Light Table 0.7.0

The GPL is a vehicle of the Free Software ideology. Not every open source contributor is fully committed to that ideology.

The general argument in favour of the GPL and similar restrictive licenses is that it's not possible to extend GPL code without distributing your extensions under the same license (where the exact definition of "distribution" and "extension" is the main difference between LGPL, GPL and AGPL). It's largely about "us" (the Open Source community) vs "them" (the corporations, who historically don't contribute to open source).

In practice there is a vast body of open source code licensed under permissive licenses like MIT, BSD or Apache already and companies are releasing their open source projects under these licenses all the time. Even without the GPL, open source is here to stay.

On the other hand many companies now dual-license their projects under the GPL and a commercial proprietary license, with the GPL version being often intended as a "demo" to advertise the often very expensive but non-viral proprietary license (see Sencha for a perfect example of this approach). The ability of other GPL projects to make use of these projects under the GPL license is more of a side-effect (and free advertising) than an altruistic intention.

I think this has to do with the general shift in how we think about copyright today. Restrictive ("Copyleft") open source licenses subvert copyright to create a shared commons (which everybody can use but nobody can own). Permissive open source licenses abandon most of the copyright by just limiting it to an attribution policy and some basic cover-your-ass legalese (thus creating something everybody can use and own).

Does that mean that companies are happy to work with GPLv1 code? If so, I'm surprised more projects don't use it.

It's not about end-user freedom at all. The GPL is there to establish the freedom of the code itself.

For the end-user it's irrelevant what license a product uses. They buy a polished, boxed product; they don't download source code, set up the code's build requirements and then compile it.

The only practical benefit of open source products for the end-user is that there may be forks of it which could have an impact on the price (although a product is more than just its source code, so they may not even be interchangeable). Or that someone could pick it up if the original developer abandons it. But these are theoretical long-term benefits, not immediate ones like those for developers or the code itself.

I'm not saying the GPL is bad. Just that people often misunderstand its motives. The GPL is about code in the same way PeTA is about animals. If the humans benefit directly from it, that's great, but the primary motivation is an ethical absolute: code should be free, locking it behind proprietary licenses is against its nature.

A CA isn't really necessary for GPL code as such, but changing license without one is a massive pain, so you essentially commit to GPL and its restrictions forever if you don't have have one. This has caused problems for other projects (I think KDE is an example).

Obviously this also means we can't move from MIT now either, but it wouldn't really make sense to, since you can't practically add restrictions to already published code. (Strictly speaking I think you could still use LT under the GPL if you wanted).

Let's start with the man himself: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point..... He would call it "open", but not "free".

The point is that the free software movement views things from the end-users perspective: the user is entitled to see and use the source of every binary blob they get delivered and use. That's an important point of the GPL. FOSS is all about freedom for users.

MIT allows the _developer_, who is not necessary the user, to modify the source, build a binary blob and deliver that to users without ever letting them see the source. The freedom from the users perspective is 0, except those that the developer gives them in their terms of service. MIT is all about freedom for developers.

Which one is the "free" your CLA aims for?

The ambiguity problem with using the term "free" is a well-known issue.