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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

#241

Post by jeena »

beefhash wrote: post #33

One thing that's worth considering making an exception for, no matter your ideological stand point, is cryptography libraries. I want everyone to get cryptographic code right, ideally with one implementation that is correct, and then that's the end of it for everyone. Because if commerical vendors do their own thing because of copyleft on a piece of cryptographic code, the one that really ends up suffering is all the…

Or, if its a permissive license then the company makes changes to it which break it so that it's less secure and the end user can't even check that (or ask someone to check that) it's not broken. Then the user ends up suffering because they didn't have the choice in the matter of using to be able to check if everything is ok. This is even worse because it pretends making security better but does not deliver. Then it would be better if this commercial software would not exist.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#242

Post by ghaff »

bbatha wrote: post #166
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…

I wish the public domain were the least restrictive license, but unfortunately that's just not true globally. In many jurisdictions, notably Germany, there is no public domain or the concept of a public domain doesn't match with common law countries. MIT/BSD or another permissive license is a much better choice if you value openness. [0] 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-domain_software

In fact, the MIT license originally came about specifically because just making X public domain wouldn't fly with at least one of the X Consortium participants.

https://opensource.com/article/19/4/history-mit-license

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#243

Post by module0000 »

nuclear_eclipse wrote: post #239
module0000 wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> can repackage and sell GPL code Can you give me some detail about how/when this happens? I was under the impression that you can sell support (or other ancillary services) for GPL'd code, but not for the code itself.

Anyone can sell software built from GPL code, but if/when they do so, they are obligated to provide source code for that software to anyone receiving a copy, and those users are permitted to redistribute both the software and the source code as long as they also adhere to the GPL.

Now I understand, it's not the code itself that has a price(hence the 'THIS IS FREE SOFTWARE' notice at the top of GPL). It's the entire "product" they charge for. Thanks for the reply!

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#244

Post by jerf »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #232
jerf wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"In a way, I feel like I should be a big enough person to be okay with this, but I'm not." One of the distinctions I like to draw strongly is between "nice" and "good". They are not the same, and at times, are actively at odds with each other. It is certainly nice to give away your software to everybody, unconditionally, and not be bothered if your code does happen to end up being a fundamental component of some mult…

> I don't think "being comfortable with being exploited" is a component of "being a big person". In the context of the types of projects I was imagining, a company would likely just rewrite any code that wasn't available via MIT or similar. If I'm not getting anything in return either way, am I being exploited? Logically , if the outcome is the same for me, there's no reason to make others redo work.

That's basically the logic I used too for my own code. As I hinted at but may not have been made clear, I was using "exploitation" quite deliberately as a loaded term in the beginning, only to try to defuse it in my final paragraphs as in many, perhaps even the vast majority, of cases you aren't really being that "exploited" no matter what anybody does. If somebody outright stole any of my projects and claimed them as their own work, I still would honestly be only annoyed, and maybe make a few posts in my README.md about the situation, and move on with my life without even a thought about engaging the legal system or anything.

But as rare as it may be, there have been many cases where an open source code base really was "exploited" by any reasonable sense of the term, with corporations slapping their logos on it and reselling significant works in violation of the license, and those cases are significant because of their size, even if they are rare.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#245

Post by LaGrange »

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

This is untrue. It might appear obvious that it does, because in the first instance, everyone can take and use it however they want. But as soon as anyone relicenses the work, everyone else loses out.

There are also more complicated benefits to the programmer-users of GPL software that get lost in the process.

I don't think the situation is clear-cut, and too many factors are hard to quantify, but I don't think you can safely say that non-copyleft "enriches everyone."

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#246

Post by EuAndreh »

Drdrdrq wrote: post #180
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)?

For example this? https://writing.kemitchell.com/ ;) (GP is the author - it contains some very good explanations on the subject of licenses, imho of course)

Thanks for the link :)

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#247

Post by davidgerard »

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…

I can't find the link, but I remember someone from the X Window System regretting that X11 was under the MIT License - it's the origin of the MIT License - rather than copyleft, precisely because so many companies just would not give code back.

Keith Packard on this in 2015:

https://list.waikato.ac.nz/pipermail/wlug/2015-September/013...

> Keith made it clear he prefers GPL-style (copyleft/sharealike) licences to MIT/BSD style ones. Net contributors of code tend to prefer the former, while net consumers of code (those who don’t want to give back to the community) tend to favour the latter. In other words, freeloaders.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#248

Post by joveian »

I generally agree with the idea of the GPL but the thing I would encourage everyone to consider is: are you really going to enforce it when someone doesn't comply? If not, consider just adding a sentence (or more) to the top of the MIT license or public domain release that you would really like people to share their modifications but are not going to force them to do so.

Otherwise, the main effects of using the GPL are:

1) Projects that are actually open source but want to be available for closed source use will not use your code (maybe some people want this)

2) Lots of people who would contribute changes anyway will spend time figuring out what the GPL means in detail (it is not short)

3) Quite a few comanies will still use your code without releasing changes since they know that few projects try to enforce the GPL (or any other open source license)

4) It could potentially be helpful in a BSD lawsuit type situation, where companies that sue over copyright (or patents) will themselves violate the license of code that they use

I'm just saying keep in mind that a license does not automatically make people follow it and if you aren't willing to attempt to enfoce it legally then at least consider using a very short license.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#249

Post by davidgerard »

module0000 wrote: post #233
SquishyPanda23 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure you understand this already, but corporations can repackage and sell GPL code. The main thing you're granting in choosing a permissive license is the right to deny others the right to enjoy future improvements to the code. This is why in practice permissively licensed code is more successful in industry. Industries like to exercise the right to make proprietary improvements to open source code.

> can repackage and sell GPL code Can you give me some detail about how/when this happens? I was under the impression that you can sell support (or other ancillary services) for GPL'd code, but not for the code itself.

WordPress themes and plugins. They're all WordPress derivatives, therefore the code has to be GPL.

Theoretically you can give away a copy of the code. In practice, people don't.

(Usually includd assets, i.e. images, are kept proprietary, and the thing is sold as an aggregation.)

The thing they're really selling is security updates and maintenance.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#250

Post by tannhaeuser »

pessimizer wrote: post #208
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.

>you're obligated to share the code with the public. You can't exclude me, because I'm part of the public

Not with the general public, nor with you as the original author, but only with users of your GPL-derived software. This might be a technicality, since users can re-publish to the general public; but then I'm not sure since they aren't required to.

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