5 ms·

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 M

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.
    - Nomentatus 10y ago
      Indeed, if you abhor all intellectual property law of any kind, and don't care whether incentives do or don't further innovation; then you'll want to have more than free software, you'll want to abolish all patents, and take us back a few hundred years.
      - quadrangle 10y ago
        Or you could be a completely rational person with no abhorring of anything, care totally about incentives and innovation, and come to the conclusion based on empirical evidence that patent law has hampered innovation and barely ever helped anything. https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.27.1.3 https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.27.1.3
        Nomentatus 10y ago
        I believe that's precisely the species of abhorrence that I was referring to, actually (abhorrence since it basically leaves no patent standing.) I have met it before! As for the article, "no empirical evidence that they serve to increase innovation and productivity" is obviously outright false. We certainly don't have proof, but there's a helluva historical correlation between patent enforcement (or existence) and countries with strong economic growth, particularly in technology sectors. That has to be referred to as evidence - since evidence which cannot be misleading, i.e. "incontrovertible evidence" is actually proof. Moreover, histories of technology often show simultaneous invention, and in such cases, the obscure and unsuccessful efforts very strongly tend to appear in areas where patent law is not efficient or respected, and therefore investment for development of inventions is lacking. Without his patent, James Watt could not have and would not have (finally, after a long effort) found a sufficiently rich partner who could fund the development and production of his new kind of steam engine. Note too that even if patents weren't globally efficient (which I strongly believe they are), they nonetheless attract inventors to your country and so are locally efficient (a prisoner's dilemma that only coordination through treaties would defeat.) This doesn't mean that present patent law is ideal, or that the historical context hasn't at least partly vanished, however: very complex technologies (which we're now awash in) create situations in which it may be more valuable to cease to produce smartphones and instead use patents to hold a gun to the head of others and merely extract rent from those still producing them (sneezeMicrosoft.) Since you aren't producing phones, others can't retaliate by refusing to license their patents - you no longer need their patents. When more than one (or perhaps a thousand) IP holders want to extract rent from the same item, obviously this can introduce great inefficiencies. Few patents are truly essential (outside FRAND standards, a different situation) but many are costly to get around. One way or another, sooner or later, we may have to deal with this situation. I wish I knew just how.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- rumcajz 10y ago
  It should be mentioned though that that goal is well served even by permissive-licensed software.
  - belorn 10y ago
    It similar to how nations employ different tactics to create peace and prospect. No single solution is perfect in every situation, and different nations will default to one method over an other. In specific situations it might be the best method to have no rules, while in others it might be best to have common rules, shared by everyone, and have those enforced by police.
goodplay 10y ago
How is this different from all the work being done to recreate open source versions of proprietary libraries?
- Nomentatus 10y ago
  By being an unnecessary tragedy. (Although I'm curious as to what you'd evoke as examples.) If you're going to end up with an MIT or BSD license, why not start there and save billions, and a ton 'o precious programmer time? Open source can have a strong economic advantage over proprietary; unfortunately the over-reaching terms of the GPL hasn't make it so - just as you say, GPL just means someone's gonna have to redo it as (more liberally licensed) open source.
  - goodplay 10y ago
    By that logic, Windows (for example) should also be open-sourced, because people will write an open source equivalent from scratch. Writing an operating system from scratch is an unnecessary and tragic waste of resources. So why not open source windows from the beginning and save billions, and a ton 'o precious programmer time?
    - Nomentatus 10y ago
      Windows is tragic in many respects, but proprietary incentives did speed up computer development early on whereas GPL has slowed things down, and been sidelined, again and again. Increasingly, corporations are concluding that investing in licenses for other's proprietary software is wasteful and they are seeking out open source software where they can, to avoid lock-in and network effects. So a hundred years from now, that may be the standard view of proprietary software. Long before that I hope we recognize how awkward applying artistic copyright to code is, and grant a four or seven year copyright, but only once the code has been revealed. The purpose of granting intellectual property rights was originally to create public goods, that's just not what's happening with computer code.
      - 10y ago
flukus 10y ago
