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Meteor meets NoGPL

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Re: Meteor meets NoGPL

#101

Post by WiseWeasel »

ajross wrote: post #100
WiseWeasel wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the main points is that Meteor supposedly seeks to build a community around their project, and that the GPL is a hindrance to this goal. Without a strong community, a tool such as this might not have much relevance in the future, relative to others which have successfully built a rich ecosystem around themselves.

There are plenty of GPL projects with robust communities though. (Albeit not in the web development space). The same kind of thing was argued c. 1998 when the "Open Source" branding movement started and all the cool projects went with permissive licenses. And it really wasn't correct. GPL projects continue to be very successful a decade and a half later. The apocalypse never came. So I guess I'm saying that I underst…

I typically land on the side of pragmatism over idealism, and as a lifelong observer of human behavior and psychology, I would say the argument carries some weight. A project I can start using without even thinking of licensing issues, and grow to become dependent on, is one I'm much more likely to contribute towards, simply out of selfish necessity and convenience.

Re: Meteor meets NoGPL

#102

Post by alecco »

debergalis wrote: post #76

[I'm one of the Meteor authors.] We released under the GPL Tuesday because our single goal was to share our work and direction of thinking with everyone. We hoped to spur a discussion about new ways to build apps that dramatically changes the skill sets required and the time it takes. We look at Meteor as part of an exciting transition from LAMP to a new architecture of rich client applications (see also http://www.f…

EDIT: tptacek on AGPL http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1273231

Your license is fine. Perhaps you should consider AGPL as it will cover the PHP-hole, too.

Stay strong, don't give in to pressure by people who are sore because their open source free lunch is ending.

(and this being HN this comment will probably be nuked by downvotes)

Re: Meteor meets NoGPL

#103

Post by alecco »

Original authors have the right to license their code whatever way they please. This kind of article is disgusting.

If it were a proprietary license nobody would raise a finger. HN is a very hypocritical community.

Re: Meteor meets NoGPL

#104

Post by olov »

joeshaw wrote: post #95
debergalis wrote: post #76

[I'm one of the Meteor authors.] We released under the GPL Tuesday because our single goal was to share our work and direction of thinking with everyone. We hoped to spur a discussion about new ways to build apps that dramatically changes the skill sets required and the time it takes. We look at Meteor as part of an exciting transition from LAMP to a new architecture of rich client applications (see also http://www.f…

Lots of people will argue against the GPL on philosophical grounds alone. I'm going to argue against it based on its ambiguity. Just reading this thread illustrates the problem clearly. In the old days of simple, standalone applications and libraries on a single machine, the obligations of the recipient of the source code was clear: your own code must also be GPL compatibile. With this new model of some of the code e…

I whole-heartedly agree with all of that.

As soon as there is ambiguity there is also legal risk, and attorneys tend to recommend a conservative position. The only way to avoid such ambiguity is to limit yourself to the well proven "crystal clear" GPL use cases. As has been demonstrated in this thread, even those "crystal clear" use cases are often misunderstood by many (proprietary program linking to a GPL library comes to mind).

It helps a lot if the copyright holders clarify their own position, possibly in a license addendum. Like Torvalds did for the Linux kernel (regarding system calls). Now that didn't hinder the whole controversy of proprietary vs GPL kernel modules, of course.

The GPL is tricky.

Re: Meteor meets NoGPL

#105

Post by pbreit »

alecco wrote: post #102
debergalis wrote: post #76

[I'm one of the Meteor authors.] We released under the GPL Tuesday because our single goal was to share our work and direction of thinking with everyone. We hoped to spur a discussion about new ways to build apps that dramatically changes the skill sets required and the time it takes. We look at Meteor as part of an exciting transition from LAMP to a new architecture of rich client applications (see also http://www.f…

EDIT: tptacek on AGPL http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1273231 Your license is fine. Perhaps you should consider AGPL as it will cover the PHP-hole, too. Stay strong, don't give in to pressure by people who are sore because their open source free lunch is ending. (and this being HN this comment will probably be nuked by downvotes)

I downvoted. "Your license is fine" and "open source free lunch is ending" don't seem well-supported by evidence.

Re: Meteor meets NoGPL

#106

Post by ajross »

WiseWeasel wrote: post #101
ajross wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are plenty of GPL projects with robust communities though. (Albeit not in the web development space). The same kind of thing was argued c. 1998 when the "Open Source" branding movement started and all the cool projects went with permissive licenses. And it really wasn't correct. GPL projects continue to be very successful a decade and a half later. The apocalypse never came. So I guess I'm saying that I underst…

I typically land on the side of pragmatism over idealism, and as a lifelong observer of human behavior and psychology, I would say the argument carries some weight. A project I can start using without even thinking of licensing issues, and grow to become dependent on, is one I'm much more likely to contribute towards, simply out of selfish necessity and convenience.

