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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

#351

Post by jake_the_third »

supernovae wrote: post #252
Quekid5 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Many years back, I bought an expensive android phone to discover that it did not support my native language. I have the necessary technical skills to add support for it, but because the phone was locked down (something enabled by permissive licenses but not the GPL), I couldn't fix the phone myself and ended up with a very expensive but useless brick.

Corporate interests rarely align completely with your own, and this small difference can be very damaging to your interests. The GPL, while not perfect, alleviates some of the damage caused by this misalignment by ensuring that users remain in a position to address it.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#352

Post by jake_the_third »

ndesaulniers wrote: post #350
mcguire wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The GPL is the one reason why there is one "mainline" Linux kernel and a number of roughly compatible distributions rather than the incompatible chaos of the Unix wars of the '80s and '90s. Take a look at imake and autoconf if you need convincing that the GPL is valuable.

Well, I hate autoconf, so maybe poor choice of example. :P

I think that's his point.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#353

Post by mempko »

cellularmitosis wrote: post #280
beering wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someday, that might come full circle and you'll be the one who won't be enriched because the original code was MIT and not GPL. Here's an example: you buy some embedded hardware for a personal project, but you find out that the toolchain for that chipset is a pile of proprietary blobs built on Clang and it only runs on Windows. If it were built on GCC, then the GPL would force them to make the source available and pe…

> If it were built on GCC... This assumes that if the only option available to the embedded hardware company were the GPL, that they'd go with that option. (more likely, the product would never come to market) In reality, releasing something under the GPL typically just ensures that it won't be used by businesses. This is a real bummer, because it means it is off-limits to me during my day-job. I would love to try an…

Thisnis because most businesses don't understand GPL.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#354

Post by madez »

est31 wrote: post #349
madez wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The GPL is not self-serving; it is a tool to achieve a type of society, and that is the society you seem to enjoy, too. After all, by what else should be measure the permissive licences vs copyleft licences if not by their influence on society?

Are you one of those "GPL is socialism" people? You are misguided. Yes, there are lots of marxists/communists in the open source / free software community and most people in it lean left. But the GPL itself is compatible with a capitalist society. In fact, GPL can be the basis for making money with FLOSS software, by offering non-GPL'd commercial licenses. All the GPL ensures that if you want to make a proprietary fo…

> Are you one of those "GPL is socialism" people?

No, not all. I don't even know why you'd assume so. I don't even see how you connect what I've said remotely to the left-right oversimplification of political opinions, let alone with one of those sides.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#355

Post by pessimizer »

rmtech wrote: post #236
pessimizer wrote: post #118

This may go either way for you, but I feel like the GPL is the closest thing that programmers have to a union. It guarantees that our obligations to users and other programmers always supersede the obligations that we have to our employer. They are a law hack that encodes professionalism. edit: it seems obvious that a doctor's obligations should be to the patient, then to medicine, then to the particular institution…

> but I feel like the GPL is the closest thing that programmers have to a union But unions generally exist to make their members rich. GPL has the opposite effect, it means you can't sell your code so you become poor. It's like the opposite of a union; a collective agreement among a group of professionals whereby they mutually agree to prevent each other from making money.

I agree a bit, maybe union isn't the right comparison - more like a bar association or medical register. It's enforceable ethics, but since programmers are not professional, we have to attach these ethics to the code rather than to the practitioner.

If you're a doctor or a lawyer and you do something unethical, you go to a hearing of your peers, and they can punish you up to and including banning you from practice with some legal force. All we can do as programmers is attach what some of us feel are ethical standards to the works we personally create, and make adhering to those standards with regards to that software the price of using that software. The GPL gives that legal force.

That's also why I'm sympathetic to weird licenses that ban the military, or the evil. But personally, as a programmer, I'm more concerned about the harm that programmers do than harm in general, and I think it's long been clear that Stallman targeted the particular exploitation that programmers can profit from like a laser.

Unions also do that, but their primary purpose is to make their members rich, like you said. It's sad that in many jurisdictions in the US, unions bargained away (or legislators signed away) their right to strike on behalf of their customers, over objectionable externalities, or anything that wasn't a direct financial benefit to union members.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#356

Post by megous »

zzzeek wrote: post #331
megous wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me it's rather simple. I like GNU/Linux, the whole free/sharing ecosystem helped me learn so much, it allowed me great productivity, to modify anything and everything, etc. I like others to have the same opportunity, so GPL it is, even for libraries.

Well it doesn't always work that way. I have a bunch of MIT licensed libraries that are very widely used and I'm 100% certain there are no commercial forks of it of any particular value. Because then they'd not have my support when their stuff breaks. Im sure there's lots of other libraries like mine, the MIT license is not limiting anyone's access to the best versions of my code.

Your argument doesn't say anything about GPL not always working that way. It just says that MIT license may work that way too, if noone else will make any useful closed modifications. Which is actually an uninteresting case.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#357

Post by zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC »

bunderbunder wrote: post #336
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You did a switch-a-roo between the perspective of individual programmers to the perspective of organizations that produce software, and I think that doing so muddies the situation a bit. The comment I replied to talked about programmers, and I was also talking about programmers, so ... where did I supposedly do that? > Personally, I like to get paid in money, because I can easily turn money into things like food an…

> What difference does it make to you in that situation whether the result of the hour of work that you are paid for is licenced under GPL or under a proprietary licencse? Directly, not at all. But most companies find it very difficult to turn a profit on GPL-licensed software without resorting to things that render the whole thing moot, like being SAAS vendors who never "distribute" the software in the first place.…

> So commercial software shops tend to build on MIT, BSD or Apache licensed stuff.

That's just not true in this generality. If you do custom commercial software for a customer's own use, using GPL code can work perfectly fine. The customer pays for the development work and gets the code under GPL. The customer in such cases often will get the source anyway, and it really doesn't matter whether it's GPL or proprietary.

> Consequently, I think that the elephant in the room is that, typically, when people complain that there's something akin to a moral obligation to use GPL, what it's really about is fears that someone might make more money than they think is seemly by shipping closed-source software that relies on open-source components.

As for myself, that is just not correct, and I don't really think it's a common sentiment. I care about my own and others' freedom to control their own computers and data. If you use my GPL code to make money, good for you.

> That statement tacitly denies the existence of freelance software developers, by implying that all programmers are working for another company for some sort of salary or wage, and don't ever individually own code themselves. Which isn't quite true, and subtly frames things in a way that strips developers of their moral agency.

Well, yeah, it's not quite true, but largely, it is, including for freelance developers. If you work on a customer's proprietary software project as a consultant or whatever, you normally don't get to keep the copyright either. You get paid whatever price was agreed upon and the customer gets to own the code.

Yes, if you do independent software development and you only licence your proprietary software to your customers, then the above does not apply to you.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#358

Post by shuzchen »

There is no one-size fits all, you should use the license that best suits the product you have, as well as the ecosystem in which you're releasing it. See the EFF's documentation on this: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-recommendations.html https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#359

Post by mplanchard »

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…

Do the LGPL and similar weak copyleft licenses not satisfy this goal?

As long as the company publishes any modifications to the library itself, they are free to use it, whether or not they open source their project.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#360

Post by mr_toad »

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

Well, except the users.

Say EvilCompany takes the code, puts in in their buggy operating system, distributes it under a commercial license, and then you end up being prevented from fixing the code that you wrote.

Because that’s what happened to RMS, and that’s why we have the GPL.

It’s freedom; not for the author, and it’s not freedom for the developers or the vendors, it’s freedom for the users.

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