My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL • Hacker News Board

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#181

Post by eitland » Fri, Jun 14, 2019, 5:58 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…

> That's definitely a valid PoV, but you just have to realize/accept that it may empower people who have power over you.

Newtons Equations has also empowered the powerful for a while now but I think we are still happy that they are available for free for everyone without any limitations.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#182

Post by microtherion » Fri, Jun 14, 2019, 6:03 PM UTC

gnomewascool wrote: post #167

microtherion wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Under a strict interpretation of the GPL, a student who copied code out of a textbook to use in a commercial project would be infringing the license. I've never come across this with GPL code, but I've been a bit uncomfortable about reading Numerical Recipes too closely because their code is restrictively licensed.

A large portion of programming books are still under neither a FOSS nor a CC license, and hence fully protected by copyright. (I've encountered some where the main text of the book is not under a FOSS license, while the code is, but that's also not universal.) In such cases, you're not allowed to just re-use large code segments from the book (commercially or in an open source piece of code). Hence the case of a book…

That's a good point. I suppose Numerical Recipes was one case where I was particularly aware of the situation because (a) the license is stated explicitly (b) the code is structured in ways that it WOULD technically make sense to reuse non-trivial portions as is.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#183

Post by epistasis » Fri, Jun 14, 2019, 6:03 PM UTC

pessimizer wrote: post #118

This may go either way for you, but I feel like the GPL is the closest thing that programmers have to a union. It guarantees that our obligations to users and other programmers always supersede the obligations that we have to our employer. They are a law hack that encodes professionalism. edit: it seems obvious that a doctor's obligations should be to the patient, then to medicine, then to the particular institution…

My problem with the GPL philosophy is that I can't find the mechanism that results in more general access to code in the world, when releasing your software as GPL versus BSD/MIT.

What determines what's out there in the world, the decision to release source versus simply doesn't come down to "well I can use this GPL code as part of my project if I also GPL it, so I guess I'll share my code too." The decisions about whether to release code are made entirely independently of what libraries or code to reuse, and there's basically no code out there that's so special and unique that it could flip people one way or the other.

The decision to release code along with the software is made due to other considerations, so claiming that GPL results in more code access seems impossible to defend, to me.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#184

Post by carapace » Fri, Jun 14, 2019, 6:05 PM UTC

cflewis wrote: post #164

kemitchell wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I like the idea of a license that is "fair", but there's something about GPL that rubs me the wrong way where I feel it accomplishes the goal of fair in some antagonistic manner. To me, GPL feels more like holding a legal gun to your head and say "You used my code, now play fair". It's not your Mum asking you nicely to share your toys with your brother. But then MIT is too far the other way where it's your Mum saying…

> I like the idea of a license that is "fair", but there's something about GPL that rubs me the wrong way where I feel it accomplishes the goal of fair in some antagonistic manner.

It kind of is antagonistic: GPL started when RMS wanted to fix his printer and Xerox said, "No." IIRC the printer software in question drew on or was based on his own prior work.

The GPL is a weapon to pre-emptively undermine sort of venal mentality RMS had already encountered. Free Software is a reaction to a kind of enclosure of the commons.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#185

Post by SAI_Peregrinus » Fri, Jun 14, 2019, 6:05 PM UTC

kerkeslager wrote: post #159

microtherion wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Under a strict interpretation of the GPL, a student who copied code out of a textbook to use in a commercial project would be infringing the license. I've never come across this with GPL code, but I've been a bit uncomfortable about reading Numerical Recipes too closely because their code is restrictively licensed.

> Under a strict interpretation of the GPL, a student who copied code out of a textbook to use in a commercial project would be infringing the license. This interpretation is very surprising to me. Could you point out what language in the GPL you're interpreting in this way?

