4 ms·

I fully understand the authors frustration. However, as an hobbyist I would always publish my source code under a strong copyleft license such as the GPL: The c

I fully understand the authors frustration. However, as an hobbyist I would always publish my source code under a strong copyleft license such as the GPL: The companies that can't live with these conditions are most probably exactly those you don't want to deal with in the first place. And as the source code was created as the result of a "hobby", the size of the user base doesn't matter anyway.

leohutson 11y ago
Yeah, that makes sense to me. I get sick of seeing entitled programmers whining that some library is LGPL or GPL, and saying they aren't going to use it as a consequence. Don't expect the author to be somehow sympathetic that you aren't going to be able make money off their work without offering anything in return, whether it's code or money.
asgard1024 11y ago
I upvoted you, and I agree. However, as a professional developer, it is nice to be able to use OSS at work because you are sure it will always be available. Therefore developers who release things under BSD license have a very good incentive - they want to use the thing they wrote (as a hobby) at work, yet they want to continue to use it even if they change jobs. I think this is actually a primary reason why BSD is favored by some developers. I don't think there is an easy solution to this, at least as long as "intellectual property" exists. However abolishing IP would be digital communism and many people are for whatever reason adverse to that idea.
- leohutson 11y ago
  Dual license your code. You can still supply it to your current employer, and any future employer under a proprietary license.
  - brazzledazzle 11y ago
    Then you need a CLA if you accept contributions right?
    - leohutson 11y ago
      I was more thinking of stuff that is entirely mine that I just want to dump a copy of onto the web. I don't think it's fair to make contributors assign copyright to me, especially if they are major. I'd probably just keep a private fork from before their contributions, and, if for whatever reason my employer is GPL averse, that's their problem, and they can pay to reimplement anything they need from after that point. Edit: Perhaps a fair way to do it would be to say that contributors who agree to the CLA are also assigned rights to the whole code base, with the restriction of only being able to redistribute it wholesale as GPL. Similar to the way commercial sound and video clip libraries are licensed, you are allowed to redistribute it as part of another work in whatever license you like, but wholesale redistribution is only allowed under the GPL. That would give the same advantages as a more permissive license, but reduce the freerider problem to some extent.
      - brazzledazzle 11y ago
        Re: your edit–that's an interesting idea. It seems like in practice it could be abused but in terms of your goal it's probably better to favor practicality over edge cases and a minority of people that would abuse it.
  - asgard1024 11y ago
    What you propose is a free market solution - make property out of it. (And I don't think free market is actually desirable for most people but that's for another debate.) From a practical point of view, it's complicated to dual license their code to the employer. If the employer refuses to license it, then the employee has to find the job which lets him license it (if he wishes to use it). That may be difficult. In other words, if you have software as property, the idea "I want to work on the same code base in the future for a living" may contradict with someone else's idea "I am paying for it therefore you do what I want". In theoretical free market this should work out, but in reality there is a lot of frictions.
- johncolanduoni 11y ago
  > However abolishing IP would be digital communism and many people are for whatever reason adverse to that idea. Perhaps, because it would just mean even less money would go into code that wasn't held as a trade secret? And instead of companies only being able to (without risk) be bad citizens of permissively licensed projects, they could just rip off everything GPL licensed as well.
  - asgard1024 11y ago
