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My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

drewdevault.com

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Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#251

Post by mcsofake »

rmtech wrote: post #207
evmar wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I make a movie and include your copyrighted song for just three minutes of the intro, my whole movie violates the law. Or if I write a book and copy-paste just one chapter you wrote on your blog into it, the book also violated your copyright. And I "starve to death and die" because yes, in this world you can't just take things that other people have made and use them in whatever way you like -- if you can't obey t…

> if you can't obey the terms that someone else has given for the use of their creative work, then don't use their work. Yes I agree, but the conclusion to this is that you probably should never use the GPL. If you want other people to be able to use your code, use the MIT license. If you want to monetize your code/keep it secret/sell it, then don't try to open-source it. The GPL makes code radioactive and useless to…

useless to you != useless to everyone. Linux is GPL'd and very useful. Just ask Red Hat if you don't believe me.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#252

Post by supernovae »

Quekid5 wrote: post #99
threwawasy1228 wrote: post #65

I can't relate to this at all, I feel like I went the opposite way. I started out putting all of my work out under GPL but slowly realized how restrictive and demanding such a license actually is, I think public domain is the license that provides the most good to the world as a whole. It enriches everyone, even those who I don't necessarily agree with. It is a much more powerful statement in my view to provide work…

> It enriches everyone, even those who I don't necessarily agree with. That's definitely a valid PoV, but you just have to realize/accept that it may empower people who have power over you. I'm mostly talking about economic power here, but with the absurd expansion of lobbying, etc., this may extend to political power, cf. Turbotax[1]. Again: It's ultimately up to you, but for me... I don't want to give big conglomer…

I read what you say and want to flip it around back at you - Aren't you just projecting your own power in lieu of your perceived loss of power?

Even your framing of your market space projects a sense of power.

GPL actually doesn't protect you from your fear. The AGPL does, but I don't know much that uses that.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#253

Post by ghaff »

module0000 wrote: post #243
nuclear_eclipse wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone can sell software built from GPL code, but if/when they do so, they are obligated to provide source code for that software to anyone receiving a copy, and those users are permitted to redistribute both the software and the source code as long as they also adhere to the GPL.

Now I understand, it's not the code itself that has a price(hence the 'THIS IS FREE SOFTWARE' notice at the top of GPL). It's the entire "product" they charge for. Thanks for the reply!

Not quite. FREE SOFTWARE in that context is "free as in freedom" not "free as in beer." I can most certainly sell you for money software licensed under the GPL (if I make the corresponding sources available) with no other obligations on my part.

Of course, today you're probably not going to have a lot of luck selling something that your potential customer can just download from elsewhere for free. So, in practice, you're going to have to provide other services/benefits that go into a commercial product.

But there's nothing in the GPL that prohibits you from just selling a bunch of bits subject to the requirements of the license and calling it a day.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#254

Post by lone_haxx0r »

Certhas wrote: post #186
lone_haxx0r wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A capitalist (ideas) economy requires a state enforcing copyright. No. Copyright has nothing to do with capitalism. In a completely capitalistic system, there would be no intellectual "property". If you read the founders of right libertarian (pure capitalist) thought, the whole system is based around freedom. And property is justified based on the fact that it's necessary for freedom. Intellectual "property" doesn'…

And no true Spartan... Some schools of thought use some weird notion of freedom to derive some abstract structure that has never been tried anywhere and claim it has some hypothetical properties. You want to call that "true capitalism". I like theory, I do theory, but the post was talking about existing social systems within which we operate. Your private definition of "true capitalism" has nothing to do with that sy…

If state capitalism is capitalism, then National-socialism is socialism.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#255

Post by tannhaeuser »

anderspitman wrote: post #209
tannhaeuser wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you want total world domination for your new protocol? Release a reference implementation under MIT or similar. Not sure this would be the right strategy in this case (assuming by world domination you mean your protocol gets maximal use). Because your protocol/impl could be forked into a closed variant with proprietary extensions, defeating the purpose of an open protocol. At which point you might be stuck maint…

Sorry this is off-topic, but can you expound a bit more on the history of WebDAV in this context?

