My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

But what's the limit of this process? The end state will continue to be intolerant of intolerance, because people will continue to think bad things.

All that means is that your "tolerance" has a clearly defined limit.

This comes up all the time. I pointed out the case with war. There's also crime. We respect the rights of others, so we don't steal, except when we fine criminals, we don't imprison, except for the prisons we have, we don't kill, except in self-defense and to execute.

No one ever describes those as "paradoxes" because they're not.

As to why people would describe this particular case as a paradox, I'm going to avoid getting into ideology.

When I find some interesting looking project on github or elsewhere, I am always tempted to look at the code. However, if I notice that the code is licensed under GPL, I refrain to do so as I do not want to have to worry about finding some "cool trick" but not being able to use it later in my own code without fear of violating the license.

I do get why some people swear by the GPL license, and I respect their choice and commitment to what they see as the greater good. However, I see it as a barrier to those that simply desire to learn.

One of the distinctions I like to draw strongly is between "nice" and "good". They are not the same, and at times, are actively at odds with each other.

It is certainly nice to give away your software to everybody, unconditionally, and not be bothered if your code does happen to end up being a fundamental component of some multi-billion-dollar company that gives you nothing.

But I'm less convinced that's necessarily good. In a world where you must live under the assumption there are bad actors, I think it's OK to put into your license that they can't necessarily do that. It is good to prevent the exploitation of anybody, and that goodness extends to preventing the exploitation of yourself, even if you also clearly have direct personal interests of your own.

I don't think "being comfortable with being exploited" is a component of "being a big person".

On the other hand, we often bring to mind mental examples of software where we slaved away for years and years to bring some unique new product to the world, only for it to be stolen by the big bad corporation for no compensation. My verbiage above about "exploitation" probably brought that to the reader's mind as the topic of discussion. If that happens, yeah, it's bad. On the other hand, that's not really the dominant case for software. There's a lot of open source put out there that's just a few day's work, which is still plenty valuable at scale, but if someone took one of these little things and incorporated it into their product, it's not really that big a deal.

I have several such small little things and they're all BSD. If a big corporation did somehow walk off with one of them, I'd legitimately be flattered, because I know that while it may have saved them a bit of time, it certainly isn't a core component of their product and had they needed to implement something themselves it would have been a trivial fraction of their time. I know I can say I'd be flattered because to some small extent, this really has happened, and I really was flattered and appreciative, so I'm not just hypothesizing about my future emotional states. I'm well aware on all levels that my ~two weeks total effort on the project in question, which I mostly did for my own purposes and for which the open source effort was essentially a bonus, doesn't entitle me to significant compensation for a product whose size is measured in person-decades.

But your claim of what people should do is itself an ideological argument. Software creators have just as much right to choose their licenses for principled reasons as utilitarian ones. Heck, they could pick a license based on the number of contractions in the license text if they wanted. It's their software and their right to determine which reasons they care about most.

>Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.

If nobody had fought the Nazis (an intolerant culture), they would rule at the very least all of Europe.