    I guess you're right, that's a big loophole. In any case, I actually don't like trade secrets either. If anything, they are completely against the logic of free market (free choice).
    - johncolanduoni 11y ago
      My guess would be that abolishing copyright would lead to every commercial program being run as SaaS with most of the code on a remote server, so changes in trade secret laws wouldn't help.
    - njharman 11y ago
      How come the choice to keep my sauce secret is less than any other choice? All trade secret laws do is if you make efforts to keep secret and some one steals it, you can punish them.
      - asgard1024 11y ago
        > How come the choice to keep my sauce secret is less than any other choice? Because this "choice" restricts freedom of other people. You don't just want it to be a secret (then all you have to do is not to tell anyone), you demand that other people to respect and enforce it to be a secret (restricting other people's choices by restricting information). If I give you three choices A/B/C, and don't tell you which is which, do you have a choice or not? I would argue that you don't. You need to understand what's behind each choice to be able to "have" a choice.
- oldmanjay 11y ago
  Abolishing copyright would eliminate a massive arts incentive. Whether that would be replaced with something reasonably equivalent or somehow better is a matter of speculation and faith, not an assertable fact. It's definitely not clear how many abusable corners it would have in a complicated real-world marketplace but my own faith says nonzero.
  - quadrangle 11y ago
    Copyright mainly funds corporate bureaucracies. It's not actually helping the vast majority of artists, except in the perverse way that destroying the public domain means less competition for new works to face. Anyway, there's other ways to fund creative work from patronage to grants. Yeah, it's hard, yes there are challenges to address. No, Copyright is not a reasonable solution or incentive, it's primarily corrupt and working in opposition to the public interest.
  - asgard1024 11y ago
    Well, in arts, OK, you can make some case for it. But I don't see why the plumber should need to have copyright for his "piping design" in my house.. The same is true for programmers, you would simply be hired to fix some problem (or build a complicated pipeline).
- sitkack 11y ago
  What about the GPL or LGPL prevents you from using it at work? Do you use Linux?
  - j_s 11y ago
    Perhaps your confusion is in the distinction between the literal 'using it at work' vs. what I interpreted OP's meaning as incorporating a GPL-licensed OSS project as a dependency of commercial software? The 'problem' with the GPL is easy: commercial software is often distributed to end users only as binaries because it is sold closed-source. The LGPL may be less clear, but there are still problems: LGPL is (was?) not allowed in iOS apps on the Apple app store, is only intended to be used when licensing software libraries, corporate lawyers spidey sense tingles as the license gets into the details of what is a library and linking, etc. The commercial friendliness of the BSD license vs. [L]GPL seems to be fairly self-evident; the FSF summarizes it as a 'lax, permissive non-copyleft free software license'[1]. [1] http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#FreeBSD http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#FreeBSD
  - asgard1024 11y ago
    Most software corporations are actually wary about LGPL more than BSD. There is a valid reason, at the same time, it may be interpreted as trying to screw LGPL choice. Yeah you can use LGPL software, but with libraries and stuff that can be incorporated into the product, it's tricky. I think it's a hard problem because you cannot really fault developers for not wanting to change the world (in a fashion similar to what RMS did). So they accept wrong moral choice for the same reason most people accept wrong moral choice, that is, the right moral choice is a lot of work (and sometimes even risk).
- Jach 11y ago
