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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

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...
  - flukus 10y ago
    Speaking of Apple, you know the only reason webkit and chromium are open source? It's because it was built off the (L)GPL. If it was BSD/MIT then webkit would have been completely closed. That means no Chrome and no electron (well maybe that's a good thing). > 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. And what about when you can sell it, like with a closed sourced android that is locked in to google?
    - Nomentatus 10y ago
      You are dead wrong. Blink was the re-creation of webkit; one more GPL license that wasted everyone's time and money by forcing a full rewrite, one more tragedy. The Android libraries (as opposed to Java engine, app store, etc) that Google recreated are open source, and not locked in to Google, many others use them. It's not reasonable to hope to banish proprietary code entirely, especially since open source hasn't really found a good, general business model yet. Open source code that businesses will use and contribute to is winning the day; GPL has been a bad wrong-turn. Again, copyleft might work - but the software and hardware patent grabs that come with GPL2 and GPL3 simply haven't. Such an incredible waste. It's hard to find historical parallels.
      - flukus 10y ago
        > You are dead wrong. Blink was the re-creation of webkit; one more GPL license that wasted everyone's time and money by forcing a full rewrite, one more tragedy. Blink is a fork of webkit, it's still under the LGPL. But I see where you've gone wrong now, you're attributing every OSS rewrite that also includes a license change to being rewritten because of licensing, which is simply not true. Without webkit being LGPL though, they never would have got to the point where they could fork it. > It's not reasonable to hope to banish proprietary code entirely, especially since open source hasn't really found a good, general business model yet. Open source code that businesses will use and contribute to is winning the day; GPL has been a bad wrong-turn. The GPL doesn't banish proprietary software and never will. It banishes GPL software from becoming closed software.

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...
- flukus 10y ago
  Speaking of Apple, you know the only reason webkit and chromium are open source? It's because it was built off the (L)GPL. If it was BSD/MIT then webkit would have been completely closed. That means no Chrome and no electron (well maybe that's a good thing). > 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. And what about when you can sell it, like with a closed sourced android that is locked in to google?
  - Nomentatus 10y ago
    You are dead wrong. Blink was the re-creation of webkit; one more GPL license that wasted everyone's time and money by forcing a full rewrite, one more tragedy. The Android libraries (as opposed to Java engine, app store, etc) that Google recreated are open source, and not locked in to Google, many others use them. It's not reasonable to hope to banish proprietary code entirely, especially since open source hasn't really found a good, general business model yet. Open source code that businesses will use and contribute to is winning the day; GPL has been a bad wrong-turn. Again, copyleft might work - but the software and hardware patent grabs that come with GPL2 and GPL3 simply haven't. Such an incredible waste. It's hard to find historical parallels.
    - flukus 10y ago
      > You are dead wrong. Blink was the re-creation of webkit; one more GPL license that wasted everyone's time and money by forcing a full rewrite, one more tragedy. Blink is a fork of webkit, it's still under the LGPL. But I see where you've gone wrong now, you're attributing every OSS rewrite that also includes a license change to being rewritten because of licensing, which is simply not true. Without webkit being LGPL though, they never would have got to the point where they could fork it. > It's not reasonable to hope to banish proprietary code entirely, especially since open source hasn't really found a good, general business model yet. Open source code that businesses will use and contribute to is winning the day; GPL has been a bad wrong-turn. The GPL doesn't banish proprietary software and never will. It banishes GPL software from becoming closed software.