I think that the MPLv2 covers the best of both worlds. It is a lightweight copyleft that requires you to give back the modifications you do to the original codebase, but it doesn't prevent you from static linking or mixing code with other licenses.
“I wish I could have licensed the Id source code releases as BSD”
271–280 of 468 posts
Re: “I wish I could have licensed the Id source code releases as BSD”
#272Earlier quoted context omitted.
I consider the viral thing of copyright a good thing, similar to a meme going viral. While technically the law, people were pretty upset when a "meme tax" was being discussed because the copyright owners of the sources of many memes were seeking compensation. The idea of going viral as making it something everyone can partake in and something nobody can tell you not to do as long as you don't try to restrict others i…
Most reasonable people agree that copyright on creative works is a good thing, but it has to be short. 10 years is plenty. What we currently have is "life plus 70 years"! That means well over 100 years. 100 years! It's totally insane, but most people just don't question it. Are we really to believe that there is anyone out there encouraged to write because they know their work will still be copyrighted for 70 years a…
Lets take your 10 years one...
If a work loses its copyright after 10 years, I could grab emacs 23.3 and make some changes and release it all close source. Or gcc 4.6.1. iText became AGPL in '09.. version 5.1.1 was released 10 years ago (5.5.13 is current) and it could be brought to a closed source library.
Whats more, I believe that the photographs that I took 10 years ago still have as much value as the day that I took them. There are a lot of photographers who's livelihood is based on their library of photographs that they have taken over the years.
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Lifetime plus 70 was done in the era where publishing content had a very long tail and the estate (and children) were able to collect from that long tail for their lifetime too.
While I'm in agreement that lifetime + 70 is too much, I believe that 10 is far too little.
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A prediction / alternate world -- if copyright was 10 years on software, you'd get an EaaS model - everything as a service. You wouldn't have anything that you could install. No libraries - nothing. You make calls out to services to do whatever you need. This would likely include connecting to VMs controlled by large companies from rather low powered terminals. Yes, this looks a lot like chrome books and the cloud for everything.
Re: “I wish I could have licensed the Id source code releases as BSD”
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
Id engines —as well as many other projects— were dual licensed, GPL or Proprietary. If you wanted to make a game with one, it either had to be GPL too, or you paid for a traditional licence. This got Id paid and let modders and the open source gaming community go wild. What's the downside? Carmack's argument about perception, but his view is really about having had more people use his software. I think he's wrong. Br…
> Id wouldn't have open sourced a second engine if the first was freely taken by a dozen companies and sold in competition with for game sales, giving no source improvements back. I don't agree with this statement, because they used to open source their engines a generation behind their current one. They released the Doom source when Quake was state of the art, so I doubt having another company release a Doom clone i…
Interesting points but it's hard to say for certain without knowing what the individual license terms are. Games continue to sell long after release, and many were released close to the open sourcing dates. Would Id have lost out on long-tail income if the devs could have switched to (eg) MIT terms?
And with a MIT IdTech2 engine, would any of their IdTech3 customers layered on their own improvements to the older engine? It's not like an engine is an drop-in solution. You still have to work it, and IdTech3 is after all just Id's improvements. Somebody could have taken the earlier engineering and run with it, just as open source efforts did, but into their own closed-source product.
WRT competition, I don't disagree on the point about the game's not being solely about the engine, but the era of gaming we're talking about did very much rely on novel technology. I think changes like those done by Infinity Ward may have changed the engine marketplace pretty disruptively in the early 2000s' flood of WW2 games, if they'd had to release them. GPL protected Id's take (CoD has an extremely long tail), as well as letting IW keep all their changes theirs.
Re: “I wish I could have licensed the Id source code releases as BSD”
#274Why is a few snippets of code so valuable anyway? We don't GPL scientific research, you expect people to cite you, and then build off your work, the licensing in a sense is far more permissive. You don't GPL maths text books and then require proofs to be licensed back. Other knowledge doesn't seem to propagate in society like this. The human element of the programmer who can understand, adapt and develop some program…
> The valuable thing is their time and overall knowledge, not the end piece of content necessarily. The GPL doesn't give primacy to the thing that's built - but to the user of the thing. The GPL implicitly values the user's freedom over developer's convenience - the opposite is true for BSD-like licenses. Generally, I feel like the affinity most people have to one license or another entirely depends on how they more…
>The GPL values the user's freedom,
That assumes a very specific kind of user. The kind that has the time and energy, not to mention the ability, to read and understand source code and modify it according to his needs. Basically the RMS kind of user.
For most users, that freedom is not much of a concern at all. For them, the most important freedom is: the freedom to enjoy the fruits of labour of a large horde of programmers who can make a fruitful living out of creating apps for said users.
They enjoy this freedom a lot more in what GNU calls non-free platforms like Windows and Mac and iPhone, which is why they keep flocking to them.
Re: “I wish I could have licensed the Id source code releases as BSD”
#275Re: “I wish I could have licensed the Id source code releases as BSD”
#276Re: “I wish I could have licensed the Id source code releases as BSD”
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
Still, how preventing said corp from using this software help you, or anyone else?
If you read between the lines, this is the very reason why Id released the source code as GPL instead of BSD: They didn't want their competitors to take their engine, make proprietary improvements, and deprive Id of revenue using their own work.
They didn't release any of this code as open-source until they'd wrung every dime of engine licensing out of it and it had been completely obsoleted.
It's free-as-in-couch software.
Re: “I wish I could have licensed the Id source code releases as BSD”
#278Why is a few snippets of code so valuable anyway? We don't GPL scientific research, you expect people to cite you, and then build off your work, the licensing in a sense is far more permissive. You don't GPL maths text books and then require proofs to be licensed back. Other knowledge doesn't seem to propagate in society like this. The human element of the programmer who can understand, adapt and develop some program…
> We don't GPL scientific research
Because people don't hide their equations and ask you to pay them money to evaluate them given a set of variables.
GPL wouldn't be necessary if sharing code were already the default. It's an ugly hack to solve a really stupid artificial problem.
Re: “I wish I could have licensed the Id source code releases as BSD”
#279I'm very frustrated by some of the answers here and on Twitter. Carmack says: > The GPL virality wound up being a net negative, and more value would have come from BSD. [...] The best aspects of GPL work didn't manifest, but tons of opportunities to just copy-paste-modify were lost due to license concerns. One of the answers on Twitter: > Then what if it's being exploited by big techs and make your work proprietary?…
Carmack explicitly mentions the BSD/GPL question in connection with copilot. He is working on AI now and has an explicit interest in the intellectual property discussions that flared up after copilot. It's natural that people think he's using his status as a super programmer to lobby for the position that currently benefits him. I don't see why he would be more qualified to assess the pros/cons of the GPL than the Li…
> I don't see why he would be more qualified to assess the pros/cons of the GPL than the Linux and GCC authors.
That is simple: he has thought about it in more depth than most of them. Most Linux and GCC authors don't really care about licensing much, just code they can work collaboratively on. Since the code they are working on is GPL they use GPL and get back to work.
I suspect if Linus took the time to really think he would use BSD for Linux - it hasn't been possible to make this type of change since like 1992 at the latest though so there is no point in him thinking about it. And in turn that means my claim is not testable.