  I think a lot of devs come to prefer BSD simply because of the importable library situation, and their dev background is just writing more and more internal libraries for their company's product. The GPL works well with the unix philosophy of having many small programs that do small things. There's no problem with taking some of those programs and using them in your proprietary project since you're just running them independently, and come distribution time you just ask (or release an open script that does it as part of your program's install process) the user to install system dependencies if bundling them yourself would constitute a derivative work. The problems with the GPL come when you try to use or bundle the programs a little too closely. It becomes important for libraries/modules to not be GPL so that you can still import foo and not be required to release your whole program under foo's license. Hence GCC has the Runtime Library Exception, and most third party modules for languages have similar exceptions (typically by being under a BSD-style license). In the background of many corporate workers, the only approved way to write code or use third party code is as an importable library to use in their company's product (which may be a multi-million line behemoth). Writing little self-contained programs isn't very common for them, nor is using other programs as spawned subprocesses. (The exception where that may be more common is the case of web applications where the used programs aren't AGPL'd...) And so since importing any GPL library introduces a semi-uncertain (uncertain in whether a court would convict) hazard about whether the company's whole multi-million line behemoth is now a 'derivative work' for including a mere multi-thousand line bit of FOSS, devs will avoid GPL libraries entirely. The motivation for BSD-like licenses for using (or writing, then using) bits of code then is simply a matter of using them at all due to the library issue, and I agree that having at least the base code available later is icing on the cake that makes the decision even more easy. But I think if a dev's corporate background is in a culture that follows unix philosophy more with lots of different programs, they won't necessarily reach for BSD-style licenses on instinct even for things beyond libraries. In one sense proponents of the GPL are opposed to the idea of abolishing IP since copyright law gives the license its teeth, while BSD guys would probably be fine if they were forced to make everything public domain (but still might ask for credit as a kindness even if not legally required to do so). But there's a bit in Stallman's free software song that I think shows the GPL guys could have the same perspective someday: "When we have enough free software/At our call, hackers, at our call,/We'll kick out those dirty licenses/Ever more, hackers, ever more." That was written in in 1991, there wasn't much free software then. I think at this point in 2015 we have so much source available, that if we're not there, we're at least very close to the point where we don't really need the viral nature of the GPL to force companies to release the source. Many companies produce entirely new works that are under a BSD license, there's nothing that compels them to do that but a dev culture where Open (if not necessarily Free) has real benefits even to the money guys and has won. GPL code now hinders many pragmatic devs who just want to include a tiny useful bit of some Program (i.e. one of its internal libraries) rather than work out how to use that useful bit indirectly by just running the program, and instead of having code reuse we're constantly reimplementing things. I can't just reach into git's source code and pluck a few useful functions I like for my own project like I can with the Python standard library. (I'm glad to know that if I ever need an approximate fraction function in JavaScript for a proprietary work, I can use the one I made based off of https://hg.python.org/cpython/file/822c7c0d27d1/Lib/fractions.py#l211 https://hg.python.org/cpython/file/822c7c0d27d1/Lib/fraction...)
- eru 11y ago
  > I don't think there is an easy solution to this, at least as long as "intellectual property" exists. However abolishing IP would be digital communism and many people are for whatever reason adverse to that idea. Isn't the BSD licence pretty close to a situation without IP?
pjmlp 11y ago
I do the same. Hobby projects get licensed as GPL. Professional work, it is whatever the customer decides to do.

