If you feel your work is valuable enough to be worth receiving compensation for, use GPL and/or a proprietary license. If not, use a permissive license.
My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL
211–220 of 431 posts
Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL
#212I've gone the other way; the last time I put a GPL on anything was more than a decade ago. (I mean on something completely new, not a modification to someone else's GPL-ed program).
I won't ever be GPL-ing anything going forward; two-clause BSD all the way.
Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL
#213This 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 w…
I don't really think any of what you said is actually true.
There are many types of software project where the license doesn't matter at all - what matters is that the software exists. Someone is willing to pay to get it made, and they don't really give a hoot about "licensing". I believe this actually constitutes the majority of software - it's just invisible because no one really has much incentive to release it. But I don't really see how, say, a festival's business model is undermined by making their lineup app open source.
Next, there really is GPL code that's simply too special to ignore. One obvious example is the Linux operating system. Designing an embedded device? You're almost certainly using Linux. Maybe Linux doesn't do quite what you want - say, support for a given bit of hardware. Guess what, you can't ship your patch without publishing it - and now every Linux user gets to use that hardware, if someone's motivated enough to merge it into mainline. This is a real thing that happens all the time.
We're not there yet (and we may never get there if people stop believing in the GPL), but you can imagine that if we get a world where all the important software is GPL, the sheer mass of it will overwhelm any other licensing considerations. "You can either participate in our ecosystem, or you can rebuild modern computing from scratch. Your call."
Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL
#214Earlier 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…
> 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.
What? I'm really struggling to find the nugget of 'point' in there, but... what?
Are you saying that Gravity is somehow biased toward powerful people?
Are you saying that refraction is somehow biased toward powerful people?
I'm left so confused by your comment. It's amazing -- hopefully in a good way!)
Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
If “users” = “not programmers” (which I think must be the definition here) then neither license gives users anything except the freedom to hire programmers to do something they want more cheaply. (I include buying software and downloading free-as-in-beer software in “hiring programmers”.) With MIT/GPL the programmers can afford to charge a lot less to do the same job. It’s fundamentally programmer freedom in either c…
You are correct if I am using an MIT/BSD program as a user I have all the freedoms the issue is if someone forks it and closes it up making it proprietary. You need to think at the larger picture, compare Linux kernel and BSD and how the licenses affect the projects and all of the users. With Linux GPL prevents parasitic use, like you get Linux, put your proprietary thing on top, close it off and give it to some user…
But if the proprietary fork is analogous to the original software the "user" can just seek out the MIT-licensed project and start from there. If the fork contains significant functional modifications then it seems fair to let the author of those changes choose how to distribute them. This doesn't restrict user's freedoms anymore than allowing greenfield projects to be proprietary already does. GPL is for people who are concerned with forcing their viewpoint into wider adoption. MIT is for people that are interested in truly gifting their work (and only their work) to society.
Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL
#216Can 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 wrote 9,990 lines of proprietary code and included 10 lines of proprietary code from another company, I imagine that your entire program would have to be approved of by the other company in writing, or you wouldn't be able to distribute it. What's supposed to be the difference here?
> proprietary code ... What's supposed to be the difference here?
The difference is that GPL is claiming to not be proprietary...
Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
That's not really being against enforcement. It's having a tactical argument that sueing is not the best way to get enforcement. Given that they did lose the lawsuit, a big part of the Linus/GregKH argument seems vindicated.
Only if you want to maximize use of open source software in general and/or that specific open source project.
If you're goal is to minimize the number of people using your work without following the agreed terms, it is worth it to shoo away non-compliant companies or companies that don't share the values of open source.
Like another poster said, why use GPL if you don't actually care that companies are violating the terms.
Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
I feel this is a bit of exaggeration. You are copying someone else's work without complying with their license. That act, not the fact that it is GPL, is exposing yourself to unknown amount of legal risk. Legal system does have nonlinear penalty system but at the same time, judgments are expected to be reasonable and fair. Courts will not force you to GPL your code, but they may stop you from distributing your work - which is EXACTLY what they'd also do in case of a plain old copyrighted work. In the best case, GPL gives you more freedoms and in the worst case, it reduces to standard copyright law.
To reduce the risk, you can go through how courts have interpreted and applied the definition of what a "derivative" work is.
Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
As an example to back up your point RMS has explicitly supported the use of non-GPL licenses for codecs as a strategic move to avoid being shut out of that market by network effects.
Do you have a link to anything he's written about this? It sounds interesting.
Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL
#220I 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…
That's an interesting take. Somewhat random question that came to my mind: Do you think it's more important for a user to be in control of their computation, or of their data, or are they equally important?