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#186

Post by Certhas » Fri, Jun 14, 2019, 6:06 PM UTC

lone_haxx0r wrote: post #38

Certhas wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikipedia states both, operation for profit and private ownership, as defining characteristics: "Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit." Classically free software works more like a gift economy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gift_economy No capitalist society ever worked without a state that enforces rules and social constructs (such…

> A capitalist (ideas) economy requires a state enforcing copyright. No. Copyright has nothing to do with capitalism. In a completely capitalistic system, there would be no intellectual "property". If you read the founders of right libertarian (pure capitalist) thought, the whole system is based around freedom. And property is justified based on the fact that it's necessary for freedom. Intellectual "property" doesn'…

And no true Spartan...

Some schools of thought use some weird notion of freedom to derive some abstract structure that has never been tried anywhere and claim it has some hypothetical properties. You want to call that "true capitalism".

I like theory, I do theory, but the post was talking about existing social systems within which we operate. Your private definition of "true capitalism" has nothing to do with that system.

Nor does it have anything to do with the accepted use of the term capitalism. E.g. in state capitalism [1]. Therefore it is a bad definition that hinders clear communication, and you have failed to convince me to use it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_capitalism

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#187

Post by Drdrdrq » Fri, Jun 14, 2019, 6:08 PM UTC

lioeters wrote: post #147

kickopotomus wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This one is a good resource: Software Licenses in Plain English https://tldrlegal.com/

You need to be careful though. For example for Commons Clause they accepted changes by Drew Vault (ironically the author of the article we are discussing here) which are misleading at best. Now it says that commercial use is not allowed [0], while it is really only selling that is not granted [1]. In other words, do read the license if you want to know about it.

[0] https://tldrlegal.com/license/commons-clause

[1] https://commonsclause.com/

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#188

Post by microtherion » Fri, Jun 14, 2019, 6:08 PM UTC

kerkeslager wrote: post #159

microtherion wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Under a strict interpretation of the GPL, a student who copied code out of a textbook to use in a commercial project would be infringing the license. I've never come across this with GPL code, but I've been a bit uncomfortable about reading Numerical Recipes too closely because their code is restrictively licensed.

> Under a strict interpretation of the GPL, a student who copied code out of a textbook to use in a commercial project would be infringing the license. This interpretation is very surprising to me. Could you point out what language in the GPL you're interpreting in this way?

It seems pretty straightforward to me that section 5 of the GPL v3, "Conveying Modified Source Versions" (and the corresponding sections of earlier GPLs) would be applicable to this situation (provided that a non-trivial amount of code is incorporated by the student).

What makes you believe otherwise?

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#189

Post by kyle-rb » Fri, Jun 14, 2019, 6:08 PM UTC

bunderbunder wrote: post #174

> Your parents probably taught you about the Golden Rule when you were young: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. The GPL is the legal embodiment of this Golden Rule Funny. For me, the Golden Rule still leads me to the opposite conclusion: I want people to share their work with me open-handedly, without telling me what I can do with it or what other software I am allowed to combine it with. The more st…

>The most annoying example of this is when companies open-source their works under a copyleft license in an obvious attempt to get free labor from the community while reserving the ability to actually profit from that work for themselves.

Similar to this, Qt has a LGPL license option, but when using it for a proprietary product, they really push you to buy their commercial license, and have basically no info on how to actually do LGPL compliance in the specific case of Qt's libs.

I get that it's not their responsibility to make it easy for me to use an open source lib in a closed source product, but it just feels like they're using LGPL compliance as a threat if you don't pay their license.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#190

Post by pessimizer » Fri, Jun 14, 2019, 6:09 PM UTC

hlkps wrote: post #154

TeMPOraL wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 us…

My iPhone has a BSD-licenced kernel. Having that kernel under that licence benefits me as an end user of the product. Maybe having used another kernel would've resulted in a less stable mobile that would not have taken off.

I doubt any licensing makes your phone more stable, but if it were unstable, the GPL would certainly certainly make it easier/cheaper to fix.