> The original idea of these licenses was to discourage freeloading - that hasn't worked very well; Just because other people have reproduced work that enabled freeloading doesn't mean the GPL wasn't successful at discouraging it. Not that this was ever the point.
- Nomentatus 10y ago
  That's not the point I was making - look at the stats, and RedHat is a huge percentage of Linux contributions. With or without replication, the general response to the GPL is not to contribute, since contribution is penalized in a way that freeloading isn't.
  - flukus 10y ago
    > look at the stats, and RedHat is a huge percentage of Linux contributions Why is that in any way surprising? > With or without replication, the general response to the GPL is not to contribute, since contribution is penalized in a way that freeloading isn't. How is contribution penalized? And what makes you think the give back rate is any better for more permissive licenses? There are a tonne of proprietary BSD forks that have never contributed anything back.
    - Nomentatus 10y ago
      It isn't surprising, it's dispositive - freeloading actually seems worse with the GPL, since contributions trigger some nasty legal consequences, such as the patent grabs. Please read the darn license. If you use, but don't distribute or contribute to the code, many clauses do not apply to you. BSD gets a lot of contributions back, including many from corporations that forbid use of GPLed code. Of course, as with other open source projects, there are non-contributors, and the scale of that (cough, Apple) can indeed be galling. But over time, a lot of the sting has been taken out of that, as corporations have seen the long-term advantages to open source in helping them avoid another firm's lock-in and network effects. So nowadays, you can fork a lot of code, take it proprietary.. but then fail to sell it, since what you've mostly added is adverse lock-in, etc. The real solution is governmental - code isn't art. It should have a four or seven year "copyright" and then go into the public domain. But that copyright doesn't go on executables unless the code is revealed first. Two recent court cases that have, astonishingly, treated copyrights to code as something more like patents of ideas or methods have really underlined this for me. One is the Facebook/Oculus case (yes it's Texas, but really!) The other is the Facebook/Nearby Places case. http://www.nasdaq.com/article/facebook-suspends-locationsharing-feature-after-italian-copyright-suit-20170306-01018 http://www.nasdaq.com/article/facebook-suspends-locationshar...
X86BSD 10y ago
LLVM to replace GCC being another prime example.
- Nomentatus 10y ago
  And Blink, at the heart of Chromium Browser, which replicates webkit, only under a more permissive license. And we could go on from there... Tally up all the replacements, and the cost is staggering. Not to mention that developers and programmers are especially critical resources. GPL is possibly the greatest tragedy to befall technology since James Watt failed to understand the physics of scale, and vigorously prevented high-pressure steam engines from existing until his patent ran out.
  - insertnickname 10y ago
    Blink is a fork of Webkit, and it seems to have the same licenses as Webkit (LGPL 2.1 + 3-clause BSD).
    - Nomentatus 10y ago
      Nope, Blink isn't a fork of webkit, it's a total rewrite and has a BSD license that webkit doesn't. Which was the point of doing the rewrite.
X86BSD 10y ago
LLVM to replace GCC being another prime example.
pksadiq 10y ago
> ... to recreate the GPL software under a more liberal (say BSD or MIT) license .... BSD or MIT are more liberal?? The reality is that there is nothing called 'absolute freedom or liberty.' Freedom may be defined as the terms that are acceptable to the whole community, not as an individual. Say for example, GNU GPL Freedom translated to real life: I can't kill you, so you shouldn't kill others. and the same terms for MIT/BSD: I'm letting you alive, but it is Okay for you to kill others (including me). Which one (GPL vs others) do you now think is more liberal?
- Nomentatus 10y ago
  I'll see you one Philosophy degree, and raise you some years graduate level work in Philosophy. Your liberty doesn't include grabbing my hardware and software patents, thanks so very much. Liberty of use is a solved problem - it's the public domain, which MIT and BSD come very close to.
  - pksadiq 10y ago
    > Your liberty doesn't include grabbing my hardware and software patents, thanks so very much. Liberty of use is a solved problem - it's the public domain, which MIT and BSD come very close to. If you think carefully on what you have said, you are contradicting yourself. How are you sure that you won't get sued for the patents used in the MIT software/library you use in your (proprietary) software (even if the original software developers are the patent owners)? In fact, GNU GPLv3 prohibits that, and ensures that you won't get sued for the patents from the original authors. I recommend you better get a lawyer, rather than saying that 'MIT/BSD is simple.' btw, IANYL, and IANAL. :) Thank you. Edit: Some says, there is implicit patent protection for MIT/BSD. But afaik, it is never tested in court. GNU GPL v3 gives explicit patent protection. Be at the safe side if you doubt. Edit2: If you agree with "there is an implicit patent protection for MIT/BSD" that means it "includes giving away (partially) your hardware and software patents." If then, why would you use MIT/BSD Rather than doing a GNU GPLv3+/non-free dual licensing (as do Qt or Odoo do), which would better serve your business?
    - 10y ago

