281–290 of 468 posts
I'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?…
I'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?…
Why 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…
I think the key property of the GPL is its virality. It's part of the vision that if I can use some software, I can also change it, to adapt it to my needs, to learn from it, to build something on top of it. I can disassemble my bike, re-assemble it, change it, build on top of it. I want to do that with my browser, my OS kernel and my image viewer too. That this is connected to how "valuable" code is, is in a sense a…
That is the dogma, but in practice it is false. Khtml was GPL, that didn't stop Apple from forking it in such a way that their changes couldn't be reused. In practice many who change BSD software find it worth while to contribute their changes back - so they can continue to use the latest version instead of maintaining their own fork.
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Licenses are about choices. I do not want 7 year old girls to be sued. I don't want people to go to jail for helping others to take part in culture and enjoy art. I want children (or everyone?) to have access to all of culture, knowledge and art regardless of their parents wealth. I want that researcher has access to research papers and software technology in order to enable the improvement of the human race, especia…
> to use code for good with commercial interests You can use GPL code commercially. You just have to publish source on anything it touches. It that makes your business model nonviable, the amount of good you were doing is... questionable.
As a side effect they had to publish their incomplete implementation of STL that was adopted by multiple other studios as it was so much faster and less memory fragmenting than alternatives.
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Proprietary is, I think, the "default" way how people always did things. Keeping the recipe secret is one of the moats that help the enterprise stay relevant. So naturally, "it works" and I think it always will. IMO, this is why it's important to keep the open source stuff open. Closed doesn't usually turn into open, so why should open turn into closed? I think the legal system is exactly the place to address this, i…
I don't remember who but someone here on HN once compared closed source vs open source to old school secretive alchemy guilds vs real science. I really liked that comparison and I've thought about it a lot since. And here it's worth asking, how did we go from alchemy to science? How did we end up figuring out that openness and transparency is beneficial? I know one thing, it wasn't with licenses. But I'm really curio…
Licenses only matter because there's trademarks and copyright. In places where IP isn't protected as much, they also would not matter, in a way that they would not be necessary. But because stuff can be copyrighted, there also must be a way to share that, aside from liberating it from the copyright of course.
I think a close real-life analogue is a potluck. The custom requires that participants bring some food, and in turn can consume from what the others brought. And it's a nice old thing too, with etymology dating back to the 16th century.
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> 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 prog…
Actually, no. End users also benefit when code is contributed back to the software they use.
That's strongly from the point of view of people who are mainly developers.
But the main beneficiaries of the GPL are not developers but users: users of GPL software have the right to view and modify the code that runs on their computers. On the contrary, users of BSD-licensed software may have had this right stripped by middlemen between the author of the software and them.
The GPL may annoy some developers but it always makes the users happier, and I think that's beautiful.
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> The best aspects of GPL work didn't manifest Did someone get sued for downloading a copy of a game with the quake source code in it? Did someone release a game with quake code in it, only to go after users for patent infringement? DRM locked devices built on the quake code? A license is simply the condition for which an author allows others to do things for which copyright law make illegal. There is also a culture…
>A license is simply the condition [...] I don't think reducing it to that actually helps the discussion. A license/law/policy can't be analyzed via its bare verbatim text. One also has to look at its unintended effects in the real world. Yes, the GPL license has noble intentions but that doesn't mean it's immune from causing actions that indirectly contradict its goal . (Wikipedia article on that phenomenon: https:/…
(We could dig into the terminology around "openess", a classic tar trap in the GPL and BSD flame wars, but I doubt such path would lead towards comments getting more thoughtful and substantive.)
Going thus back towards getting users and copy-paste-modify events, as a strategy GPL is rarely if ever a maximize for those goals. The discussions around licenses for stackoverflow code seems to have concluded that claiming copyright at all on small code snippets is counter productive and something most users don't seem to even acknowledge or know that it has a license. A patent grant is however a good protective measure, which would be more akin to the apache license rather than BSD.
For maximum users we have both Iphone and Android as examples of BSD vs GPL, and the conclusion seems to be that the license has very little effect. In contrast one could make a strong correlative argument that proprietary software on top and DRM is the best strategy out there if you want to maximize users.
I doubt however either is what Carmack is talking about. Instead it seems to be the rather common pattern we have seen in the past when old developers test out open source. They look at projects like linux and expect to get similar contributors by releasing their own projects under GPL, and then they end up not getting many and announcing that "the best aspects of GPL work didn't manifest". The question is if that would also have happened under BSD. He could try it today, and if we got the same result, what would that prove?
I'm still bummed out that for years, GPL was the "standard" go-to open source license. So many projects became useless for any commercial projects whatsoever. GPL advocates say it's so that your code isn't exploited by corporations. But I'd say that choosing GPL means it's more important to you that your code "is not exploited by corporations" than that it can be used for good by people with commercial interests. Tho…