leohutson 11y ago

Yeah, that makes sense to me. I get sick of seeing entitled programmers whining that some library is LGPL or GPL, and saying they aren't going to use it as a consequence. Don't expect the author to be somehow sympathetic that you aren't going to be able make money off their work without offering anything in return, whether it's code or money.

asgard1024 11y ago

I upvoted you, and I agree. However, as a professional developer, it is nice to be able to use OSS at work because you are sure it will always be available. Therefore developers who release things under BSD license have a very good incentive - they want to use the thing they wrote (as a hobby) at work, yet they want to continue to use it even if they change jobs. I think this is actually a primary reason why BSD is favored by some developers. I don't think there is an easy solution to this, at least as long as "intellectual property" exists. However abolishing IP would be digital communism and many people are for whatever reason adverse to that idea.

leohutson 11y ago
Dual license your code. You can still supply it to your current employer, and any future employer under a proprietary license.
- brazzledazzle 11y ago
  Then you need a CLA if you accept contributions right?
  - leohutson 11y ago
    I was more thinking of stuff that is entirely mine that I just want to dump a copy of onto the web. I don't think it's fair to make contributors assign copyright to me, especially if they are major. I'd probably just keep a private fork from before their contributions, and, if for whatever reason my employer is GPL averse, that's their problem, and they can pay to reimplement anything they need from after that point. Edit: Perhaps a fair way to do it would be to say that contributors who agree to the CLA are also assigned rights to the whole code base, with the restriction of only being able to redistribute it wholesale as GPL. Similar to the way commercial sound and video clip libraries are licensed, you are allowed to redistribute it as part of another work in whatever license you like, but wholesale redistribution is only allowed under the GPL. That would give the same advantages as a more permissive license, but reduce the freerider problem to some extent.
    - brazzledazzle 11y ago
      Re: your edit–that's an interesting idea. It seems like in practice it could be abused but in terms of your goal it's probably better to favor practicality over edge cases and a minority of people that would abuse it.
- asgard1024 11y ago
  What you propose is a free market solution - make property out of it. (And I don't think free market is actually desirable for most people but that's for another debate.) From a practical point of view, it's complicated to dual license their code to the employer. If the employer refuses to license it, then the employee has to find the job which lets him license it (if he wishes to use it). That may be difficult. In other words, if you have software as property, the idea "I want to work on the same code base in the future for a living" may contradict with someone else's idea "I am paying for it therefore you do what I want". In theoretical free market this should work out, but in reality there is a lot of frictions.
johncolanduoni 11y ago
> However abolishing IP would be digital communism and many people are for whatever reason adverse to that idea. Perhaps, because it would just mean even less money would go into code that wasn't held as a trade secret? And instead of companies only being able to (without risk) be bad citizens of permissively licensed projects, they could just rip off everything GPL licensed as well.
- asgard1024 11y ago
  I guess you're right, that's a big loophole. In any case, I actually don't like trade secrets either. If anything, they are completely against the logic of free market (free choice).
  - johncolanduoni 11y ago
    My guess would be that abolishing copyright would lead to every commercial program being run as SaaS with most of the code on a remote server, so changes in trade secret laws wouldn't help.
  - njharman 11y ago
    How come the choice to keep my sauce secret is less than any other choice? All trade secret laws do is if you make efforts to keep secret and some one steals it, you can punish them.
    - asgard1024 11y ago
      > How come the choice to keep my sauce secret is less than any other choice? Because this "choice" restricts freedom of other people. You don't just want it to be a secret (then all you have to do is not to tell anyone), you demand that other people to respect and enforce it to be a secret (restricting other people's choices by restricting information). If I give you three choices A/B/C, and don't tell you which is which, do you have a choice or not? I would argue that you don't. You need to understand what's behind each choice to be able to "have" a choice.
oldmanjay 11y ago
Abolishing copyright would eliminate a massive arts incentive. Whether that would be replaced with something reasonably equivalent or somehow better is a matter of speculation and faith, not an assertable fact. It's definitely not clear how many abusable corners it would have in a complicated real-world marketplace but my own faith says nonzero.
- quadrangle 11y ago
  Copyright mainly funds corporate bureaucracies. It's not actually helping the vast majority of artists, except in the perverse way that destroying the public domain means less competition for new works to face. Anyway, there's other ways to fund creative work from patronage to grants. Yeah, it's hard, yes there are challenges to address. No, Copyright is not a reasonable solution or incentive, it's primarily corrupt and working in opposition to the public interest.
- asgard1024 11y ago
  Well, in arts, OK, you can make some case for it. But I don't see why the plumber should need to have copyright for his "piping design" in my house.. The same is true for programmers, you would simply be hired to fix some problem (or build a complicated pipeline).
sitkack 11y ago
What about the GPL or LGPL prevents you from using it at work? Do you use Linux?