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.
  - Nomentatus 10y ago
    Indeed, if you abhor all intellectual property law of any kind, and don't care whether incentives do or don't further innovation; then you'll want to have more than free software, you'll want to abolish all patents, and take us back a few hundred years.
    - quadrangle 10y ago
      Or you could be a completely rational person with no abhorring of anything, care totally about incentives and innovation, and come to the conclusion based on empirical evidence that patent law has hampered innovation and barely ever helped anything. https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.27.1.3 https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.27.1.3
      - Nomentatus 10y ago
        I believe that's precisely the species of abhorrence that I was referring to, actually (abhorrence since it basically leaves no patent standing.) I have met it before! As for the article, "no empirical evidence that they serve to increase innovation and productivity" is obviously outright false. We certainly don't have proof, but there's a helluva historical correlation between patent enforcement (or existence) and countries with strong economic growth, particularly in technology sectors. That has to be referred to as evidence - since evidence which cannot be misleading, i.e. "incontrovertible evidence" is actually proof. Moreover, histories of technology often show simultaneous invention, and in such cases, the obscure and unsuccessful efforts very strongly tend to appear in areas where patent law is not efficient or respected, and therefore investment for development of inventions is lacking. Without his patent, James Watt could not have and would not have (finally, after a long effort) found a sufficiently rich partner who could fund the development and production of his new kind of steam engine. Note too that even if patents weren't globally efficient (which I strongly believe they are), they nonetheless attract inventors to your country and so are locally efficient (a prisoner's dilemma that only coordination through treaties would defeat.) This doesn't mean that present patent law is ideal, or that the historical context hasn't at least partly vanished, however: very complex technologies (which we're now awash in) create situations in which it may be more valuable to cease to produce smartphones and instead use patents to hold a gun to the head of others and merely extract rent from those still producing them (sneezeMicrosoft.) Since you aren't producing phones, others can't retaliate by refusing to license their patents - you no longer need their patents. When more than one (or perhaps a thousand) IP holders want to extract rent from the same item, obviously this can introduce great inefficiencies. Few patents are truly essential (outside FRAND standards, a different situation) but many are costly to get around. One way or another, sooner or later, we may have to deal with this situation. I wish I knew just how.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
rumcajz 10y ago
It should be mentioned though that that goal is well served even by permissive-licensed software.
- belorn 10y ago
  It similar to how nations employ different tactics to create peace and prospect. No single solution is perfect in every situation, and different nations will default to one method over an other. In specific situations it might be the best method to have no rules, while in others it might be best to have common rules, shared by everyone, and have those enforced by police.

goodplay 10y ago

How is this different from all the work being done to recreate open source versions of proprietary libraries?

Nomentatus 10y ago
By being an unnecessary tragedy. (Although I'm curious as to what you'd evoke as examples.) If you're going to end up with an MIT or BSD license, why not start there and save billions, and a ton 'o precious programmer time? Open source can have a strong economic advantage over proprietary; unfortunately the over-reaching terms of the GPL hasn't make it so - just as you say, GPL just means someone's gonna have to redo it as (more liberally licensed) open source.
- goodplay 10y ago
  By that logic, Windows (for example) should also be open-sourced, because people will write an open source equivalent from scratch. Writing an operating system from scratch is an unnecessary and tragic waste of resources. So why not open source windows from the beginning and save billions, and a ton 'o precious programmer time?
  - Nomentatus 10y ago
    Windows is tragic in many respects, but proprietary incentives did speed up computer development early on whereas GPL has slowed things down, and been sidelined, again and again. Increasingly, corporations are concluding that investing in licenses for other's proprietary software is wasteful and they are seeking out open source software where they can, to avoid lock-in and network effects. So a hundred years from now, that may be the standard view of proprietary software. Long before that I hope we recognize how awkward applying artistic copyright to code is, and grant a four or seven year copyright, but only once the code has been revealed. The purpose of granting intellectual property rights was originally to create public goods, that's just not what's happening with computer code.
    - 10y ago

flukus 10y ago

> The original idea of these licenses was to discourage freeloading - that hasn't worked very well; Just because other people have reproduced work that enabled freeloading doesn't mean the GPL wasn't successful at discouraging it. Not that this was ever the point.

