My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL • Hacker News Board

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#401

Post by bmaupin » Sat, Jun 15, 2019, 2:53 PM UTC

Common wisdom says to use the best tool for the job. Why wouldn't the same thing apply to licenses? The MIT vs GPL argument seems silly to me. Use whichever one best applies to your situation.

Writing a library and want maximum adoption? Use MIT.

Worried about patents? Use Apache.

Want to ensure the code stays open-source? Use GPL for an application or MPL for a library.

Obviously these are grossly oversimplified examples to make my point. But I wouldn't write a web application in C or a device driver in JavaScript. So why use the same license for all of your code?

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#402

Post by _ph_ » Sat, Jun 15, 2019, 3:51 PM UTC

cyphar wrote: post #399

_ph_ wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are not getting my point. The point was, that the ability of the GPL to enforce source sharing is limited. Where source sharing and redistribution are not desired, GPL licensed software just isn't used. Or used in a way that it does not affect the propriatary parts.

The whole argument of Stallman is that you don't give companies the choice to use permissively licensed software (by making it economically impossible for them to rewrite the entire body of free software). I think "there isn't enough software under the GPL" is not a criticism of the GPL's effectiveness. If anything it supports the GPL as a method for ensuring user freedom.

If the only open source software available to companies were GPLed software, they would not switch their product to GPL, but rather not use open source software. GPL isn't making companies share source which they don't want to share, they just avoid anything GPL. That is what I meant with the limited powers of GPL.

This isn't about not wanting to "give back" to the community, companies using permissive licensed software are contributing back. It is about that the GPL is incompatible with the business model of all companies which are licensing (selling) the software they produce.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#403

Post by cjbprime » Sat, Jun 15, 2019, 4:03 PM UTC

c22 wrote: post #341

cjbprime wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think people are especially willing to cooperate in the absence of enforced rules, even with regard to the GPL. They didn't "choose" to live in countries where governments will perform force against them if they break the rules -- that's a very rosy view of consent and cooperation. And even in such a world, GPL violations are so common that for a while I think most Android phones in existence weren't even try…

Governments aren't strange 3rd party alien entities enforcing their "rules" on a captive population. All governments (and corporations) consist of individuals. Some day governments will consist entirely of people who haven't been born yet , so it seems a little disingenuous to imply these people are just being born into an authoritarian world that they have no power to change. Governments continue to enjoy legitimacy…

I agree with most of that. But like.. most software is proprietary, right? Left to their own devices, Microsoft and Apple didn't decide to cooperate with the world and share software; instead they became the richest companies in the world by instituting a de facto computer tax. What you describe as "cooperation" really seems more like "people complying with rules enforced by force to the smallest extent possible", even in this software example.

There are obviously some cases where humans work together really well -- times of conflict or disaster are probably a good example. But as society contains less scarcity, it seems like we move farther away from that massive cooperation, because there's no overriding need for it anymore.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#404

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jun 15, 2019, 4:40 PM UTC

a1369209993 wrote: post #362

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think "being comfortable with being exploited" is a component of "being a big person". In the context of the types of projects I was imagining, a company would likely just rewrite any code that wasn't available via MIT or similar. If I'm not getting anything in return either way, am I being exploited? Logically , if the outcome is the same for me, there's no reason to make others redo work.

> there's no reason to make others redo work. As a simplified example, consider Corporation G and Corporation P. One will eventually lose market share to the other, go bankrupt, and be replaced by Corporation R that bases its business practices on the more successful one (then the cycle repeats). Both are evil, as corporations are wont to be, and in particular will never release anything under a less restrictive lice…

[deleted]

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#405

Post by rmtech » Sat, Jun 15, 2019, 5:15 PM UTC

UncleEntity wrote: post #264

rmtech wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You are copying someone else's work without complying with their license. That act, not the fact that it is GPL Right, so the correct conclusion is to never use, never contribute to and never write GPL-licensed software. Then you comply 100% with GPL, you have no legal risk and you also have money to pay for your Gatorade. In fact the best solution would just be to completely rid ourselves of GPL?

