My favourite license is still MPLv2. In my opinion it hits just the right spot between giving back source and not limiting potential uses significantly. So many languages link statically nowadays, making LGPL fundamentally pointless.
My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL
381–390 of 431 posts
Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL
#382I 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…
The public domain isn't recognized everywhere and licenses like Creative Commons Zero (CC0) which has a fallback of being all-permissive for regimes where a public domain won't work doesn't look out for patent treachery.
The FSF warns against using CC0 for software (see https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#CC0 for the full comments): "For works of software it [CC0] is not recommended, as CC0 has a term expressly stating it does not grant you any patent licenses."
If you really want people to be free to use the software as they wish, you can't ignore software idea patents. That naivety actually works against the users as they would be lured into dealing with the software believing it to be free but then trapped by a patent infringement lawsuit.
> 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.
No, this is too broadly accepting and not carefully discerning as reality requires to make sage judgments nor will it help us understand the ethical underpinnings of the software freedom movement (very much related to one of the major problems in the essay -- the author frames the issue around "open source", a developmental methodology which eschews ethics and is therefore of great use to proprietors. See https://digitalcitizen.info/2019/05/10/how-free-software-and... for more on this). Proprietary software is a "differing point of view" and your statement tries to get us to accept that it is merely another acceptable alternative among many. Seeing proprietary software as some form of social progress means accepting the inherent harm of proprietary software, the very reason why the free software movement was founded in the first place. I will call proprietary software harmful and in no way progress for anything worth defending. The goal isn't to maximize one's ability to have power over someone else, it's to ensure specific and well-identified freedoms for all. Strongly copylefted free software where license terms are defended does this.
Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL
#383Earlier 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…
> but I think BSD (permissive for developers, maybe restrictive for users) vs. GPL (restrictive for developers, permissive for users) Strawman. MIT/BSD is not restrictive for users. When someone derives from my permissively-licensed code and doesn't share back with me? Not my problem, but theirs. They now have a legacy fork to refresh every so often at some non-trivial cost. If I'm maintaining a codebase for them to…
Neither the MIT X11 license (one should be careful to identify which MIT license is being talked about as MIT has used many licenses for software) nor the modified (or 3-clause) BSD license look out for patent treachery. For all the user knows, perhaps your organization holds patents which read on the software you're distributing and this program is a means to give them something that tempts users to run, modify, and share software landing them in a patent infringement lawsuit. It's great that you write and distribute free software, but if you insist on using a non-copylefted free software license the Apache 2.0 license is a better choice for users of your software.
But it is also in user's interests to look out for derivative works because that means users of those derivative programs get software that respects their software freedom. Proprietary derivatives of non-copylefted free software means software that doesn't respect a user's software freedom.
Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL
#384Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think you understand. From the perspective of a pro-lawsuit person, there can only be upside. If they lose the lawsuit, it's the same effectively as the status quo. The company will continue abusing your contribution. But if you win, you win. Similarly, if you scare off people that are not interested in open source values (ie. they're using open source only b/c people have convinced them that in practice it's…
That's only true if your only options are a lawsuit or sitting on your hands. Linus and Greg explain how they do a bunch of other stuff that ends up actually working. So that's a false dichotomy. And it's not even true that there's no downside to losing. You may get a precedent settled that actually invalidates enforcing the license. Then you've screwed up your own enforcement and everyone else's.
> You may get a precedent settled that actually invalidates enforcing the license.
Which means the license is unenforcible and a new legally enforceable license is needed.
> Then you've screwed up your own enforcement and everyone else's
Nope, they would have been screwed already, they just didn’t know it yet. And fewer future people would end up screwed as new licenses would be created in the aftermath.
Untested enforceability is not better than tested and confirmed un-enforceability.
Or to use an absurd example in an even more absurd context, it’s better to open the box and know your cat is dead than to leave the box closed and believe it might still be alive.
(EDIT: I was wrong)
Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL
#385Earlier quoted context omitted.
Many years back, I bought an expensive android phone to discover that it did not support my native language. I have the necessary technical skills to add support for it, but because the phone was locked down (something enabled by permissive licenses but not the GPL), I couldn't fix the phone myself and ended up with a very expensive but useless brick. Corporate interests rarely align completely with your own, and thi…
The problem is, in practice, the GPL doesn't assure as many rights to the user as it is claimed. The example of Android shows this clearly. While the base of Android is GPL and consequently freely available, nonetheless Google managed to mix it with enough proprietary parts, so that they could could block Huawai from selling their phones with Android. Of course, Huawai is able to build their own OS based on the open…
Only the kernel is GPL, AOSP is Apache.
Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL
#386Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is, in practice, the GPL doesn't assure as many rights to the user as it is claimed. The example of Android shows this clearly. While the base of Android is GPL and consequently freely available, nonetheless Google managed to mix it with enough proprietary parts, so that they could could block Huawai from selling their phones with Android. Of course, Huawai is able to build their own OS based on the open…
Only the kernel is GPL, AOSP is Apache.
Well, right. Thats my point. They have enough parts in "Android" which don't fall under GPL and thus they can keep them proprietary.
Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL
#387Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's only true if your only options are a lawsuit or sitting on your hands. Linus and Greg explain how they do a bunch of other stuff that ends up actually working. So that's a false dichotomy. And it's not even true that there's no downside to losing. You may get a precedent settled that actually invalidates enforcing the license. Then you've screwed up your own enforcement and everyone else's.
> You may get a precedent settled that actually invalidates enforcing the license. Which means the license is unenforcible and a new legally enforceable license is needed. > Then you've screwed up your own enforcement and everyone else's Nope, they would have been screwed already, they just didn’t know it yet. And fewer future people would end up screwed as new licenses would be created in the aftermath. Untested enf…
>Untested enforceability is not better than tested and confirmed un-enforceability.
This is addressed by Linus directly and it's simply not true. That the license can be enforced without testing in court is evidenced by the fact that they are being able to enforce it without lawsuits. If you get a legal precedent that somehow says the opposite you are now deeply screwed. Courts are fickle beasts. You now get to spend a bunch of time/money trying to reverse that, or even worse, launch the worlds largest open-source relicensing effort. For the kernel that's basically impossible. You'd basically destroy copyleft completely.
Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL
#388Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You may get a precedent settled that actually invalidates enforcing the license. Which means the license is unenforcible and a new legally enforceable license is needed. > Then you've screwed up your own enforcement and everyone else's Nope, they would have been screwed already, they just didn’t know it yet. And fewer future people would end up screwed as new licenses would be created in the aftermath. Untested enf…
>Untested enforceability is not better than tested and confirmed un-enforceability. This is addressed by Linus directly and it's simply not true. That the license can be enforced without testing in court is evidenced by the fact that they are being able to enforce it without lawsuits. If you get a legal precedent that somehow says the opposite you are now deeply screwed. Courts are fickle beasts. You now get to spend…
You're right, I hadn't considered the potential ramifications for the Linux kernel specifically, and how variably educated court judges can actually be.
Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL
#389Earlier quoted context omitted.
Capitalism is not "about" anything really. It's a description that sometimes applies (if private individuals can own (and buy/sell) equity, and operate the means of production for profit) to economies. Of course there are good and bad parts, of course there are good and bad implementations/representations/manifestations of such big concepts. For example using a price system and voluntary exchange is usually a great w…
I'd say that a system whose essence is to concentrate capital in a few hands, and where concentrated capital provides the power to tilt the system in your favor, is very prone to ending being fucked up. It's not that other political doesn't also suffer from this problem, but capitalism is not exempt from it.
This question screams for some quantitative analysis. What's the model, then let's crunch the numbers. Otherwise I fear we get into a yes it is, no it's not, yes it's inherently that, no it's not inherently that.
What is the essence of capitalism? That private property protection extends to capital goods, they can be legally bundled up and sold and bought.
Does this have any inherent dynamic about concentration?
I don't see it.
Throughout our history we always had inequality. Maybe capitalism mirrors that. (Does it exacerbate it? I don't know. It usually allows for competition, which should force inefficient markets to turn into efficient ones - which would provide a niche for everybody, but of course there is nothing inherently there to guarantee this.)
So I have to agree with you, basic bitch capitalism is too vague and as such most of its implementations are bound to fail due to human nature.
Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL
#390Earlier quoted context omitted.
Only the kernel is GPL, AOSP is Apache.
Well, right. Thats my point. They have enough parts in "Android" which don't fall under GPL and thus they can keep them proprietary.
"the GPL is ineffective because the non-GPL parts become proprietary" doesn't seem like a strong argument against the superiority of the GPL.