Sorry I don't have really more knowledge above what's in the protocol specs and on Wikipedia.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#256

Post by ronsor »

jeena wrote: post #241
beefhash wrote: post #33

One thing that's worth considering making an exception for, no matter your ideological stand point, is cryptography libraries. I want everyone to get cryptographic code right, ideally with one implementation that is correct, and then that's the end of it for everyone. Because if commerical vendors do their own thing because of copyleft on a piece of cryptographic code, the one that really ends up suffering is all the…

Or, if its a permissive license then the company makes changes to it which break it so that it's less secure and the end user can't even check that (or ask someone to check that) it's not broken. Then the user ends up suffering because they didn't have the choice in the matter of using to be able to check if everything is ok. This is even worse because it pretends making security better but does not deliver. Then it…

This is illogical because (1) why would the company break the algorithm? (2) it's relatively easy to hide backdoors in plain sight (it just looks like poorly written code)

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#257

Post by mattl »

module0000 wrote: post #243
nuclear_eclipse wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone can sell software built from GPL code, but if/when they do so, they are obligated to provide source code for that software to anyone receiving a copy, and those users are permitted to redistribute both the software and the source code as long as they also adhere to the GPL.

Now I understand, it's not the code itself that has a price(hence the 'THIS IS FREE SOFTWARE' notice at the top of GPL). It's the entire "product" they charge for. Thanks for the reply!

That line has nothing to do with price.

The FSF started out selling copies of tapes with Emacs on them, and then later whole CD collections of free software, including a mixture of GPL and non-GPL code. They even had a service for a number of years where for $5000 they would compile up a whole ton of software for whatever platform you were using, and send it to your business with t-shirts and manuals for the software.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#258

Post by craigsmansion »

rmtech wrote: post #165

Can somebody clarify for me - if you write 9,990 lines of proprietary code and include 10 lines of GPL code, the whole 10,000 becomes GPL, right? And then the whole 10,000 becomes public property according to the GPL so the person who wrote the 9,990 lines of proprietary code starves to death and dies because you can't monetize public property, and our food system only accepts money in exchange for food, not "good de…

> if you write 9,990 lines of proprietary code and include 10 lines of GPL code, the whole 10,000 becomes GPL, right?

No. The 9990 lines remain under whatever license you desire. The 10 lines remain GPL. You can't distribute the whole work.

> And then the whole 10,000 becomes public property according to the GPL

The GPL doesn't make software "public property", whatever you think that entails.

> so the person who wrote the 9,990 lines of proprietary code starves to death and dies because you can't monetize public property,

No capable programmers starve to death, or even earn poorly because of the GPL. Approximately 90% of programming work is in-house development.

> because you can't monetize public property,

I don't know what this means; the GPL isn't about commercial software but proprietary software.

>and our food system only accepts money in exchange for food, not "good deeds" or whatever?

Again, I don't know what this means or what money (or even food), have to do with anything.

>If so, then this is what people mean when they say the GPL is a "general public virus".

If so, they are woefully misinformed and shouldn't be writing any sort of detraction lightly disguised as a very poor analysis online when the GPL is being discussed.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#259

Post by mattl »

kemitchell wrote: post #144
dllthomas wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That led eventually to AGPL, a kind of fork of GPL Yes. > but outside FSF Initially. The current version was published by the FSF in 2007.

I wasn't clear. The reciprocal licenses that require sharing alike, with or without distribution, came from outside FSF.

Pre-FSF Emacs from Stallman came with a request to send any/all changes made back to Stallman.

https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/ch06.html

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#260

Post by c22 »

cjbprime wrote: post #177

> [more free vs. less free] The intuition that helped me understand this was noticing that the GPL is trying to maximize societal freedom, and in contrast the BSD is trying to maximize individual freedom. So, is the GPL less free than BSD? Answer: For whom? Single individuals or everyone together? An analogy: a society would have more individual liberty if dogs were allowed to poop on the sidewalk, because fining dog…

What about a society where individuals are free to let their dogs poop all over but most choose not to since it's unattractive and they've been raised in a society where personal responsibility is of paramount value?

This is the society I want to live in, and I think if you look at it pragmatically this is a society in which a lot of us already live (I have heard of very few cases where someone has actually been fined for not picking up their dog poop and I also see relatively little dog poop lying around).

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