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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

#131

Post by sctb »

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…

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Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#132

Post by qznc »

smitop wrote: post #127
beering wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Grandparent is talking about a modified GCC. Not some binary compiled with GCC.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#133

Post by seandougall »

I feel like where this debate breaks down is in trying to apply the same license to both reusable libraries and finished products.

For a library, an MIT license is much more likely to get it adopted in a finished product that is accessible and maintained. A GPLed library can only get adopted in a GPLed project, which means there may be a ton of economic constraints that make the library's functionality inaccessible to anyone who doesn't have the time or expertise to build an entire application around it.

Also worth noting: to most ordinary people, GPL on a library is like a Post-It that says, "Free—take one!" on the door of a safe. It's nice to have permission, but it doesn't do much good if you don't know anyone who has the combination. The GPL-everywhere philosophy seems to assume a magical utopia where everyone is a skilled programmer fluent in multiple languages.

For finished products, though, an MIT license doesn't necessarily make sense, for the reasons lots of folks here have pointed out; namely, any big corp could compile the code unmodified, brand it, and sell it. If you want to make a complete application free and permissive for end users, GPL seems like the best way to guarantee that.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#134

Post by Quekid5 »

jahewson wrote: post #123
Quekid5 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

"something" = "leverage".

Disprove that.

As a bonus point, leverage is exactly what you may be giving them by licensing with the BSD/MIT/... There's no guarantee that they'll gain leverage, but if they see and seize the opportunity then that's what they'll get.

EDIT: The APL 2.0 is kind of interesting here because it doesn't really do that much over BSD/MIT/... except for the patent grant thing. The patent thing actually brings it much closer to 'acceptable' for me, personally, because a lot of instances of conglomerates exercising their power has been through software patents.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#135

Post by grumdan »

jahewson wrote: post #123
Quekid5 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It does cement their power over you even further though. An individual project may not make an appreciable difference, but in aggregate, if lots of people make similar choices, it may have an impact.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#136

Post by klyrs »

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.

Nauty has a clause like this. Which is hilarious because Magma uses Nauty, and the NSA is one of Magma's biggest users if not the biggest. McKay apparently doesn't mind, but refuses to change the license

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#137

Post by dllthomas »

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 led eventually to AGPL, a kind of fork of GPL

Yes.

> but outside FSF

Initially. The current version was published by the FSF in 2007.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#138

Post by normalhuman »

mhh__ wrote: post #87

I worry that the downturn of GPL use will have consequences in the future. I understand why the GPL has its issues in context/s, but I don't see why it shouldn't be the default for open source where possible. The political argument that gave birth to GNU/FSF seems to have lost it's bite in this day and age (perhaps due to a feeling that now open source is the de facto default, it will always be this way?)

Open Source failed. It remains as something that is useful to build software, but its political aims were defeated.

The political goal was to give users absolute control over their computational environments. In reality, we have less and less control, because computations moved to the cloud (corporation-controlled servers) and the most used devices regressed to a non-hackable state (mobile gadgets).

Even if you use a Linux desktop with 100% open source software, you will still probably do a good part (and the most sensitive part) of your computations on someone else's computer, that you do not control. Open Source ended up making it easier for companies to build this new world, because it provided them with perhaps billions of man-hours of free effort.

The strategy of Open Source as a political movements made sense in the 1990s, but we need something new for 2019...

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#139

Post by ran3824692 »

Nonfree software is often malware, https://www.gnu.org/proprietary/proprietary.en.html , and it's nowadays built on top of permissively licensed free software. Its not just a difference of opinion and its not about "selling" the software. Red hat happens to sell lots of free software.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#140

Post by wrsh07 »

jahewson wrote: post #123
Quekid5 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Easy counter example: cockroach labs & Amazon

Why did cockroach decide on their new business license?

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