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I like thinking of GPL and AGPL as licenses that solve the freeloader problem. Corporations and their employees love to lower their costs and externalize their

by omouse 10y ago

I like thinking of GPL and AGPL as licenses that solve the freeloader problem. Corporations and their employees love to lower their costs and externalize their costs; therefore they use MIT/BSD/Apache licensed code as much as possible and rely on what is essentially free labour to maintain that code; they rarely if ever donate.

TeMPOraL 10y ago
Not defending our evil corporate overlords, but from a little inside experience, it's not just about saving money on some code. It's often about the whole business strategy, with a healthy dose of CYA - the "toxicity" of GPL and AGPL restricts what they can do with a product, in a way that can make it unviable, or that would require a legal team to sort things out. For instance, company I work in develops software for a customer that later sells it to various corporations, big and small. Were I to include an GPL dependency in the code, and were it to pass unnoticed by my boss and our customer, it could quickly turn out into a legal clusterfuck with damages orders of magnitude larger than my salary. So we do have a list of open source licenses that are allowed for dependencies of projects for our customer, and GPL/AGPL are prominently not on that list. Now if there was some critical piece of code we absolutely need and there's no non-GPL alternative, I could ask my boss to talk to his boss to talk to the lawyers to figure something out. But in 99% of cases, you'll be asked to "Google harder", and then you'll find something with a "better" OS license - so it's easiest for the management to ban GPL by default (or, in our case, create a whitelist of allowed licenses). (I desperately tried to get WTFPL on the whitelist list, but failed :(.)
- belorn 10y ago
  Can you sneak in proprietary dependency in the code, making your customers pirates of some third companys product? It sound to me that the only code allowed in the product is code you have written yourself, code you have hired someone to make so its yours, code you bought so its yours, or code which license make it indistinguishable from code you own.
  - falcolas 10y ago
    Frequently, companies which make use of open source code will do scans, and identify (and immediately remove) such code. It's a common occurrence in my experience in companies over 1k or so employees. Under 1k, getting hit with the GPL would probably just be a death knell.
- erikpukinskis 10y ago
  This seems pointless to me. If you sell someone a piece of software with a GPL dependency, what is the risk to the customer? They're just going to use the software, right? That's explicitly allowed by the GPL. Are they really going to modify it? Can they even modify it? Even if it was AGPL... and even if the customer modified the library, and even if they did get sued.... all three of which are vanishingly small probabilities... still all you'd have to do is release your modifications to the AGPL library. The notion that the AGPL will force you to open source your proprietary code is, as far as I can tell, completely spurious. I really think that it's just a cultural "screw the hippies" kind of a thing, which you're buying into by making these sound like rational fears. There's nothing rational about it, it's just "oh my, we'd need just thousands of lawyers for that!" bogeymen.
Nomentatus 10y ago
Copyleft addresses the freeloader problem, true - but GPL goes on to grab patent rights - that's what usually prevents corporate use. Sadly, you aren't the only one whom confuses copyleft with GPL; which has (unnecessarily) badly tainted the idea of copyleft, itself. GPL deserves its terrible reputation, copyleft doesn't. But someone (cough, cough) over-reached.
- CiPHPerCoder 10y ago
  Which copyleft licenses would these corporations be okay with?
- stcredzero 10y ago
  Copyleft addresses the freeloader problem Is there a freeloader problem? How do we know if people just aren't that interested in the software?
  - thomasahle 10y ago
    Easy. If they don't use it, they're probably not interested. If they use it without giving back (or forward), they're probably free loading.
    - stcredzero 10y ago
      How is that a problem? I take a book out of the library. (That institution is both about free as in speech and free as in beer.) If I become a huge fan, then I might buy the book for myself and start dressing up like the characters at conventions. If I'm not that into it, I return the book. If one puts something out there for "free" then one is not entitled to a return. It's the model which is broken, not the users!
      - thomasahle 10y ago
        I was answering the second question, not whether free loading is an actual problem. The answer to that is of course up to the original author, who is entitled to use any license they like. Regarding your "peek and return" scenario, GPL actually lets you do that, and I wouldn't consider you an actual "user".
dragonwriter 10y ago
> therefore they use MIT/BSD/Apache licensed code as much as possible and rely on what is essentially free labour to maintain that code; they rarely if ever donate. Lots of permissively licensed software exists that is mainly corporate contributed code, or which is produced by projects which are primarily corporate funded (by corporations which use the code.) You can't get free maintenance on your code by using permissively licensed open source if what you use diverges to far from what your free labor force has, after all.
snovv_crash 10y ago
I feel like MPL2 does that just as well, but by adding a file-level firewall ensures that it will gain adoption among people/organizations who need to be able to distribute it in a binary along with other code that has another license. This way people still add features and upstream bugfixes, but a) it doesn't get forked to hell like the 200 Linux kernels that each Android manufacturer has to publish and b) you get much wider adoption faster, with more people being paid to fix bugs and add features to your code because it is being used alongside proprietary code. Sure, it doesn't give you a nice stick-it-to-the-corporations dose of righteous satisfaction, but it feels to me far more pragmatic, and healthy for the project in the long run.
mwfunk 10y ago
It's fine if big companies or whomever want to use open source software without contributing back to it. There's no such thing as a freeloader in this context, the code is freely given so that people can freely use it with no quid pro quo other than respecting the code's license and copyright. If there was an expectation that someone using open source code give back (whether anyone wants their contributions or not), then that wouldn't be open source any more. I mean, it's great when users do contribute back, but there's no expectation of that, hence no concept of freeloaders. Heck, maybe you have a company that makes billions of dollars off of open source and never contributes back a single thing, ever. That's fine, if it were any other way then it wouldn't be open source- it would be just some weird variant of proprietary software where you're expected to send patches instead of license fees. When someone works on open source software (whether it's GPL, or something more simple and permissive), they shouldn't be doing it with an expectation that anyone else owes them anything. They will be very disappointed very quickly.
- davexunit 10y ago
  The purpose of the GPL is not to have developers give back to their upstreams, it's to give users freedom. To swing the balance of power in the user's favor rather than the developer's. Either the user controls the software, or the software controls the user.
- thomasahle 10y ago
  > it would be just some weird variant of proprietary software where you're expected to send patches instead of license fees. Why is this weird? As the author of the software, surely I get to decide how I prefer to be compensated? If I'd like patches and user freedom, then your only decision is whether the software is worth that for you. Not whether my license is "weird" or "not open source".

