Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

drewdevault.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 431 posts

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#41

Post by mrob »

theturtletalks wrote: post #25
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, copyleft doesn't prevent commercial use. In fact, preventing commercial use is impossible with the GPL.

Sorry I was under the impression copyleft meant that commercial users must purchase a license and normal users could use it for free. Is this what CockroachBD just did?

From the Open Source Definition[0]:

>The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.

From the FSF's "What is free software?" page[1]:

>A free program must be available for commercial use, commercial development, and commercial distribution.

Licenses like CockroachDB's with restrictions on commercial use are "source available", which is a form of proprietary software.

[0] https://opensource.org/docs/osd

[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html.en

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#42

Post by pas »

theturtletalks wrote: post #25
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, copyleft doesn't prevent commercial use. In fact, preventing commercial use is impossible with the GPL.

Sorry I was under the impression copyleft meant that commercial users must purchase a license and normal users could use it for free. Is this what CockroachBD just did?

They moved from Apache2 (a permissive license) to a no-compete license basically.

Copyleft means the license leaves the right-to-copy for the user. But copyleft (AGPL, GPL, LGPL) means that you can't remove the copyleft itself even from the new parts, whereas permissive (Apache, MIT) means that you can.

edit: I mixed up weak copyleft and permissive :o

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#43

Post by elagost »

Lately there's been a lot of relicensing stories this year, mongodb[1] being the one I thought of first. It seems like the GPL is just a way for groups to protect their own assets without getting ripped off, and more permissive licenses (BSD, MIT) don't give the creator of that software the same protection. However, if you do violate the GPL and release a closed-source product, who's to tell? Who will know? Always struck me as weird.

[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/its-mongodbs-turn-to-change-it...

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#44

Post by [deleted] »

theturtletalks wrote: post #25
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, copyleft doesn't prevent commercial use. In fact, preventing commercial use is impossible with the GPL.

Sorry I was under the impression copyleft meant that commercial users must purchase a license and normal users could use it for free. Is this what CockroachBD just did?

[deleted]

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#45

Post by kemitchell »

elagost wrote: post #43

Lately there's been a lot of relicensing stories this year, mongodb[1] being the one I thought of first. It seems like the GPL is just a way for groups to protect their own assets without getting ripped off, and more permissive licenses (BSD, MIT) don't give the creator of that software the same protection. However, if you do violate the GPL and release a closed-source product, who's to tell? Who will know? Always st…

A number of organizations are actively involved in GPL enforcement. The most active these days is probably gpl-violations.org, in Europe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gpl-violations.org

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#46

Post by TeMPOraL »

theturtletalks wrote: post #25
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, copyleft doesn't prevent commercial use. In fact, preventing commercial use is impossible with the GPL.

Sorry I was under the impression copyleft meant that commercial users must purchase a license and normal users could use it for free. Is this what CockroachBD just did?

No, copyleft means anyone can use it for anything they want, commercial or otherwise, but the product and any modifications to it must be made available to others to do whatever they want with it.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#47

Post by catdog »

raphlinus wrote: post #11

I absolutely encourage people to choose the license that works best for them. My motion has been the other way, all my new stuff is permissively licensed. This is basically because I want my work to have broad impact, and have the possibility of collaborating with as many others as possible, including those making proprietary software. I'm a fan of Drew's work, and also hope to help GPL projects such as Inkscape (I m…

It really depends what your goal is if you choose a copyleft license or not. As far as I know even the FSF acknowledges that for pursuing some goals (e.g. driving adoption of open standards) a more liberal license is an appropriate choice.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#48

Post by karmakaze »

godshatter wrote: post #24

First, I'm not a lawyer, but I've always seen the MIT license as being more "free", whereas the GPL is more "fair". Both licenses are pretty much the same for users of the code. Where they differ is that the MIT license gives you the freedom to make an awesome change to the free code you were given, and add it to your closed source application with no obligation to give those enhancements you made to the code to anyo…

Even within the libre-sense there's differing axes of 'free'. You're describing one. Another is from the perspective of the software itself. Similar to the phrase "information wants to be free" (which sounds cheesy but gets the message across), if changes made to the software are kept isolated it's less free to spread which is the motivation for free software before it got fractured into open-source that's less free in that sense.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#49

Post by TuringTest »

briandear wrote: post #26
lone_haxx0r wrote: post #6

> Capitalism is about enriching yourself - not enriching your users and certainly not enriching society. Capitalism is not about enriching anyone, it's about being free to do whatever you want with your resources. Free software developers use their resources to enrich society (and I applaud their work). Mark Zuckerberg uses his resources to enrich himself. Both are being capitalistic, as long as they don't steal or k…

[dead]

Capitalism has an enormous blind spot, in that it doesn't contains ethic provisions on what happens in a free market to people not able to create value that others are willing to pay for. Given the relentless tendency of capitalism to optimize towards eradicating any inefficiency, it contains as a natural consequence the propensity to expel those people out of the system - i.e. the ethical proposition of capitalism is essentially "produce or die".

There are some relief provisions against this outcome of people being expelled from the system, supported by those who reject it as immoral; but they are typically frowned upon by those who see capitalism as an ethical system.

The first one is building an unconditional safety net to take care of those who have run out of resources to compete inside the system. There's also the possibility to create make-believe work so that everybody will be able to earn a living; not exactly efficient, but for some reason this tends to be better accepted by free market supporters.

Post reply on HN