Your issue seems to be with copyright itself and not with the GPL. If you copy anyone's work you need permission because copyright is automatically assigned and without it you are violating the law.

> Your issue seems to be with copyright itself and not with the GPL.

Copyrighted code is fairly simple to understand - you make something, you own it. Alice makes something, Alice owns it.

I don't really have a problem with this kind of code existing, and I think that we have very clearly seen that open source with a permissive license is capable of "beating" secret or copyrighted code.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#406

Post by rmtech » Sat, Jun 15, 2019, 5:16 PM UTC

icebraining wrote: post #309

rmtech wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They think that closed source software is "morally wrong", and therefore "allowing closed and open source to exist side-by-side" is not really their goal. OK, that's nice but can these people explain to me how I should pay rent?

Work for one of the thousands of companies that pay you to write GPL licensed code? I can give you some references, having worked for one for a few years (specifically, we wrote Odoo modules for various businesses).

And how does the company get money?

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#407

Post by rmtech » Sat, Jun 15, 2019, 5:19 PM UTC

icebraining wrote: post #310

rmtech wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> proprietary code ... What's supposed to be the difference here? The difference is that GPL is claiming to not be proprietary...

Which is why you don't need to ask for permission, just follow the license.

If you're a business, the license effectively says "you can't use this software" though, because as discussed previously it makes all the software that it touches into GPL software so you can't sell it, which is the point of a business.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#408

Post by rmtech » Sat, Jun 15, 2019, 5:21 PM UTC

mcguire wrote: post #332

rmtech wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You are copying someone else's work without complying with their license. That act, not the fact that it is GPL Right, so the correct conclusion is to never use, never contribute to and never write GPL-licensed software. Then you comply 100% with GPL, you have no legal risk and you also have money to pay for your Gatorade. In fact the best solution would just be to completely rid ourselves of GPL?

The correct conclusion is that you must never use or look at software that you yourself didn't write. Of course, then there's patents. You might want to avoid having any ideas at all.

No you can use software with an MIT license etc. Because that doesn't cause problems.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#409

Post by rmtech » Sat, Jun 15, 2019, 5:31 PM UTC

mcguire wrote: post #333

filmgirlcw wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that analogy doesn't quite work. If you use a copyrighted song in a movie, you can choose to license that song (and the terms of use and cost will be up to the rights holder) -- licensing that song doesn't give the rights holder reciprocal access to your film. So yes, I agree with you that you need to obey the terms someone else has used for their work, or else you shouldn't use the work -- but your analogy wi…

You are welcome to negotiate a second license to avoid the GPL.

> You are welcome to negotiate a second license to avoid the GPL.

I have seen this in real life a few times. Usually something gets released under the GPL and then the authors ask for $ to hand it out with a commercial license on a case-by-case basis.

But in practice it is difficult to negotiate a truly fair price if the market is somewhat thin and the size of the code is relatively small. I've seen this for ML datasets for example, collected using taxpayers' money and the author wants $50k per license to allow a company to use it. But that $50k represents what the author thinks they can get away with, not the true value of the dataset to your algorithm. In reality companies (in my experience) stay away from this, and for good reason.

In cases like this I definitely wish GPL didn't exist, because if the academics who made the dataset had to choose between MIT or secret/proprietary, they would not be able to get away with Keeping their taxpayer funded dataset secret. (Because then taxpayers would be like "yo, wtf are we paying you for?").

One reason open source is good is that code markets just don't seem to work very well. But the good kind of open source is MIT licensed code.

Re: My Personal Journey from MIT to GPL

#410

Post by rmtech » Sat, Jun 15, 2019, 5:33 PM UTC

pessimizer wrote: post #355

rmtech wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 wi…

> 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.

This is only sane if you think making money is unethical.