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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

#371

Post by epistasis »

mcguire wrote: post #322
epistasis wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My problem with the GPL philosophy is that I can't find the mechanism that results in more general access to code in the world, when releasing your software as GPL versus BSD/MIT. What determines what's out there in the world, the decision to release source versus simply doesn't come down to "well I can use this GPL code as part of my project if I also GPL it, so I guess I'll share my code too." The decisions about w…

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.

Are you saying that GPL holds off forks better than BSD/MIT? If so, by what mechanism? Of all the pro-GPL things I've heard, I've never heard that one before, so I'm quite interested to hear this fleshed out into something I can follow!

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#372

Post by simion314 »

c22 wrote: post #215
simion314 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are correct if I am using an MIT/BSD program as a user I have all the freedoms the issue is if someone forks it and closes it up making it proprietary. You need to think at the larger picture, compare Linux kernel and BSD and how the licenses affect the projects and all of the users. With Linux GPL prevents parasitic use, like you get Linux, put your proprietary thing on top, close it off and give it to some user…

But if the proprietary fork is analogous to the original software the "user" can just seek out the MIT-licensed project and start from there. If the fork contains significant functional modifications then it seems fair to let the author of those changes choose how to distribute them. This doesn't restrict user's freedoms anymore than allowing greenfield projects to be proprietary already does. GPL is for people who a…

That is only possible sometimes, say I create ffmpeg, it can decode/encode 100 video formats, then Google/Apple forks it and support for a new proprietary format that only they use and not contribute it back, Now Google/Apple use this new properitary format and only their applications will be the only ones that can read all the videos formats.

Maybe a bad analogy, GPL - I make knives and if you want to use my knives you have to agree not to use them to injure/kill people because this taking their freedom

BSD - you can do whatever you want with my knives, you can kill people I am fine with it because I care only about you my customer freedoms but not about any other people freedoms(lives). Just don't remove my name from the knife.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#373

Post by adrianN »

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…

Are you telling me nobody would sell cable boxes or TVs if they had to provide a URL where I could download the code? That sounds ridiculous.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#374

Post by cryptonector »

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…

> but I think BSD (permissive for developers, maybe restrictive for users) vs. GPL (restrictive for developers, permissive for users)

Strawman. MIT/BSD is not restrictive for users.

When someone derives from my permissively-licensed code and doesn't share back with me? Not my problem, but theirs. They now have a legacy fork to refresh every so often at some non-trivial cost. If I'm maintaining a codebase for them to contribute, then they might be better off contributing. If my codebase is their secret sauce, well, good for them -- perhaps they should consider paying me to help them, and they are welcome to try, but it's not a requirement. It's all good.

Now, if I'm building a project to monetize, I might not open source the secret sauce. The GPL wouldn't help me there anymore than BSD/MIT. So, what good is the GPL to me?

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#375

Post by theturtletalks »

kemitchell wrote: post #86
theturtletalks wrote: post #7

I about to launch an open core SaaS and all these articles about open source software getting exploited and how copyleft should be the way to go is getting me confused. The software is for e-commerce. So if users use it to make more money, is that considered commercial use? Would the copyleft license require them to get a commercial license then? Would this cause less adoption and less use of the software? What kind…

I can offer some general principles, but when it comes time to apply those generalities to your specifics---to give legal advice---you'll need to speak with a lawyer who will stand professionally accountable to you. I won't. Let's put licenses for public software projects into three general categories: permissive, copyleft, and noncommercial. MIT is a classic permissive license. GPLv2 is a classic copyleft license. P…

Thanks my man. Any articles or documentation you can point me to so I can better understand what kind of license I should use?

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#376

Post by beefhash »

mplanchard wrote: post #359
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.

I don't think that the LGPL can satisfy this goal when it comes to embedded devices, where the whole notion of “dynamic linking” may not reasonably exist in the first place. The state of IoT security is a hopeless trashfire already; every bit of help is needed there.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#377

Post by atq2119 »

otikik wrote: post #151

I use MIT (compared to GPL) because it's a low-maintenance library. When I have published stuff in GPL, I would have had someone from (say) the Netherlands opening an issue asking "hey, can I use this library for doing so-and-so?". And I had to go and check so-and-so and check the again library and re-read the license and after I was not sure because I am not a lawyer and GPL text is fairly dense. Even if I was a law…

You are under no obligation to answer those legal questions. In fact, you probably shouldn't.

Just tell them politely that the GPL is available for them to read and well documented, and to ask their lawyer if it's really important to them.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#378

Post by atq2119 »

seandougall wrote: post #133

I feel like where this debate breaks down is in trying to apply the same license to both reusable libraries and finished products. For a library, an MIT license is much more likely to get it adopted in a finished product that is accessible and maintained. A GPLed library can only get adopted in a GPLed project, which means there may be a ton of economic constraints that make the library's functionality inaccessible t…

This distinction is part of the reason why the LGPL exists, and why many libraries are in fact licensed under LGPL instead of GPL.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#379

Post by _ph_ »

jake_the_third wrote: post #351
supernovae wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thi…

The problem is, in practice, the GPL doesn't assure as many rights to the user as it is claimed. The example of Android shows this clearly. While the base of Android is GPL and consequently freely available, nonetheless Google managed to mix it with enough proprietary parts, so that they could could block Huawai from selling their phones with Android. Of course, Huawai is able to build their own OS based on the open source parts of Android, but for all practical purposes it will be a separate OS.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#380

Post by _ph_ »

icebraining wrote: post #312
_ph_ wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strictly speaking, as soon as you looked at the GPL code you are tainted. A developer with a good memory will struggly not to pick up code he read through. After all, if you are looking at others people code, you are looking at the interesting parts - and if you see a cleverly written function - so anything which is longer as a single expression - you are in risk violating the copyrights of the creator. As I am respe…

So do you provide attribution to every MIT/BSD project you look at? Otherwise, you're also in risk of violating the copyright of the creator.

Not for code I just looked at. But if I find the MIT/BSD code useful enough that I want to have such a functionality in my program, I would just use the code and give attribution as the license requires.

In all the cases, where I not intend to include GPL code in my project, I consider it unethical and legally improper to look at it and then write my own version of such a functionality.

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