Sure. But that's only pragmatism in the sense of "I want what's best for me and my project". It's the kind of "pragmatism" that led Andy Rubin to demand rewriting the GPL userspace with a clearly inferior one for Android, for example.

After enough years and enough projects, I find my perspective is broader. The GPL helps more than it hurts. Efforts to explicitly avoid the GPL (not just to use permissive licenses for free software projects -- that's clearly a good thing) tend to hurt more than they help.

Re: Meteor meets NoGPL

#107

Post by protomyth »

zobzu wrote: post #94
protomyth wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 attrib…

attributing != sharing back it's greed, ego, etc.

I'll share back too if it I have some improvement (I am going to test in on my own site first).

Greed is actually a very poor reason for not sharing back. It actually costs more money to maintain a forked code base than contributing the change back and getting it maintained by everyone. It is also fairly stupid to hide what software you are using from a recruitment point of view.

I prefer the BSD / MIT licenses because the sharing occurs on my schedule, less stress, and less friction. I like doing things because it is right and not because I have a lawyer at my door.

Re: Meteor meets NoGPL

#108

Post by alecco »

pbreit wrote: post #105
alecco wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EDIT: tptacek on AGPL http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1273231 Your license is fine. Perhaps you should consider AGPL as it will cover the PHP-hole, too. Stay strong, don't give in to pressure by people who are sore because their open source free lunch is ending. (and this being HN this comment will probably be nuked by downvotes)

I downvoted. "Your license is fine" and "open source free lunch is ending" don't seem well-supported by evidence.

Edit: read this first http://zedshaw.com/essays/why_i_gpl.html

I've seen BSD developers switch to GPL because of too many freeloaders were repackaging and selling their code with a minimal frontend without even respecting proper author credit. There was even a counter-rant by Zed Shaw "The Long Beard's Revenge".

There's a growing feeling of discontent with the startup-brogrammer-douchebag subgroup, as it's becoming a significant part of the whole startup scene. IMHE

Re: Meteor meets NoGPL

#109

Post by davidw »

koko775 wrote: post #85
debergalis wrote: post #76

[I'm one of the Meteor authors.] We released under the GPL Tuesday because our single goal was to share our work and direction of thinking with everyone. We hoped to spur a discussion about new ways to build apps that dramatically changes the skill sets required and the time it takes. We look at Meteor as part of an exciting transition from LAMP to a new architecture of rich client applications (see also http://www.f…

I think you're turning this too corporate too soon. At this stage your most powerful evangelists will be hobbyists and spare-timers. When I write code, I like to write it open-source. Setting the obviously negative connotation aside, it is objectively true that the GPL code, compiled or no, is a license virus that spreads so fundamentally that linking with non-GPL-compatible code violates the terms. Because the disti…

> I think you're turning this too corporate too soon.

That may or may not be, only time will tell. The important thing is to be up front about it, though. There are advantages and disadvantages to companies in something like this: often they can move faster than someone working part time, and they're probably going to be friendlier to those who need support for their own commercial endeavors (anyone remember the famous "fuck you" slide from DHH?).

There are certainly downsides too (I'm not really interested in GPL code if I can help it), but it's theirs to decide. The only thing I want is for them to be up front about what's what.

Re: Meteor meets NoGPL

#110

Post by koko775 »

zobzu wrote: post #93
koko775 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're turning this too corporate too soon. At this stage your most powerful evangelists will be hobbyists and spare-timers. When I write code, I like to write it open-source. Setting the obviously negative connotation aside, it is objectively true that the GPL code, compiled or no, is a license virus that spreads so fundamentally that linking with non-GPL-compatible code violates the terms. Because the disti…

It's so hypocritical tho. Obviously you want to release only code that will help you code less in the future (ie: let others maintain feature X for FREE for us; but don't give them what MATTERS) And that's the main concern with all the anti-GPL folks - that's also the very reason why the GPL exists.

Having developed and released something under the GPL a long time ago, I am not anti-GPL, but that doesn't mean I'm not wary of it.

> Obviously you want to release only code that will help you code less in the future

No, I want to release code other people might find useful.

> ie: let others maintain feature X for FREE for us

This sounds naive. Virtually nobody writes a library then abandons it when other people start helping out.

> don't give them what MATTERS

"What matters" is highly subjective and different to different people. What matters to Twitter is the userbase and user experience. So they open-source their database stuff, Bootstrap, and a plethora of other things. And why not?

It's not hypocritical. The GPL was critical to the fight against closed OSes and the closed tools that made writing software essentially limited and pay-to-program.

My view of open-source and programming in general is that there are many things that programming can help you do. More often than not, these are the same things. The more programmers can help each other to spend more time writing things that are great, the better off we all are.

The GPL fights proprietary software, but for things that are not products on their own, but are designed to be a component of or integrated into other products, it can also fight other programmers as well. I use GPL software, but I don't use GPL libraries or frameworks. (The LGPL is less selfish - the whole software ecosystem doesn't need to open for it to play its part, but the library damn well stay open.)

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