by omouse 10y ago

TeMPOraL 10y ago

Not defending our evil corporate overlords, but from a little inside experience, it's not just about saving money on some code. It's often about the whole business strategy, with a healthy dose of CYA - the "toxicity" of GPL and AGPL restricts what they can do with a product, in a way that can make it unviable, or that would require a legal team to sort things out. For instance, company I work in develops software for a customer that later sells it to various corporations, big and small. Were I to include an GPL dependency in the code, and were it to pass unnoticed by my boss and our customer, it could quickly turn out into a legal clusterfuck with damages orders of magnitude larger than my salary. So we do have a list of open source licenses that are allowed for dependencies of projects for our customer, and GPL/AGPL are prominently not on that list. Now if there was some critical piece of code we absolutely need and there's no non-GPL alternative, I could ask my boss to talk to his boss to talk to the lawyers to figure something out. But in 99% of cases, you'll be asked to "Google harder", and then you'll find something with a "better" OS license - so it's easiest for the management to ban GPL by default (or, in our case, create a whitelist of allowed licenses). (I desperately tried to get WTFPL on the whitelist list, but failed :(.)

belorn 10y ago
Can you sneak in proprietary dependency in the code, making your customers pirates of some third companys product? It sound to me that the only code allowed in the product is code you have written yourself, code you have hired someone to make so its yours, code you bought so its yours, or code which license make it indistinguishable from code you own.
- falcolas 10y ago
  Frequently, companies which make use of open source code will do scans, and identify (and immediately remove) such code. It's a common occurrence in my experience in companies over 1k or so employees. Under 1k, getting hit with the GPL would probably just be a death knell.
erikpukinskis 10y ago
This seems pointless to me. If you sell someone a piece of software with a GPL dependency, what is the risk to the customer? They're just going to use the software, right? That's explicitly allowed by the GPL. Are they really going to modify it? Can they even modify it? Even if it was AGPL... and even if the customer modified the library, and even if they did get sued.... all three of which are vanishingly small probabilities... still all you'd have to do is release your modifications to the AGPL library. The notion that the AGPL will force you to open source your proprietary code is, as far as I can tell, completely spurious. I really think that it's just a cultural "screw the hippies" kind of a thing, which you're buying into by making these sound like rational fears. There's nothing rational about it, it's just "oh my, we'd need just thousands of lawyers for that!" bogeymen.

