341–350 of 468 posts
I'm still bummed out that for years, GPL was the "standard" go-to open source license. So many projects became useless for any commercial projects whatsoever. GPL advocates say it's so that your code isn't exploited by corporations. But I'd say that choosing GPL means it's more important to you that your code "is not exploited by corporations" than that it can be used for good by people with commercial interests. Tho…
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Carmack has net worth of $50 million. Him saying "exploitation by big tech is not a problem, really" is very different than normal person saying it - his well being is not on the line and never will be. Go ask authors of ElasticSearch or Airflow or whatever the new thing that AWS steals will be.
The argument of big tech "exploiting" or stealing has always rang untrue to me. If Microsoft took the source code to Nano and made a Nano+ that reads word files or something, closed-source, selling it for big bucks, etc, the value of what they're offering cannot possibly be more than the delta from what is freely and openly available. They didn't make the original any less available, and a user is only possibly going…
I think its interesting that you described exactly the big problem the GPL was supposed to solve. The entire intention is to not allow another party to take the work you've done and build a minor increase in value and then piggy backing on all the value you've created.
Now you've removed contributions that could have made the original project better - most of the intention of open source is to make something that others can contribute too.
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> to use code for good with commercial interests You can use GPL code commercially. You just have to publish source on anything it touches. It that makes your business model nonviable, the amount of good you were doing is... questionable.
I disagree with "have to publish source on anything it touches" . Electronic Arts used WebKit in multiple games and they only had to share changes they did to it, not the source codes for all their games. As a side effect they had to publish their incomplete implementation of STL that was adopted by multiple other studios as it was so much faster and less memory fragmenting than alternatives.
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> to use code for good with commercial interests You can use GPL code commercially. You just have to publish source on anything it touches. It that makes your business model nonviable, the amount of good you were doing is... questionable.
I disagree with "have to publish source on anything it touches" . Electronic Arts used WebKit in multiple games and they only had to share changes they did to it, not the source codes for all their games. As a side effect they had to publish their incomplete implementation of STL that was adopted by multiple other studios as it was so much faster and less memory fragmenting than alternatives.
I'm very frustrated by some of the answers here and on Twitter. Carmack says: > The GPL virality wound up being a net negative, and more value would have come from BSD. [...] The best aspects of GPL work didn't manifest, but tons of opportunities to just copy-paste-modify were lost due to license concerns. One of the answers on Twitter: > Then what if it's being exploited by big techs and make your work proprietary?…
> Is there a word for that? Dismissing empirical evidence by clinging to philosophical assertions? Freshmansplaining?
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> I often hear the following invalid argument: "I don't care about code availability, I won't look at it!" Sounds a bit like "I don't care about free speech, I don't want to say anything!".
That's because they literally set it up to deliver that same punchline in the next paragraph. Looks like you got too excited to be able to read the entire comment? XD
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> to use code for good with commercial interests You can use GPL code commercially. You just have to publish source on anything it touches. It that makes your business model nonviable, the amount of good you were doing is... questionable.
I disagree with "have to publish source on anything it touches" . Electronic Arts used WebKit in multiple games and they only had to share changes they did to it, not the source codes for all their games. As a side effect they had to publish their incomplete implementation of STL that was adopted by multiple other studios as it was so much faster and less memory fragmenting than alternatives.
I'm still bummed out that for years, GPL was the "standard" go-to open source license. So many projects became useless for any commercial projects whatsoever. GPL advocates say it's so that your code isn't exploited by corporations. But I'd say that choosing GPL means it's more important to you that your code "is not exploited by corporations" than that it can be used for good by people with commercial interests. Tho…
They are probably downvoting because time and time again people explain that the _purpose_ of GPL isn't to stop commercial use (commercial use is fine), it's to stop developers from depriving users of the same rights to the source code that you, the developer had.
I'm not even a GPL guy, just a guy that can take 10 minutes to read a license and an FAQ. I've also used GPL in commercial software, it's very simple to comply with the license.
Just a note that he is speaking from the perspective of someone who already profited immensely from the source code in question before the source was released. Most developers of FOSS never see a single dime and actually do it at net negative monetary benefit not to mention personal cost. All of that purely for the benefit of the collective.
The profit does not come from the source code, but from the assets. There are games which are fully opensource, but where you have to pay for the assets (and where the source code was released at the same time as the rest of the game). This was not the case for doom, but the demo for doom was free and came out at the same time; the engine was always freely available.
Which is why Unity and the Unreal Engine are free. Oh wait...
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Why does the GPL license make it "useless for any commercial projects whatsoever"? Many commercial projects use GPL software. The only thing you have to do is provide sources under the same license if you release binaries. If you're not even willing to do that I understand some people rather have you not use their software.
"Not even"? This is a huge requirement for most cases. A small GPL library for, say, some statistics calculation, would mean an entire product's source code would need to be released if it used the library.