261–270 of 431 posts
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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)
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…
It very much boils down to tolerance, yeah. I've made the experience that in the communities where permissive licenses are common, there is much larger tolerance for proprietary software and services than in communities that revolve around GPL. I personally don't care much about GPL vs permissive per se, but I do care about the four freedoms and see copyleft as neccessary evil that's needed in some instances to prevent proprietary takeovers.
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…
That is the purpose of the GPL as well.
The GPL doesn't say that you have to be a free love hippie to use the software, in fact it says that everyone can use whatever.
What it does prescribe is that if you extract value from selling FOOS (not using, but distributing) you must play by the rules of FOOS. You can not sit on the sidelines and extract value without providing anything.
Nowhere does it say that you have to share my values. But if you sell my software you have to play by my rules, and that means contributing back.
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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 -…
> You are copying someone else's work without complying with their license. That act, not the fact that it is GPL Right, so the correct conclusion is to never use, never contribute to and never write GPL-licensed software. Then you comply 100% with GPL, you have no legal risk and you also have money to pay for your Gatorade. In fact the best solution would just be to completely rid ourselves of GPL?
If you copy anyone's work you need permission because copyright is automatically assigned and without it you are violating the law.
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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 -…
> You are copying someone else's work without complying with their license. That act, not the fact that it is GPL Right, so the correct conclusion is to never use, never contribute to and never write GPL-licensed software. Then you comply 100% with GPL, you have no legal risk and you also have money to pay for your Gatorade. In fact the best solution would just be to completely rid ourselves of GPL?
It depends on how you "use" GPL'd software. You _can_ run proprietary software on Linux. Clearly, using GPL'd and proprietary software together is legally possible.
> never contribute to
If simply contributing to projects licensed under GPL were such a huge problem, we would have industry-wide blacklists for employment. Contributing to _some_ projects can be a problem for _some_ positions but generally you are in the clear.
> never write GPL-licensed software
You, as the author, have the right to relicense code you have written yourself. GPL'ing your own code doesn't increase your legal risks.
So no, the correct conclusion is not "to never use, never contribute to and never write GPL-licensed software" and the best solution is not to "completely rid ourselves of GPL". I'm not even sure what the problem you are trying to solve is. People can and do profit off GPL'd code. It is not an instant death sentence like you seem to imply.
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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…
>Like another poster said, why use GPL if you don't actually care that companies are violating the terms.
Both of these are wrong according to Linux/GregKH. They both very deeply care about both those things and argue very convincingly that you get more of both of them by their strategy than with lawsuits. They cite very specific cases of that both in the kernel and in BusyBox, and the fact that the lawsuit was lost is further support of their argument.
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…
> 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. Purpose of GPL is not to avoid profiting from other people's work. It's to give user's freedom to inspect, modify and re-use the software. I now have a mental blacklist of GPL violators, that I bought or were given the HW of, that is useless…
The GPL is this, but I believe it is something else, too.
I believe that when you make your code GPL, you are saying to others who want to use your code, or especially to extend it and publish those changes, that you want to be paid. How?
In code.
You are basically saying "Yes, go ahead and have fun with this work, but - if you want to change it and pass it on to others, you need to put those changes out there for me and others to use."
Pay me for my work in code. Don't want to pay me in code? Then you don't get to use my code.
I think that's a completely fair bargain, and it also ensures that a company can't fork your code, go their own way, market it as a better solution to your users while they continue to extend it - to the point where their stuff no longer works with your stuff, even if it still looks identical.
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish?
Those words are often forgotten nowadays. And, while I give kudos to Microsoft's open source offerings and other recent gestures of similar merit, I cannot and will not forget their past, and I keep a wary eye on them just the same...
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…
So yes, I agree with you that you need to obey the terms someone else has used for their work, or else you shouldn't use the work -- but your analogy with regards to a film or a book isn't accurate.
Look, if you want to contribute to the commons of programming, use a permissive license. If you want to cut out certain people who can't or don't want to use copyleft, use the GPL. If you can't stand the fact that someone might profit off of your work while you get nothing, don't publish anything.
Another good but seldomly given piece of advice: don't publish all your half-assed crap on Github. This is software pollution. Nobody wants to read the source code to such garbage as "stfupy3.org", but it will show up on search results regardless. No employer or potential client wants to sift through a list of trash to find the one good thing that you did that one time, that actually shows you know how to finish a program. Less is more!
In the end, it will depend on the goals one wishes to accomplish. I tend to avoid certain licenses and scenarios. Most of the time I will favor MIT or ISC, but have been considering how to apply some things I've been working on.