Nomentatus 10y ago
That's not the point I was making - look at the stats, and RedHat is a huge percentage of Linux contributions. With or without replication, the general response to the GPL is not to contribute, since contribution is penalized in a way that freeloading isn't.
- flukus 10y ago
  > look at the stats, and RedHat is a huge percentage of Linux contributions Why is that in any way surprising? > With or without replication, the general response to the GPL is not to contribute, since contribution is penalized in a way that freeloading isn't. How is contribution penalized? And what makes you think the give back rate is any better for more permissive licenses? There are a tonne of proprietary BSD forks that have never contributed anything back.
  - Nomentatus 10y ago
    It isn't surprising, it's dispositive - freeloading actually seems worse with the GPL, since contributions trigger some nasty legal consequences, such as the patent grabs. Please read the darn license. If you use, but don't distribute or contribute to the code, many clauses do not apply to you. BSD gets a lot of contributions back, including many from corporations that forbid use of GPLed code. Of course, as with other open source projects, there are non-contributors, and the scale of that (cough, Apple) can indeed be galling. But over time, a lot of the sting has been taken out of that, as corporations have seen the long-term advantages to open source in helping them avoid another firm's lock-in and network effects. So nowadays, you can fork a lot of code, take it proprietary.. but then fail to sell it, since what you've mostly added is adverse lock-in, etc. The real solution is governmental - code isn't art. It should have a four or seven year "copyright" and then go into the public domain. But that copyright doesn't go on executables unless the code is revealed first. Two recent court cases that have, astonishingly, treated copyrights to code as something more like patents of ideas or methods have really underlined this for me. One is the Facebook/Oculus case (yes it's Texas, but really!) The other is the Facebook/Nearby Places case. http://www.nasdaq.com/article/facebook-suspends-locationsharing-feature-after-italian-copyright-suit-20170306-01018 http://www.nasdaq.com/article/facebook-suspends-locationshar...

X86BSD 10y ago

LLVM to replace GCC being another prime example.

Nomentatus 10y ago
And Blink, at the heart of Chromium Browser, which replicates webkit, only under a more permissive license. And we could go on from there... Tally up all the replacements, and the cost is staggering. Not to mention that developers and programmers are especially critical resources. GPL is possibly the greatest tragedy to befall technology since James Watt failed to understand the physics of scale, and vigorously prevented high-pressure steam engines from existing until his patent ran out.
- insertnickname 10y ago
  Blink is a fork of Webkit, and it seems to have the same licenses as Webkit (LGPL 2.1 + 3-clause BSD).
  - Nomentatus 10y ago
    Nope, Blink isn't a fork of webkit, it's a total rewrite and has a BSD license that webkit doesn't. Which was the point of doing the rewrite.

X86BSD 10y ago

LLVM to replace GCC being another prime example.

pksadiq 10y ago

> ... to recreate the GPL software under a more liberal (say BSD or MIT) license .... BSD or MIT are more liberal?? The reality is that there is nothing called 'absolute freedom or liberty.' Freedom may be defined as the terms that are acceptable to the whole community, not as an individual. Say for example, GNU GPL Freedom translated to real life: I can't kill you, so you shouldn't kill others. and the same terms for MIT/BSD: I'm letting you alive, but it is Okay for you to kill others (including me). Which one (GPL vs others) do you now think is more liberal?

Nomentatus 10y ago
I'll see you one Philosophy degree, and raise you some years graduate level work in Philosophy. Your liberty doesn't include grabbing my hardware and software patents, thanks so very much. Liberty of use is a solved problem - it's the public domain, which MIT and BSD come very close to.
- pksadiq 10y ago
  > Your liberty doesn't include grabbing my hardware and software patents, thanks so very much. Liberty of use is a solved problem - it's the public domain, which MIT and BSD come very close to. If you think carefully on what you have said, you are contradicting yourself. How are you sure that you won't get sued for the patents used in the MIT software/library you use in your (proprietary) software (even if the original software developers are the patent owners)? In fact, GNU GPLv3 prohibits that, and ensures that you won't get sued for the patents from the original authors. I recommend you better get a lawyer, rather than saying that 'MIT/BSD is simple.' btw, IANYL, and IANAL. :) Thank you. Edit: Some says, there is implicit patent protection for MIT/BSD. But afaik, it is never tested in court. GNU GPL v3 gives explicit patent protection. Be at the safe side if you doubt. Edit2: If you agree with "there is an implicit patent protection for MIT/BSD" that means it "includes giving away (partially) your hardware and software patents." If then, why would you use MIT/BSD Rather than doing a GNU GPLv3+/non-free dual licensing (as do Qt or Odoo do), which would better serve your business?
  - 10y ago