Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 468 posts

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

#321

Post by elcapitan »

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?…

> Is there a word for that? Dismissing empirical evidence by clinging to philosophical assertions?

Freshmansplaining?

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

#322

Post by jrochkind1 »

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?…

Eh, people are allowed to disagree or challenge Cormack, it doesn't bother me that they brought up that worry despite knowing he is an experienced respected person.

I do find it notable how many of my peer computer programmers/software engineers no longer believe in open source though. 15 years ago it was very popular to believe in open source, as a way of combating the power of giant corporations.

The dislike/distrust/desire to combat large corporations is still there, but there seems to be a popular and growing opinion that, as they have seen big corporations get only more powerful while using open source, this must mean that open source serves big corporations, and we should be anti-open source if we want to combat big corporations. So it's still anti-corporate, but now much more popular to be anti-open source.

The difference I guess is that now the idea is that open source privileges big corporations against smaller for-profit concerns, that it hurts the kind of "entrepreneurs" that the speakers want to be, hurts their ability to become rich themselves. Whereas before the idea was that open source would help "the people" against the corporations, not help some entrepeneurs get rich themselves.

ANYHOW. This is definitely a thing. Anyone who's been in this "scene" for 20 years is seeing it.

Is anyone writing more about it and what's going on?

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

#323

Post by jrochkind1 »

epaga wrote: post #48

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…

The "it's more important that your code is not exploited by corporations" crowd doesn't actually find GPL suitable anymore either, it still allows too much exploitation.

This position increasingly wants technically not-open-source licenses that reserve the right to profit from the code for... actually, a certain corporation, the one of the "original developers". It's not really about "by corporations", but "big corporations" vs "plucky entrepeneurs who deserve to get rich from their innovation".

Whereas before, for open source enthusiasts, it was about "those who get rich from code" (whether big corporations or 'plucky entrepeneurs') vs some kind of 'commons' or 'public good'. (The new ideological position believes they are still open source enthusiasts somehow, but that their non-open-rights-reserved licenses are somehow 'more truly' open source than... actual open source licenses including the GPL. The term 'open source' still has too much credit for them to say they are opposed to it, even when they are).

There is definitely an ideological shift going on. I am curious if anyone has written/researched more about it.

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

#324

Post by toast0 »

bifrost wrote: post #34
toast0 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He also said in the thread that his partners wouldn't have gone for it, so he may have thought BSD was better back then too, but went with what he could do. Releasing the engine code at all was a big deal back then, and inspired some others to do so, but others sometimes had more restrictive than GPL licenses; GPL is certainly better than a license prohibiting commercial use.

> GPL is certainly better than a license prohibiting commercial use. The GPL prohibits some commercial use. The BSD license does not.

The GPL may make commercial use infeasible, but the Descent public license has gems like:

> IN NO EVENT SHALL THE END-USER USE THE COMPUTER CODE CONTAINED HEREIN FOR REVENUE-BEARING PURPOSES

Which is still better than no source release. But it doesn't get your code out and used by other projects.

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

#325

Post by fastaguy88 »

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.

This argument confuses the typescript of a result with the result itself. The physical presentation of the paper is copyrighted. The scientific results in the paper are not copyrighted (which makes sense, since copyright only applies to a particular instantiation). For computer code, which can be copied and pasted, copyright and licensing are powerful constraints. Scientific results must be reproduced by some set of experimental procedures -- copy and paste makes no sense -- so patents are typically the only protection. Certainly Elsevier does not "own" or control in any way one's ability to confirm, refute, or extend a scientific result.

I suppose the academic world might be considered worse than GPL in some copyright sense, but not in the practical sense of sharing/reproducing/extending results. And, of course, one does not need to publish with Elsevier -- there is no shortage of "open-access" journals.

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

#326

Post by squeaky-clean »

mannerheim wrote: post #203
trasz wrote: post #139

Earlier 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 never open-sourced any of their engines until after they had published a game with the next iteration of their engine.

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

#327

Post by lukeschlather »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #322
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?…

Eh, people are allowed to disagree or challenge Cormack, it doesn't bother me that they brought up that worry despite knowing he is an experienced respected person. I do find it notable how many of my peer computer programmers/software engineers no longer believe in open source though. 15 years ago it was very popular to believe in open source, as a way of combating the power of giant corporations. The dislike/distru…

Carmack is clearly still in favor of open source, he just wishes he had gone with BSD. And it doesn't sound like it's because he's anti-corporate. It sounds like it's because he works for a mega tech corp and his mega tech corp hates the GPL so he has to do a ton of paperwork to use any GPL code there. (which is the same as working for any tech corp.)

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

#328

Post by zamalek »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #309
jasode wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

> 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.

BSD/MIT/permissive and our use of them did make it a hell of a lot easier to approach my previous employer about contributing back on company time/pay (they now do). They even came back with "but no GPL." One of the biggest problems in OSS is paid time/contributions, and GPL discouraged it in at least this one case.

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

#329

Post by cgh »

mannerheim wrote: post #112
epaga wrote: post #48

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…

> So many projects became useless for any commercial projects whatsoever. Which is why Linux is used in zero commercial projects.

Linux has GPL linking exceptions so the full terms of the license do not apply.

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

#330

Post by belorn »

prox wrote: post #260
belorn wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have made a similar observation in the past. Game development is such a extremely high competitive area that any legal method to save time and use someone else code will be used unless it breaks the core business model. Delaying a release of a game by a few months because developers are re-implementing a xlm parser is not an option. If I remember right, Starcraft 2 by Blizzard uses LGPLv3 code, and the software cre…

What are the implications if you use an engine like Unity or Unreal, since you build upon an existing framework?

For unreal, I think the first $1 million USD of lifetime gross revenue of the game is royalty-exempt, and then you pay. Then I think it is 5% of revenue. For unity it is free if revenue or funding is less than $100K in the last 12 months.

That is just the basic implication from a cost perspective. I am not a game developer but there is likely a bunch of other considerations, both legal and technical.

Post reply on HN