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I’ve looked at some of the Copilot threads but am unable to follow the issue. Can someone summarize what the issue is with Copilot and why a BSD license would have been significant for the code?
This headline is a bit sensationalist. His tweet at the end says - "I'm still supportive of lots of GPL work, but I don't think the restrictions helped in this particular case." He also says - "but tons of opportunities to just copy-paste-modify were lost due to license concerns". It appears that the goal John was shooting for was to have as broad an impact by having the code being reused in as many situations as pos…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It appears that the goal John was shooting for was to have as broad an impact by having the code being reused in as many situations as possible. On this metric, yes BSD would have been a superior choice. You basically made the point on why using the BSD license would've been superior... There are a lot of things the GPL prevents and Carmack is spot on about it.
For the particular metric John cares about, yes definitely. But there are other metrics out there by which GPL would have been a superior choice.
There is no empirical evidence in what he says
Are there any AAA game engines released under a BSD license to compare with?
I don't think many games (or other software) ended up shipping with code from the GPL Quake source, other than Quake source ports. Is that because of code quality, code specialization, license, lack of support, or something else? Hard to tell empirically; I think a lot of game developers do want to be able to sell their creations, and not disclose their source code though.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For the particular metric John cares about, yes definitely. But there are other metrics out there by which GPL would have been a superior choice.
And those are? The GPL is far more restrictive, I can't see anything valuable that the GPL would contribute here.
I’ve looked at some of the Copilot threads but am unable to follow the issue. Can someone summarize what the issue is with Copilot and why a BSD license would have been significant for the code?
My understanding is that when Copilot automatically inserts some GPL licensed code fragment into your project, your project automatically has to become GPL licensed, whether you want and realize or not.
I don’t see how the GPL is special in the discussion around Copilot.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You would've had the privilege of reading the source with BSD too, but the GPL prevents a variety of things from happening so its not as free as the BSD License. If you want to read into something - he was bullied into using the GPL and not the BSD license.
I would never have had the opportunity to read the DOOM source if JC had insisted on using BSD, because, as JC tweets, his business partners at Id soft would not have gone for it. ipso facto the GPL + Id + JC are responsible for this privilege being available to us all.
There is no empirical evidence in what he says
> There is no empirical evidence in what he says Didn't Apple remove all GPL-based code from the whole iOS and macOS dev infrastructure at some point due to GPL licensing concerns? I also believe Apple sticked for a very long time to an older version of GCC in the past, due to licensing concerns of newer versions of GCC [0]. That was, until Apple replaced GCC with Clang. And I am not sure if GPL-based code can even b…
The concern there seems to be the anti-"tivoization" provisions, which could force Apple to allow people to replace GPLv3'd code.
GPL is about being kind to everyone, as long as they are as kind as you. When sharing something valuable under a GPL license, you’re incentivizing others to be kind like you.
Obviously, if you’re a millionaire like Carmack, you don’t need others’ kindness to get by, so from his point of view a BSD license is better, as his goal is simply to disseminate his code as widely as possible.
I’ve looked at some of the Copilot threads but am unable to follow the issue. Can someone summarize what the issue is with Copilot and why a BSD license would have been significant for the code?
My understanding is that when Copilot automatically inserts some GPL licensed code fragment into your project, your project automatically has to become GPL licensed, whether you want and realize or not.