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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

#201

Post by wiz21c »

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.

he didn't say that all points of view lead to positive progress. Progress is even "quoted".

The GPL has that political nature : it makes you think about your own point of view and hence, the point of view of others. Figuring out if you want or need it by actually reading it is a super useful exercise.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#202

Post by zepto »

darkpuma wrote: post #100
zepto wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is that camp the only one in the world?

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#203

Post by School-Cotton »

pessimizer wrote: post #190
hlkps wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I doubt any licensing makes your phone more stable

Sure it does. Without open-source software to base their work on, Apple would have had to start from scratch and possibly never get the project into a usable state. (In fact, they did actually try several multiple times to replace Mac OS 9 with an in-house-developed OS, before eventually buying NeXT, whose OS was rebranded as OS X and ultimately became iOS).

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#204

Post by tannhaeuser »

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…

> Do you want total world domination for your new protocol? Release a reference implementation under MIT or similar.

Not sure this would be the right strategy in this case (assuming by world domination you mean your protocol gets maximal use). Because your protocol/impl could be forked into a closed variant with proprietary extensions, defeating the purpose of an open protocol. At which point you might be stuck maintaining the mundane, laborious base code, and others do the exciting stuff and take over your project (aka embrace-extend-extinguish). As has happened multiple times back in the last decade when we still saw value in using standardized protocols such as WebDav, XMPP, etc.

For these cases, FSF recommends LGPL instead.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#205

Post by zepto »

whatshisface wrote: post #72
zepto wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s no such thing as a tiny monopoly.

An example of a tiny monopoly would be a program with no alternatives that performed a task worth a few thousand bucks to 20 people on Earth. It doesn't have to be Standard Oil for monopoly pricing to take effect, if the market is small enough the mere fact that two vendors couldn't survive at the same time would be enough to keep out competition. Another example would be proprietary data formats, if your program is…

There is no monopoly in either case you describe.

In both cases there is competition from other solutions.

People can and do migrate away from Oracle all the time, and that does constrain the price.

Your other example is obviously not a monopoly since the supplier has no pricing power.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#206

Post by rmtech »

mathnmusic wrote: post #175
rmtech wrote: post #165

Can somebody clarify for me - if you write 9,990 lines of proprietary code and include 10 lines of GPL code, the whole 10,000 becomes GPL, right? And then the whole 10,000 becomes public property according to the GPL so the person who wrote the 9,990 lines of proprietary code starves to death and dies because you can't monetize public property, and our food system only accepts money in exchange for food, not "good de…

> if you write 9,990 lines of proprietary code and include 10 lines of GPL code, the whole 10,000 becomes GPL, right? NO. GPL mentions no where about 10 being the minimum # of lines. All it says is that if your work is a "derivative" of the GPL code, then it must be GPL'd. Courts will determine whether including 10 lines of GPL code make your product derivative or not. The assumption is that a reasonable criteria wil…

> Courts will determine whether including 10 lines of GPL code make your product derivative or not.

OK but in reality that means the cost of including those 10 lines is that you are exposing yourself to an unknown amount of legal risk, and our legal system has a highly nonlinear penalty system, so it's basically as if the 10 lines infect your whole codebase with GPL.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#207

Post by rmtech »

evmar wrote: post #170
rmtech wrote: post #165

Can somebody clarify for me - if you write 9,990 lines of proprietary code and include 10 lines of GPL code, the whole 10,000 becomes GPL, right? And then the whole 10,000 becomes public property according to the GPL so the person who wrote the 9,990 lines of proprietary code starves to death and dies because you can't monetize public property, and our food system only accepts money in exchange for food, not "good de…

If I make a movie and include your copyrighted song for just three minutes of the intro, my whole movie violates the law. Or if I write a book and copy-paste just one chapter you wrote on your blog into it, the book also violated your copyright. And I "starve to death and die" because yes, in this world you can't just take things that other people have made and use them in whatever way you like -- if you can't obey t…

> if you can't obey the terms that someone else has given for the use of their creative work, then don't use their work.

Yes I agree, but the conclusion to this is that you probably should never use the GPL.

If you want other people to be able to use your code, use the MIT license.

If you want to monetize your code/keep it secret/sell it, then don't try to open-source it.

The GPL makes code radioactive and useless to everyone.

I get the intent in the OP that people should obey the golden rule and only build open source on open source. But what actually happens in my limited experience is that when a company comes across GPL code, the boss asks you to find equivalent code with an MIT license and ditch the GPL code.

If no such MIT code exists, the boss asks you to find another way, or to rewrite the GPL code yourself and keep it secret, or maybe even release it as MIT code.

GPL code is a dead end because it poisons other code.

And the fundamental reason for this is that programmers have to get money somehow, which almost always means being able to have some of the code they write as closed-source.

MIT allows closed and open source to exist side-by-side. You can write some code that does something, release it under the MIT license on GitHub, and also use it as a component of your company's proprietary product which ultimately pays for you to eat and live.

And this problem recurses. If I am not in a corporate setting and I am choosing between a GPL library or an equivalent MIT library to use in my own open source application, I should choose the MIT one because otherwise my open source code becomes "infected" with GPL, meaning that people in a corporate setting can't use it. If I'm deciding which library to learn as a hobby I should choose the MIT one because that will be useful for getting a job. Etc.

GPL will IMO be radioactive for as long as we insist that most programmers have to sell something in order to have a house to live in and food on the table. If the rest of society sets up a big fund to hand out money to programmers who make useful software, then we can talk about GPL.

But actually even if such a fund existed I still think MIT would be better.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#208

Post by pessimizer »

TheMagicHorsey wrote: post #92

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 th…

> Isn't that what the GPL is? You use my code, and then you must pay back to me your improvements on the code.

No. You're not obligated to pay me back, you're obligated to share the code with the public. You can't exclude me, because I'm part of the public, but you don't have to have any contact with me at all.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#209

Post by anderspitman »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #204
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…

> Do you want total world domination for your new protocol? Release a reference implementation under MIT or similar. Not sure this would be the right strategy in this case (assuming by world domination you mean your protocol gets maximal use). Because your protocol/impl could be forked into a closed variant with proprietary extensions, defeating the purpose of an open protocol. At which point you might be stuck maint…

Sorry this is off-topic, but can you expound a bit more on the history of WebDAV in this context?
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