software creators have just as much right to choose their licenses for principled reasons as utilitarian ones. Heck, they could pick a license based on the number of contractions in the license text if they wanted. It's their software…
We are pretty much in agreement here. All I ask is that people think for themselves, rather than farming out that decision to that persuasive sloganeer they recently met.