All of us should be thankful that the tools we rely on (like gcc and Linux) were available under the GPL, since otherwise proprietary extensions to these programs would have made the OSS versions obsolete.
My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL
361–370 of 431 posts
Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL
#362Earlier 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.
> there's no reason to make others redo work.
As a simplified example, consider Corporation G and Corporation P. One will eventually lose market share to the other, go bankrupt, and be replaced by Corporation R that bases its business practices on the more successful one (then the cycle repeats).
Both are evil, as corporations are wont to be, and in particular will never release anything under a less restrictive licence than they have to (so they will never release software under a MIT licence). However, G will release software under the GPL if this allows it to save work, whereas P will always release software under a proprietary licence, even if this forces it to expend more resources rewriting GPL functionality.
Releasing code under the GPL exerts a selection effect that favors G over P, and in the long run results in corporations that release somewhat more software period - and significantly more software under FOSS licences - than if P was not forced to redo work.
Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL
#363Earlier 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…
The folks who regularly do GPL compliance work have a very reasonable set of principles they apply when doing that work. Legal action is a last resort and GPL violators are given every opportunity to comply. The only legal actions that have been taken have been from years of stonewalling or even blatant refusal to comply and the consequences of those legal actions have been reasonable.
https://fsf.org/licensing/enforcement-principles https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/principles.htm...
Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL
#364Earlier quoted context omitted.
Easy counter example: cockroach labs & Amazon Why did cockroach decide on their new business license?
I don't think that is a fair counter example since it isn't actually straight GPL and provides a different type of leverage than GPL does, which is what we were discussing. The Cockroach Community License[0] was created specifically to fit their needs, and it differs from GPL in several ways. [0] https://www.cockroachlabs.com/cockroachdb-community-license/
The parent I'm responding to is trying to suggest that giving entities more powerful than yourself (eg better funded) doesn't help them.
That's obviously bs, and that's what I was responding to.
Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL
#365First, I'm not a lawyer, but I've always seen the MIT license as being more "free", whereas the GPL is more "fair". Both licenses are pretty much the same for users of the code. Where they differ is that the MIT license gives you the freedom to make an awesome change to the free code you were given, and add it to your closed source application with no obligation to give those enhancements you made to the code to anyo…
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 don't believe the AGPL requires distribution of the sources unless you are exposing the software in some way. So, a company is free to run modified AGPL software on their intranet without having to offer the sources to anyone but their employees.
Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL
#366Earlier quoted context omitted.
> but what difference does this make in practice? CentOS is the difference; it is one of the most widely used distributions has the same stability and longevity characteristics and gets security fixes just as fast as RHEL.
That is a good point. Perhaps a better example would be FAANG making billions and running their servers on Linux, which (IIRC) is what things like the AGPL are designed to prevent.
The AGPL wouldn't prevent FAANG making billions, just ensure they respect end-user freedom while doing so.
Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL
#367I 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 a…
and if you are willing to attempt to enforce it legally, consider doing it in a reasonable way like the FSF and SFC do:
https://fsf.org/licensing/enforcement-principles https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/principles.htm...
Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL
#368I 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 is a much more powerful statement in my view to provide work in a way that allows the entire world, (corporations included) to enrich themselves and educate themselves in an open and free manner. 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…
I agree. The GPL is sort of a hack for people who don't believe in Copyright. In an ideal world, there would be no difference between GPL and public domain, but in our world the GPL forces people who use your code to behave as if everything were public domain.
Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL
#369Can 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. The 9990 lines remain under whatever license you desire. The 10 lines remain GPL. You can't distribute the whole work. > And then the whole 10,000 becomes public property according to the GPL The GPL doesn't make software "public property", whatever you think that entails. > so the person who wrot…
>> if you write 9,990 lines of proprietary code and include 10 lines of GPL code, the whole 10,000 becomes GPL, right?
> No. The 9990 lines remain under whatever license you desire. The 10 lines remain GPL. You can't distribute the whole work.
It would be more accurate to say that if you distribute a combined / derivative work that incorporates those 10 lines of GPL code, you have to do so under the terms of the GPL. To do otherwise is copyright infringement of the GPL code.
Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL
#370Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you one of those "GPL is socialism" people? You are misguided. Yes, there are lots of marxists/communists in the open source / free software community and most people in it lean left. But the GPL itself is compatible with a capitalist society. In fact, GPL can be the basis for making money with FLOSS software, by offering non-GPL'd commercial licenses. All the GPL ensures that if you want to make a proprietary fo…
> Are you one of those "GPL is socialism" people? No, not all. I don't even know why you'd assume so. I don't even see how you connect what I've said remotely to the left-right oversimplification of political opinions, let alone with one of those sides.
> I don't even know why you'd assume so.
In my comment I was talking about communities and you replied with a comment about types of societies. For me a community is focused to one thing like idk a specific game or fan community of a book author, while a society encompasses all aspects of life for its members. So for me, a "type of society" is about a general way of living together, be it capitalism, feudalism, socialism, etc. I've thought you meant that but apparently you haven't so my comment doesn't apply to you, sorry :)