8 ms·

1995 called, it wants its bad arguments back. The honest answer is that people releasing software under the GPL don't want you using their code in your proprie

by __jal 10y ago

1995 called, it wants its bad arguments back. The honest answer is that people releasing software under the GPL don't want you using their code in your proprietary whatever. They explicitly said they don't want you to do that. How is that different than you releasing your proprietary whatever, and conditioning use on paying you money and agreeing not to share it? If you get to set the terms of use of your code, so do other people. > What's the point of open sourcing something if it can't be used in a proprietary product? Obviously, the point is to share it with people who want to do something other than use it in a proprietary product. Complaining about free gifts generally doesn't end very well. Don't like the terms? Pretend it is Oracle or Microsoft crown-jewel code. You can't do what you want with that, either.

charlesdm 10y ago
> How is that different than you releasing your proprietary whatever, and conditioning use on paying you money and agreeing not to share it? If you get to set the terms of use of your code, so do other people. One component != an entire product. That's like saying you invent an open source car engine licensed under GPL. And now you can't use it in any car, because you can't build an entire car on your own, and even if you could, you'd have to give the entire car design away for free. I don't mind giving back any improvements I make to a library (and I've done so several times in the past), but I honestly don't see the point in releasing anything under GPL. That's like saying, you know what guys, I love the fact that no one is ever going to bother using this for something great. The only use case the GPL works in, if it's an entire product on its own, i.e. MySQL, etc. Closed source doesn't always mean evil. Open source doesn't always mean good.
- Retra 10y ago
  If you don't accept the GPL license, then the code is not open to you. Treat it like you would any other closed source code: don't use it. If you have such a noble use of the code, feel free to ask the authors to be charitable and license it to you under different terms.
  - Nomentatus 10y ago
    But again, what actually happens is that trying to impose a GPL license (that grabs both hardware and software patents) merely causes someone else to replicate the whole effort under a better open source license.
    - quadrangle 10y ago
      "impose"… if I write some code and put it under the GPL, I'm not imposing anything. "better"… That's sorta like saying that when some community gets together and builds a public park that when a wealthy company comes around and builds a fancy exclusive country club that the terms of the country club are better, and if only the folks had just let the country club folks build their exclusive clubhouse in the middle of the original park, that would be better because it doesn't cause them to have to go buy and prepare a different plot of land.
      - Nomentatus 10y ago
        Contracts impose. Else enforcement couldn't be a topic. But suppose we allow your cavil, and try "insist" or "request"? What changes? Nothing. Better - companies are choosing to replicate, not stamping out kiddie parks. If you're going to end up with an MIT license, why not start there and avoid all the waste?
        Sacho 10y ago
        You keep repeating this sentiment, but you haven't brought forward any argument why GPL doesn't achieve its goals, even if, eventually, some of the software gets reinvented with a different license. I could take your argument and use it the same way vs proprietary software - why even bother writing it, if some of it is going to end up being remade(or even just relicensed!) under an MIT license? In both cases, the developer extracted some value from the licensing.
        Nomentatus 10y ago
- greenhouse_gas 10y ago
  No. It's like saying that I want cars to be open source, so I make an engine that can be used only in OS cars, helping the OS community. Take GCC. The fact that GCC was GPL'd made Objective-C open source. One can arguably say that Linux's GPL base is what makes custom ROMs (and all the cool stuff they brought to stock android) possible. On the other hand, BSD was under a permissive license. How many Operating Systems leech of it and don't give back?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- lmm 10y ago
  Plenty of closed-source components have terms that affect your whole product even if you use them only in one corner of it. Ever wondered why you see all those "Uses Bink Video" or "Creative Surround Sound" notices in game credit sequences? Often there are other, more financial terms, attached, and this can have real consequences - e.g. maybe you want to change your game to be free-to-play but there's a per-unit royalty to some of the libraries you're using, so you can't. The GPL imposes certain requirements on any product that you use a GPL component in. If that's "cancer" then virtually every commercial software library is equally "cancerous". You can decide for yourself whether those requirements are too costly to comply with or not, and again that's absolutely normal, standard industry practice. There are plenty of libraries and products where the developers would have liked to use that library in their product but decided the license for it was too costly; it's unreasonable to single out the GPL. (As an end use who bought a Linux game and then switched to Linux, and was therefore only able to continue playing it thanks to the GPL, I'm pretty happy about the GPL)
Nomentatus 10y ago
But what has actually happened, again and again and again, is that all the work gets done again, to recreate the GPL software under a more liberal (say BSD or MIT) license. The GNU libraries are just one example. That's immensely wasteful just for starts - wasteful of the earnest labors of armies of volunteers, amongst others. The original idea of these licenses was to discourage freeloading - that hasn't worked very well; and the penalty in inefficiency for the economy as a whole seems to be about 100%. Sad.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- quadrangle 10y ago
  Richard Stallman wrote the GPL and never ever had any goal to "discourage freeloading". His goal was to create an entirely free software ecosystem where the community users, the end-users were not limited and controlled by proprietary software publishers. Whether or not that goal was or wasn't well-served by the GPL, that was and remains the motivation.
  - Nomentatus 10y ago
    Copyleft is an interesting invention. It isn't in any way necessary for that freedom thing. It never was. I can't speak to RS's original motivations, but I know well how the licenses were originally perceived, sold, and even argued against. If your argument means that RS et al will cheerfully drop the patent and tivoization clauses as extraneous; great. So far, I have seen no hint of this. The best way to summarize your argument is that RS got wildly distracted from his original goals, and that's my argument.
    - belorn 10y ago
      How do patent and tivoization help to "create an entirely free software ecosystem where the community users, the end-users were not limited and controlled by proprietary software publishers."? It is rather easy to see how patent and tivoization are harmful to the creation of such ecosystem.

