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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

#421

Post by OrderlyTiamat »

est31 wrote: post #349
madez wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The GPL is not self-serving; it is a tool to achieve a type of society, and that is the society you seem to enjoy, too. After all, by what else should be measure the permissive licences vs copyleft licences if not by their influence on society?

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…

The above commenter may not be, but the author of the article very much seems to think that gpl is exclusively socialist. As a non socialist myself and a gpl fan, I hope people will see that gpl is perfectly valid in a non socialist context, as well.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#422

Post by icebraining »

rmtech wrote: post #420
icebraining wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can sell GPL software. It paid my salary for years.

I don't understand?

What is there to understand? We sold GPL licensed extensions to a GPL application, and made money. All perfectly valid under the license: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#423

Post by icebraining »

rmtech wrote: post #406
icebraining wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Work for one of the thousands of companies that pay you to write GPL licensed code? I can give you some references, having worked for one for a few years (specifically, we wrote Odoo modules for various businesses).

And how does the company get money?

Sales of the modules, optional support contracts, and SaaS hosting of the GPL application and our GPL modules for people who prefer it to self-hosting.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#424

Post by phyzome »

kemitchell wrote: post #413
phyzome wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The first paragraph of section 13 of AGPLv3 reads: 13. Remote Network Interaction; Use with the GNU General Public License. Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, if you modify the Program, your modified version must prominently offer all users interacting with it remotely through a computer network (if your version supports such interaction) an opportunity to receive the Corresponding Source of your ve…

Mmm, I agree. I think I got tripped up by this line:

> That led eventually to AGPL, a kind of fork of GPL, but outside FSF, also to licenses that simply require sharing back whether you distribute your work or not.

...because I read it as "the AGPL requires sharing back whether you distribute your work or not", and felt like splitting hairs for the case where you expose the work, but only internally to a group.

Are there licenses that say if you run an altered copy, you have to contribute back sources, no matter who interacts with it?

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#425

Post by kemitchell »

phyzome wrote: post #424
kemitchell wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first paragraph of section 13 of AGPLv3 reads: 13. Remote Network Interaction; Use with the GNU General Public License. Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, if you modify the Program, your modified version must prominently offer all users interacting with it remotely through a computer network (if your version supports such interaction) an opportunity to receive the Corresponding Source of your ve…

Mmm, I agree. I think I got tripped up by this line: > That led eventually to AGPL, a kind of fork of GPL, but outside FSF, also to licenses that simply require sharing back whether you distribute your work or not. ...because I read it as "the AGPL requires sharing back whether you distribute your work or not", and felt like splitting hairs for the case where you expose the work, but only internally to a group. Are t…

> I read it as "the AGPL requires sharing back whether you distribute your work or not"

That's true, insofar as providing as a service isn't "distributing", or in (A)GPLv3-speak, "conveying". See section 13 of AGPLv3: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html#section13

Compare how the Open Software License handles network services: by requiring they be treated as "distribution". https://zoo.kemitchell.com/OSL-3.0#5

> Are there licenses that say if you run an altered copy, you have to contribute back sources, no matter who interacts with it?

For an older license of this type, have a look at RPL-1.5. For a newer one, which I led, have a look at Parity.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#428

Post by mcguire »

rmtech wrote: post #409
mcguire wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are welcome to negotiate a second license to avoid the GPL.

> You are welcome to negotiate a second license to avoid the GPL. I have seen this in real life a few times. Usually something gets released under the GPL and then the authors ask for $ to hand it out with a commercial license on a case-by-case basis. But in practice it is difficult to negotiate a truly fair price if the market is somewhat thin and the size of the code is relatively small. I've seen this for ML datas…

"But that $50k represents what the author thinks they can get away with, not the true value of the dataset to your algorithm."

That is how the market works, right? The price of something is set not by the "value" but by what the seller can get. Researchers "get away" with keeping their data proprietary all the time.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#430

Post by mcguire »

epistasis wrote: post #371
mcguire wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The GPL is the one reason why there is one "mainline" Linux kernel and a number of roughly compatible distributions rather than the incompatible chaos of the Unix wars of the '80s and '90s. Take a look at imake and autoconf if you need convincing that the GPL is valuable.

Are you saying that GPL holds off forks better than BSD/MIT? If so, by what mechanism? Of all the pro-GPL things I've heard, I've never heard that one before, so I'm quite interested to hear this fleshed out into something I can follow!

The original license from Bell Labs for Unix wasn't BSD/MIT, but it had essentially the same effect (and in fact, BSD is a down-stream license of it): you could get the source code for Unix and do anything you wanted with it.

Most people started with the BSD distribution (because networking), many later incorporated System V things from Bell. They then added their own changes and released the result under their own proprietary license. "They" being Sun Microsystems, IBM, HP, Silicon Graphics, and a host of smaller organizations including NeXT. Each of these had some really neat feature, like IBM's Journaled File System, SiliG's graphics, and Sun's hardware and the fact that they hired Berkeley's CSRG people. But they were all as incompatible as they could be made to be and still be Unixy. They were also business rivals and fought each other constantly. (I was part of IBM's effort with the "Open Software Foundation"'s DCE (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_Computing_Environm...), which attempted to fight off Sun's lead with NFS.) This was at a time when Microsoft was pushing Windows on smaller machines and those smaller machines were getting powerful enough to be a threat in the Unix "workstation" market. As a result, Microsoft won the Unix wars.

Linux, in contrast, is under the GPL, as are most of its basic user-space programs. You can modify the code to add some feature, but you have to distribute the changes if you distribute the whole thing. As a result, your feature gets incorporated into the mainline kernel, or you fork Linux. Forked Linuxes don't get a lot of traction, though, in part because nobody has a serious hardware advantage, but mostly because the mainline quickly grows a corresponding feature. It's very hard to lock your customers in to your own distribution.

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