- j_s 11y ago
  Perhaps your confusion is in the distinction between the literal 'using it at work' vs. what I interpreted OP's meaning as incorporating a GPL-licensed OSS project as a dependency of commercial software? The 'problem' with the GPL is easy: commercial software is often distributed to end users only as binaries because it is sold closed-source. The LGPL may be less clear, but there are still problems: LGPL is (was?) not allowed in iOS apps on the Apple app store, is only intended to be used when licensing software libraries, corporate lawyers spidey sense tingles as the license gets into the details of what is a library and linking, etc. The commercial friendliness of the BSD license vs. [L]GPL seems to be fairly self-evident; the FSF summarizes it as a 'lax, permissive non-copyleft free software license'[1]. [1] http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#FreeBSD http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#FreeBSD
- asgard1024 11y ago
  Most software corporations are actually wary about LGPL more than BSD. There is a valid reason, at the same time, it may be interpreted as trying to screw LGPL choice. Yeah you can use LGPL software, but with libraries and stuff that can be incorporated into the product, it's tricky. I think it's a hard problem because you cannot really fault developers for not wanting to change the world (in a fashion similar to what RMS did). So they accept wrong moral choice for the same reason most people accept wrong moral choice, that is, the right moral choice is a lot of work (and sometimes even risk).
Jach 11y ago
I think a lot of devs come to prefer BSD simply because of the importable library situation, and their dev background is just writing more and more internal libraries for their company's product. The GPL works well with the unix philosophy of having many small programs that do small things. There's no problem with taking some of those programs and using them in your proprietary project since you're just running them independently, and come distribution time you just ask (or release an open script that does it as part of your program's install process) the user to install system dependencies if bundling them yourself would constitute a derivative work. The problems with the GPL come when you try to use or bundle the programs a little too closely. It becomes important for libraries/modules to not be GPL so that you can still import foo and not be required to release your whole program under foo's license. Hence GCC has the Runtime Library Exception, and most third party modules for languages have similar exceptions (typically by being under a BSD-style license). In the background of many corporate workers, the only approved way to write code or use third party code is as an importable library to use in their company's product (which may be a multi-million line behemoth). Writing little self-contained programs isn't very common for them, nor is using other programs as spawned subprocesses. (The exception where that may be more common is the case of web applications where the used programs aren't AGPL'd...) And so since importing any GPL library introduces a semi-uncertain (uncertain in whether a court would convict) hazard about whether the company's whole multi-million line behemoth is now a 'derivative work' for including a mere multi-thousand line bit of FOSS, devs will avoid GPL libraries entirely. The motivation for BSD-like licenses for using (or writing, then using) bits of code then is simply a matter of using them at all due to the library issue, and I agree that having at least the base code available later is icing on the cake that makes the decision even more easy. But I think if a dev's corporate background is in a culture that follows unix philosophy more with lots of different programs, they won't necessarily reach for BSD-style licenses on instinct even for things beyond libraries. In one sense proponents of the GPL are opposed to the idea of abolishing IP since copyright law gives the license its teeth, while BSD guys would probably be fine if they were forced to make everything public domain (but still might ask for credit as a kindness even if not legally required to do so). But there's a bit in Stallman's free software song that I think shows the GPL guys could have the same perspective someday: "When we have enough free software/At our call, hackers, at our call,/We'll kick out those dirty licenses/Ever more, hackers, ever more." That was written in in 1991, there wasn't much free software then. I think at this point in 2015 we have so much source available, that if we're not there, we're at least very close to the point where we don't really need the viral nature of the GPL to force companies to release the source. Many companies produce entirely new works that are under a BSD license, there's nothing that compels them to do that but a dev culture where Open (if not necessarily Free) has real benefits even to the money guys and has won. GPL code now hinders many pragmatic devs who just want to include a tiny useful bit of some Program (i.e. one of its internal libraries) rather than work out how to use that useful bit indirectly by just running the program, and instead of having code reuse we're constantly reimplementing things. I can't just reach into git's source code and pluck a few useful functions I like for my own project like I can with the Python standard library. (I'm glad to know that if I ever need an approximate fraction function in JavaScript for a proprietary work, I can use the one I made based off of https://hg.python.org/cpython/file/822c7c0d27d1/Lib/fractions.py#l211 https://hg.python.org/cpython/file/822c7c0d27d1/Lib/fraction...)
eru 11y ago
> I don't think there is an easy solution to this, at least as long as "intellectual property" exists. However abolishing IP would be digital communism and many people are for whatever reason adverse to that idea. Isn't the BSD licence pretty close to a situation without IP?

pjmlp 11y ago

I do the same. Hobby projects get licensed as GPL. Professional work, it is whatever the customer decides to do.