by __jal 10y ago

charlesdm 10y ago

> How is that different than you releasing your proprietary whatever, and conditioning use on paying you money and agreeing not to share it? If you get to set the terms of use of your code, so do other people. One component != an entire product. That's like saying you invent an open source car engine licensed under GPL. And now you can't use it in any car, because you can't build an entire car on your own, and even if you could, you'd have to give the entire car design away for free. I don't mind giving back any improvements I make to a library (and I've done so several times in the past), but I honestly don't see the point in releasing anything under GPL. That's like saying, you know what guys, I love the fact that no one is ever going to bother using this for something great. The only use case the GPL works in, if it's an entire product on its own, i.e. MySQL, etc. Closed source doesn't always mean evil. Open source doesn't always mean good.

Retra 10y ago
If you don't accept the GPL license, then the code is not open to you. Treat it like you would any other closed source code: don't use it. If you have such a noble use of the code, feel free to ask the authors to be charitable and license it to you under different terms.
- Nomentatus 10y ago
  But again, what actually happens is that trying to impose a GPL license (that grabs both hardware and software patents) merely causes someone else to replicate the whole effort under a better open source license.
  - quadrangle 10y ago
    "impose"… if I write some code and put it under the GPL, I'm not imposing anything. "better"… That's sorta like saying that when some community gets together and builds a public park that when a wealthy company comes around and builds a fancy exclusive country club that the terms of the country club are better, and if only the folks had just let the country club folks build their exclusive clubhouse in the middle of the original park, that would be better because it doesn't cause them to have to go buy and prepare a different plot of land.
    - Nomentatus 10y ago
      Contracts impose. Else enforcement couldn't be a topic. But suppose we allow your cavil, and try "insist" or "request"? What changes? Nothing. Better - companies are choosing to replicate, not stamping out kiddie parks. If you're going to end up with an MIT license, why not start there and avoid all the waste?
      - Sacho 10y ago
        You keep repeating this sentiment, but you haven't brought forward any argument why GPL doesn't achieve its goals, even if, eventually, some of the software gets reinvented with a different license. I could take your argument and use it the same way vs proprietary software - why even bother writing it, if some of it is going to end up being remade(or even just relicensed!) under an MIT license? In both cases, the developer extracted some value from the licensing.
        Nomentatus 10y ago
greenhouse_gas 10y ago
No. It's like saying that I want cars to be open source, so I make an engine that can be used only in OS cars, helping the OS community. Take GCC. The fact that GCC was GPL'd made Objective-C open source. One can arguably say that Linux's GPL base is what makes custom ROMs (and all the cool stuff they brought to stock android) possible. On the other hand, BSD was under a permissive license. How many Operating Systems leech of it and don't give back?
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
lmm 10y ago
Plenty of closed-source components have terms that affect your whole product even if you use them only in one corner of it. Ever wondered why you see all those "Uses Bink Video" or "Creative Surround Sound" notices in game credit sequences? Often there are other, more financial terms, attached, and this can have real consequences - e.g. maybe you want to change your game to be free-to-play but there's a per-unit royalty to some of the libraries you're using, so you can't. The GPL imposes certain requirements on any product that you use a GPL component in. If that's "cancer" then virtually every commercial software library is equally "cancerous". You can decide for yourself whether those requirements are too costly to comply with or not, and again that's absolutely normal, standard industry practice. There are plenty of libraries and products where the developers would have liked to use that library in their product but decided the license for it was too costly; it's unreasonable to single out the GPL. (As an end use who bought a Linux game and then switched to Linux, and was therefore only able to continue playing it thanks to the GPL, I'm pretty happy about the GPL)

Nomentatus 10y ago

But what has actually happened, again and again and again, is that all the work gets done again, to recreate the GPL software under a more liberal (say BSD or MIT) license. The GNU libraries are just one example. That's immensely wasteful just for starts - wasteful of the earnest labors of armies of volunteers, amongst others. The original idea of these licenses was to discourage freeloading - that hasn't worked very well; and the penalty in inefficiency for the economy as a whole seems to be about 100%. Sad.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
quadrangle 10y ago
Richard Stallman wrote the GPL and never ever had any goal to "discourage freeloading". His goal was to create an entirely free software ecosystem where the community users, the end-users were not limited and controlled by proprietary software publishers. Whether or not that goal was or wasn't well-served by the GPL, that was and remains the motivation.
- Nomentatus 10y ago
  Copyleft is an interesting invention. It isn't in any way necessary for that freedom thing. It never was. I can't speak to RS's original motivations, but I know well how the licenses were originally perceived, sold, and even argued against. If your argument means that RS et al will cheerfully drop the patent and tivoization clauses as extraneous; great. So far, I have seen no hint of this. The best way to summarize your argument is that RS got wildly distracted from his original goals, and that's my argument.
  - belorn 10y ago
    How do patent and tivoization help to "create an entirely free software ecosystem where the community users, the end-users were not limited and controlled by proprietary software publishers."? It is rather easy to see how patent and tivoization are harmful to the creation of such ecosystem.