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Meteor meets NoGPL

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Re: Meteor meets NoGPL

#41

Post by protomyth »

wavephorm wrote: post #28

The real reason permissive licences are preferred is developers are greedy. I know, I'm a developer and I'm greedy. I don't want to admit I'm using other people's code to do my work. I want to silently include that code and pretend that I did all of it myself and impress people with my amazing programming skills. If I have to buy a license I have fess up, and admit to myself I need their code, whereas if I can just u…

It's not greed, it's friction. Developers don't like friction in development and worrying about licensing is a type of friction that requires real money. I want to help them (I contribute $ to a few projects), but I need to know my stuff will work with there's before I go paying. There are few things worse than paying for software, deploying, and finding out you need to switch to something else.

I am fine with attributing others. I have actually done it after paying even when paying removes the need (e.g. glyphicons pro).

Re: Meteor meets NoGPL

#42

Post by madhadron »

Other folks have already pointed out that using a library does not constitute a derivative work, so the author's point is irrelevant anyway.

There are times when BSD license and equivalent are sensible choices. Berkeley was releasing a reference set of source code. Their whole point was to have a common platform that everyone was building off of. Similarly, a BSD licensed reference implementation of TCP/IP back in the day meant that everyone could get the protocol up and running much faster with far fewer inconsistencies. BSD licensing is useful for social engineering.

But for most cases this isn't so. Why would anyone who wrote a JavaScript library and gave it away want to make it easy for someone else to build a company around taking their work, extending it a little, selling it, and giving nothing back other than enough tidbits to keep the community (if any) from getting up in arms? This is what happened to the Lisp machines, and it's exactly why the GPL is the way it is. Businesses have a fiduciary responsibility to maximize shareholder profits. If you're selling software, that means minimizing costs and maximizing income. It is the legal obligation of a company to take any permissively licensed code it can get its hands on and thinks will speed things up, extend it a little, and sell it. My response: if I'm not trying to engineer your behavior, stop leaching off the community and buy your underlying components.

The GPL exists for a reason. Every so often, some cheap bastard complains about it because he can't make a quick buck by ripping someone else off. Tough. That's why it's there. You want to use my work on this? Give me yours in exchange.

Re: Meteor meets NoGPL

#43

Post by madhadron »

lucian1900 wrote: post #15

This is likely irrelevant for the server-side bit, and it remains to be determined if it is for the client-side. It will hinder contributions if they require attribution, however.

Absolutely. The license difference is why FreeBSD is so much more widespread than Linux.

Re: Meteor meets NoGPL

#44

Post by drpancake »

clarkevans wrote: post #31
drpancake wrote: post #19

Sencha took a similar approach with ExtJS and it pains me to watch it falling into obscurity. The framework itself is elegant and well thought-out; it seems that everything Backbone and its various offshoots give us now was already available there years ago.

I don't think they are falling into obscurity -- last I talked with people there, Sensha is quite profitable and growing rapidly.

Sencha Touch is growing because they stopped dual-licensing it. Going on my own personal experience, ExtJS doesn't have much mindshare in the circles I care about i.e. valley-style startups.

Re: Meteor meets NoGPL

#45

Post by pbreit »

olalonde wrote: post #23

GPL doesn't require you to distribute your server-side code if you are hosting it on your own servers (AGPL does). The client side code does have to be open sourced since it is distributed but Javascript code is pretty worthless without the server-side API, HTML and CSS that goes with it. In other words, all the commercial license does from a business point of view is allow you to sue people who copy your client side…

But with Meteor he line between serve and client code is much blurrier. GPL is bad but it's even worse in this case.

Re: Meteor meets NoGPL

#46

Post by shawndrost »

I met these guys last night, and I'd really recommend you write them before you let the GPL stop you from developing software using Meteor. It sounds like they'd be happy to license it otherwise to anyone that wants to use it now, but they don't want to neuter their monetization for all the people that sign up later. (If I were them, I'd formalize that fact and dual-license for early adopters to bootstrap their community.)

Re: Meteor meets NoGPL

#47

Post by wavephorm »

web_chops wrote: post #36
wavephorm wrote: post #28

The real reason permissive licences are preferred is developers are greedy. I know, I'm a developer and I'm greedy. I don't want to admit I'm using other people's code to do my work. I want to silently include that code and pretend that I did all of it myself and impress people with my amazing programming skills. If I have to buy a license I have fess up, and admit to myself I need their code, whereas if I can just u…

You got it reverse. Most permissive licenses need attribution (in form of leaving the original header comment etc) which lets the whole world know that you are using the component. A commercial license gives you complete anonymity (most let you completely change the source code) except for the charge on your credit card bill. And I don't think its greed. Not many applications on any platform gets written completely f…

  Most permissive licenses need attribution (in form of leaving the 
  original header comment etc) which lets the whole world know
If the code is being used for commercial and propriety purposes then the code is never seen, never attributed. Attribution in the form of source code comments is really only valuable in other open source projects.

Re: Meteor meets NoGPL

#48

Post by lucian1900 »

madhadron wrote: post #43
lucian1900 wrote: post #15

This is likely irrelevant for the server-side bit, and it remains to be determined if it is for the client-side. It will hinder contributions if they require attribution, however.

Absolutely. The license difference is why FreeBSD is so much more widespread than Linux.

Linux doesn't require copyright attribution, whereas things like MySQL and OpenOffice did. Notice how much more momentum Linux has (for other reasons too, of course).

Re: Meteor meets NoGPL

#49

Post by cperciva »

madhadron wrote: post #43
lucian1900 wrote: post #15

This is likely irrelevant for the server-side bit, and it remains to be determined if it is for the client-side. It will hinder contributions if they require attribution, however.

Absolutely. The license difference is why FreeBSD is so much more widespread than Linux.

The license difference is why you're aware of so many places that Linux is used. It's hard to miss a blob of text as big as the GPL.

There are a lot of boxes running FreeBSD internally which you never hear about. We try to convince vendors that it's ok to talk publicly about using FreeBSD, but an awful lot of them consider it to be "secret sauce" which they don't want their competitors to hear about.

Re: Meteor meets NoGPL

#50

Post by obituary_latte »

woodhull wrote: post #39
obituary_latte wrote: post #6

I think I prefer the paid-support model a-la RedHat. I think the OP makes a good point of this licensing possibly hindering uptake/contributions to the Meteor project. Just by virtue of Meteor choosing this licensing model, I've lost some of my excitement to try it out. I would most certainly use it for something commercial and because it looks so sweet I would be willing to shell out some $ for, say, some email supp…

That's kind of a silly view. You would rather spend 6 months "writing code" than spend 1 day negotiating a contract that would save you 6 months of effort? What if sending them an email that took as long to write as this HN post would get you a quote? Psychology of product purchasers is fascinating.

How about if my budget for negotiating contracts is $0?

If I don't have a baseline price and I am worried about licensing, I'm not going to spend time trying to fight for a budget to then spend time trying to negotiate a contract--I don't have time.

If I could dev without licensing worries, then I would fight for a budget for things like support and add-ons.

Also, may I ask why you put "writing code" in quotations?

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