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“I wish I could have licensed the Id source code releases as BSD”

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Re: “I wish I could have licensed the Id source code releases as BSD”

#301

Post by efficax »

marcodiego wrote: post #295

I can play Doom on a modern, underpowered machine for today standards, with many improvements to graphics, sound and gameplay thanks to the need that all these improvements had to be contributed back. I can even pay for original assets of the game. It is not easy to conclude that that would be the case if Doom's source code was not released under the GPL. Actually, GPL has been working exactly as intended and exactly…

basically everything you're talking about was contributed by hobbyists passionate about Doom (I know, I was one of them). A BSD license wouldn't have stopped them, or encouraged any of them to take their modifications closed-source. Doom and then Quake had an active and enthusiastic community of modders who generally released everything back to the community, for the love it. I can't imagine the GPL vs BSD or MIT or Apache would have made any difference here.

Re: “I wish I could have licensed the Id source code releases as BSD”

#302

Post by tzs »

belorn wrote: post #235
foxes wrote: post #55

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…

Scientific research is patented and exclusively copyrighted under publisher. If all scientific research were public and accessible we would not have sci-hub, and they would not currently be in court. We would also not live in a world where scientist has to work around patents and in some cases chose alternative research areas just because they can't afford (or use the result) because of patents. In addition there is…

> Scientific research is patented and exclusively copyrighted under publisher.

Research is not copyrighted. Particular write-ups of the research are copyrighted.

Re: “I wish I could have licensed the Id source code releases as BSD”

#303

Post by enriquto »

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #299
enriquto wrote: post #288

> The best aspects of GPL work didn't manifest 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…

A user who is not also a developer has no ability to meaningfully view and modify the code, and thus doesn't care.

And what is your point? It's a freedom that they still have. They can always hire some developer to help them.

Re: “I wish I could have licensed the Id source code releases as BSD”

#304

Post by jongorer »

enriquto wrote: post #288

> The best aspects of GPL work didn't manifest 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…

Vast majority of users don't care for the source code, nor even know what source code is. And personally, as a developer, I never bothered to look at the source code of software I've used, much less fix or extend it - and that goes for all the devs I know personally.

Re: “I wish I could have licensed the Id source code releases as BSD”

#305

Post by dannyw »

jokoon wrote: post #117
layoutIfNeeded wrote: post #29

BSD is about being kind to everyone, even unkind people. 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…

I'm not supporting capitalism (with all its problems), copyright or intellectual property, but in the real world, kindness doesn't really exist. Setting up a market for kindness is not going to work very well.

What about all the nonprofits that employ ~1 in 10 Americans?

Re: “I wish I could have licensed the Id source code releases as BSD”

#306

Post by temac »

PoignardAzur wrote: post #156

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?…

And to be fair, he even concluded with "I'm still supportive of lots of GPL work, but I don't think the restrictions helped in this particular case."

Re: “I wish I could have licensed the Id source code releases as BSD”

#307

Post by temac »

gameswithgo wrote: post #298
PoignardAzur wrote: post #156

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?…

Linus Torvalds has similar conversations with gpl advocates regularly. “no, i am happy for companies to use linux this way”. And the people just can’t handle this idea. Like suggesting that god doesn’t exist to someone devout.

It is probably more about a v2 vs v3 debate in the case of Linux. He really likes copyleft GPLv2-style and really thinks it has been a net-positive if not one of the key things for the success of the project.

Re: “I wish I could have licensed the Id source code releases as BSD”

#308

Post by tylermauthe »

PoignardAzur wrote: post #156

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?…

It's called mansplaining.

Re: “I wish I could have licensed the Id source code releases as BSD”

#309

Post by zelphirkalt »

jasode wrote: post #255
belorn wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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:/…

> One can still disagree with Carmack but it's still worth understanding what he's claiming.

Exactly, one can still disagree, and he is making a claim. Those are 2 things:

He does not know what would have happened, had they gone with BSD license. No one does ultimately. It might be a case of "the grass is always greener on the other side".

Second is, that he might write however good code he wants, but what is its use, if it can only be used in 1 product, and then gets copied into other people's proprietary products, with no modifications shared back to the community? His code could have been "trapped" in that one BSD licensed product, if they did not make use of it themselves later on. By going GPL, at least they got the people, who did in reality, not just in imagination of an alternative past future, use the code, to contribute back. Those are the facts and they were caused by the license choice. A BSD license does not ensure any such thing. Of course it is possible, that there would have been more adopters and more people sharing code back, but that is not guaranteed, which is kind of the point of GPL.

Re: “I wish I could have licensed the Id source code releases as BSD”

#310

Post by jsjohnst »

xunn0026 wrote: post #209
foxes wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree scientific papers should be open source. It is not acceptable there is a proliferation of bad practice. That seems a different issue however.

It's not a different issue. You used academic papers as the standard we could use for open source and it's provably worse. Even copyright... isn't Elsevier a major copyright holder for all academic papers and thus causing all sorts of problems. It's not like it's all kumbaya out there. The academic world is much worse than GPL and open source on multiple dimensions.

> isn't Elsevier a major copyright holder for all academic papers and thus causing all sorts of problems

No, I could be wrong, but it’s my understanding that the author of the academic paper still holds the copyright, it’s just the author licensed sole (or near exclusive) distribution rights to Elsevier in exchange for publication in their journals. It’s basically the same in the publishing world, I own the copyright on the book I coauthored, but WROX Press owns the distribution rights as we gave those up in exchange for them publishing.

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