Nomentatus 10y ago

Copyleft addresses the freeloader problem, true - but GPL goes on to grab patent rights - that's what usually prevents corporate use. Sadly, you aren't the only one whom confuses copyleft with GPL; which has (unnecessarily) badly tainted the idea of copyleft, itself. GPL deserves its terrible reputation, copyleft doesn't. But someone (cough, cough) over-reached.

CiPHPerCoder 10y ago
Which copyleft licenses would these corporations be okay with?
stcredzero 10y ago
Copyleft addresses the freeloader problem Is there a freeloader problem? How do we know if people just aren't that interested in the software?
- thomasahle 10y ago
  Easy. If they don't use it, they're probably not interested. If they use it without giving back (or forward), they're probably free loading.
  - stcredzero 10y ago
    How is that a problem? I take a book out of the library. (That institution is both about free as in speech and free as in beer.) If I become a huge fan, then I might buy the book for myself and start dressing up like the characters at conventions. If I'm not that into it, I return the book. If one puts something out there for "free" then one is not entitled to a return. It's the model which is broken, not the users!
    - thomasahle 10y ago
      I was answering the second question, not whether free loading is an actual problem. The answer to that is of course up to the original author, who is entitled to use any license they like. Regarding your "peek and return" scenario, GPL actually lets you do that, and I wouldn't consider you an actual "user".

dragonwriter 10y ago

> therefore they use MIT/BSD/Apache licensed code as much as possible and rely on what is essentially free labour to maintain that code; they rarely if ever donate. Lots of permissively licensed software exists that is mainly corporate contributed code, or which is produced by projects which are primarily corporate funded (by corporations which use the code.) You can't get free maintenance on your code by using permissively licensed open source if what you use diverges to far from what your free labor force has, after all.

snovv_crash 10y ago

I feel like MPL2 does that just as well, but by adding a file-level firewall ensures that it will gain adoption among people/organizations who need to be able to distribute it in a binary along with other code that has another license. This way people still add features and upstream bugfixes, but a) it doesn't get forked to hell like the 200 Linux kernels that each Android manufacturer has to publish and b) you get much wider adoption faster, with more people being paid to fix bugs and add features to your code because it is being used alongside proprietary code. Sure, it doesn't give you a nice stick-it-to-the-corporations dose of righteous satisfaction, but it feels to me far more pragmatic, and healthy for the project in the long run.

mwfunk 10y ago

It's fine if big companies or whomever want to use open source software without contributing back to it. There's no such thing as a freeloader in this context, the code is freely given so that people can freely use it with no quid pro quo other than respecting the code's license and copyright. If there was an expectation that someone using open source code give back (whether anyone wants their contributions or not), then that wouldn't be open source any more. I mean, it's great when users do contribute back, but there's no expectation of that, hence no concept of freeloaders. Heck, maybe you have a company that makes billions of dollars off of open source and never contributes back a single thing, ever. That's fine, if it were any other way then it wouldn't be open source- it would be just some weird variant of proprietary software where you're expected to send patches instead of license fees. When someone works on open source software (whether it's GPL, or something more simple and permissive), they shouldn't be doing it with an expectation that anyone else owes them anything. They will be very disappointed very quickly.

davexunit 10y ago
The purpose of the GPL is not to have developers give back to their upstreams, it's to give users freedom. To swing the balance of power in the user's favor rather than the developer's. Either the user controls the software, or the software controls the user.
thomasahle 10y ago
> it would be just some weird variant of proprietary software where you're expected to send patches instead of license fees. Why is this weird? As the author of the software, surely I get to decide how I prefer to be compensated? If I'd like patches and user freedom, then your only decision is whether the software is worth that for you. Not whether my license is "weird" or "not open source".