My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL • Hacker News Board

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#121

Post by ghaff » Fri, Jun 14, 2019, 4:45 PM UTC

biomcgary wrote: post #110

ghaff wrote: post #93

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…

I recently ran into a modified MIT license with a no-military clause. My company would not use the otherwise very nice package because, unfortunately, it includes an "indirectly" in the language. We don't have anything to do with the military, but our clients are large pharmaceutical companies, so they probably have military contracts.

Just purely from a practical perspective, lawyers tend to run screaming from a lot of usage-based restrictions. Even if they seem fairly straightforward at first scan, once you start asking questions (as in your case and non-commercial), all but the most trivial uses--in which the license doesn't really matter anyway--start to look like they might fall into a grey area.

If your job is managing business risk, it's just not worth it.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#122

Post by c0l0 » Fri, Jun 14, 2019, 4:47 PM UTC

CJefferson wrote: post #111

My problem with the GPL is more low level. It (in my opinion) doesn't work well over very long periods. 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,…

> [...] We had to either go GPL v2+, which assumes the FSF will never go crazy, [...]

This is a rather common common misconception. If you use the "Version 2 of the GPL or any later version"-clause in your specific GPL licensing lingo, then any re-distributor may CHOOSE to distribute under GPLv3, or GPLv4 (if it ever exists), or, for that matter, also GPLv2. You're not bound to re-distribute under GPLv${latest} because of that phrase - so it is, in my pov, completely safe to go with the "or later"-clause. (But that also may be because I do trust the FSF to not "go crazy" in the forseeable future :))

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#123

Post by jahewson » Fri, Jun 14, 2019, 4:48 PM UTC

Quekid5 wrote: post #99

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 conglomer…

People who have power over you are, by definition, already empowered. Whether or not you give them something for free isn't going to move the needle.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#124

Post by komali2 » Fri, Jun 14, 2019, 4:48 PM UTC

neuland wrote: post #34

oarsinsync wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I was very disheartened to see the Linux community's and other GPL projects' attitude to enforcement actions brought by individuals. Can you share some examples of what's happened that's disheartening? I'm assuming based on context that the reaction to individuals enforcing GPL violations have been negative, which I would agree is disheartening. If you don't enforce the terms, the terms are valueless, and you might…

The big case recently was in Germany against VMWare [0]. They lost that case. But it was controversial partly because the person (who contributed a non-trivial amount of networking code) was asking for monetary damages in addition to bringing the company into compliance. But setting the money aside, even the enforcement part was flamed by Torvalds and Greg KH [1]. The gist was that they're able to bring more people i…

This almost smacks of the discussion yesterday in the thread about gorillas that were dismantling poacher traps. There was a subthread about intelligent parrots stealing bait from traps that were set to capture artificially introduced predators of the parrots. Thus the parrots were unknowingly harming themselves, though benefiting themselves in the short term.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#125

Post by jwgarber » Fri, Jun 14, 2019, 4:48 PM UTC

I personally agree with the philosophy of the author: I think all software should be free, and in the perfect world, I would license everything I do under the GPL. However, not everyone in the open source world has this philosophy. A lot of people prefer more permissive licenses like Apache and MIT, and using the GPL excludes these people and projects from using the code - by its viral nature, any single usage of the GPL would force the entire project to be under the GPL as well. Cooperation is the greatest strength of the FOSS world, and so I'm willing to compromise a bit to make that possible. As such, I personally prefer the MPL - it is a weak copyleft license that enforces all modifications to the source code itself are released back (important for me), but unlike the GPL is not viral and will not spread outside its own source files to other projects (important for others). This way I can keep the project and all modifications to it free, but also allow it to be used by others who don't share that point of view.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#126

Post by kerkeslager » Fri, Jun 14, 2019, 4:49 PM UTC

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…

> 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.

Just to be very clear, neither the MIT nor GPL licenses prevent this.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#127

Post by smitop » Fri, Jun 14, 2019, 4:50 PM UTC

beering wrote: post #117

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…

Someday, that might come full circle and you'll be the one who won't be enriched because the original code was MIT and not GPL. 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 pe…

GCC has the GCC Runtime Library Exception: the resulting binary of code compiled with GCC doesn't need to licensed under GPL.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#128

Post by TeMPOraL » Fri, Jun 14, 2019, 4:53 PM UTC

djmips wrote: post #104

TeMPOraL wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

"the whole point is to convince people to buy your product/service where, left alone, they wouldn't. " - your implication is cynical. Some of the time the reason you wouldn't is that you're ignorant of a better way. Certainly you don't want a better mousetrap if you don't know they exist. In that context, advertising and sales is just a way of getting the word out that something better is available.

I strongly disagree. My implication is down-to-Earth realistic, whereas your argument is a Motte-and-Bailey defense of the advertising industry. Yes, informing consumers about what's available on the market is crucial for good operation of the market. No, that's not what the advertisers do.

Informing consumers is putting yourself in Yellow Pages / catalogs of companies. Informing consumers is making a catalog of your products available. It's having a product page available with full specifications up front. It's showing up on trade shows.

Informing consumers does not require spamming them with e-mail and snail-mail, banners, billboards, leaflets or interstitials. Informing consumers does not require branding, or polluting every inch of space available to you with said branding. It does not require tracking people, spying on people, or manipulating people with dark UI patterns, dishonest journalism (aka. native advertising), paying people to lie to their audience (aka. influencers).

Most of money and effort in advertising is not spent on honestly informing people about availability of a better mousetrap.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#129

Post by kerkeslager » Fri, Jun 14, 2019, 4:56 PM UTC

flamtap wrote: post #81

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…

>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. This is really insightful, to me. Worth keeping in mind in today’s world.

Eh, is it really insightful? It just seems straightforwardly wrong to me.

Nazism is a viewpoint. Does progress include that?

I know I'm triggering Godwin's law here, but if you're literally saying that progress includes ALL viewpoints, you're really opening yourself up to including some really ridiculously outlandish ideals.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#130

Post by munificent » Fri, Jun 14, 2019, 4:56 PM UTC

TuringTest wrote: post #10

MIT-like freedom is the "freedom to sell yourself as a slave". GPL is "your liberty ends where my nose begins". If you understand freedom as the removal of social constraints, you won't understand the value of something like GPL software or Wikipedia. If, on the other side, you think of freedom as the capability to do things, the accumulation of knowledge in copyleft projects creates possibilities that are less likel…

> MIT-like freedom is the "freedom to sell yourself as a slave".

I don't think this analogy is strictly wrong, but the tone is insensitive enough that it is unlikely to be persuasive to the people you are trying to persuade. (Also, some will feel that it diminishes the gravity of actual slavery.)

I agree with your point, but I think you would be better off stating it in a different way.