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Here's the full quote by Greg Olson that was supposedly so offensive: The most permissive licenses present little risk and few compliance requirements. The

Here's the full quote by Greg Olson that was supposedly so offensive: The most permissive licenses present little risk and few compliance requirements. These licenses include BSD and MIT, and others, that have minimal requirements, all the way to Apache and the Eclipse Public License, which are more elaborate in addressing contributions, patents, and indemnification. In the middle of the spectrum are the so-called ‘weak viral licenses’ which require sharing source code to any changes made to the originally licensed code, but not sharing of other source code linked or otherwise bound to the original open source code in question. The most popular and frequently encountered licenses in this category are the Mozilla Public License and the Common Public Attribution License. Restrictive Licenses present the most legal risk and complexity for companies that re-distribute or distribute software. These licenses are often termed ‘viral’ because software combined and distributed with this licensed software must be provided in source code format under the terms of those licenses. These requirements present serious risks to the preservation of proprietary software rights. The GNU General Public License is the archetype of this category, and is, in fact, the most widely used open source license in the world. It is beyond me how this analysis, which appears to be as objective as can possibly be, can be taken as an insult at all, let alone lead one to conclude that the " Linux Foundation has no respect for FOSS".

rbanffy 10y ago
Perhaps some people think "the preservation of proprietary software rights" is a good thing. I have pointed out numerous times the only restriction the GPL imposes on developers is on the "right" to deny others the freedoms the developer enjoys.
- jimktrains2 10y ago
  Exactly, the GPL focuses on the rights of the user, not the rights of the developer.
  - bbatha 10y ago
    Those rights mean nothing if the user is not someone versed enough to modify the code. So in practice the rights are the rights of the developer.
    - xoa 10y ago
      Incorrect, you've mistakenly conflated "in practice the rights are the rights of the original developer" with what the GPL aims to ensure, which is "in practice the rights are the rights of any developer". A user (which could be a user or an entire organization) need not possess any development skills themselves in order to hire somebody else with developer skills. I don't have a moral problem with proprietary software and think it has strengths, but the part of the core value of open source (or even simple available source, given the appropriate contractual terms[1]) could be defined as "potential for interchangeability" with respects to devs. If the original devs go in a direction that isn't desirable or for that matter got hit by a bus, there is at least the option for an individual, organization, or community sufficiently dependent or seeing sufficient value to take up the torch. Whether they have the skills directly to do it themselves is as irrelevant as whether they have the skills to maintain hardware or do building engineering or construction or whatever themselves. The ability to have a flexible and redundant market around maintaining foundational infrastructure and tooling isn't without value. 1. I personally think available source, even if only escrowed, should be flat out requirement for copyright period but that's a different discussion.
    - Nursie 10y ago
      No, the GPL focusses on the rights of the user downstream of the developer, regardless of whether or not they are versed enough to be a developer, or just a tinkerer, or a kid just starting to learn about computers, or someone that can figure out enough to make that one tweak to something that's annoyed them or a user that pays a developer or... The point is the person who makes a few tweaks and distributes has to pass on that privilege.
    - jimktrains2 10y ago
      Entirely false. First, if the user is someone who can modify the code, then the rights aren't just those of the original developer. Second, if the user is someone who can't, it provides them with the ability to hire someone who is, or to learn themselves. This is especially important when the original developer cannot or chooses to not support the software (at all or on a specific platform.) Take the coming y2038. For many things, the changes aren't immense, but the original developer could die in 2027 and never make them. Access to the source is crucial, even if the user doesn't think they'll need it or be able to use it themselves.
- ythn 10y ago
  I mean, if I am just contributing to the community or using a technology in a non-linking way, I don't see a problem with GPL. However, from a business standpoint, can you explain to me how linking in GPL code wouldn't just cause my customers to grab the source for free and consume my work without paying? I'm not afraid of using LGPL or GPL with library exceptions, but linking in pure GPLv3 scares me because in my mind it says "Why would customers pay you to use your product when they can just do a git clone and use your product for free?"
  - jimktrains2 10y ago
    > Why would customers pay you to use your product when they can just do a git clone and use your product for free? Support? Consulting? Hosting?
    - ythn 10y ago
      In other words, tech savvy customers will not be paying for my product since they will just host locally and use community support forums. And if my product is marketed to tech savvy people, that's a huge hit to my market.
      - jimktrains2 10y ago
        That's not entirely true. There are services I pay for that I don't want to run at home. Sometimes the convenience is worth it. Look at tarsnap. It's basically just encrypting files and sending it to S3, entirely open source, and he's still able to charge. I'm sure he's not living the high life off of it, but most people aren't off single products anyway.
  - simion314 10y ago
    So don't link with GPL code, find a work-around, a different library or write your own code, if the original author has the copyright you could buy a better license for your need. Again GPL protects the user of the code not the developers that want to remove the user freedom.
- drostie 10y ago
  That's not quite right. Non-copyleft licenses say "I will not sue you"; a sort of first-level copyleft license says "I will not sue you unless you potentially threaten to sue other people"... but the GPL is fully recursive: "I will not sue you unless you threaten to sue others in the ways that I don't like or do not threaten to sue others in the ways that I do like (namely, this sentence)." As a concrete example of how this imposes real restrictions, the proprietary macOS got ZFS and DTrace starting, oh, ten years ago or so; Ubuntu got ZFS last year and there are still people who are pissed about it, wanting Ubuntu users to be forced to jump through the Purity Hoops that they already have to use for their proprietary drivers. Ubuntu's decision to ship ZFS cannot possibly be read as an attempt "to deny others the freedoms that Ubuntu enjoys." There is no freedom which Ubuntu enjoys which it is trying to deny others by shipping ZFS. You still need to jump through the Purity Hoops to run DTrace: the "official channels" way is to not run DTrace (they recommend that you install systemtap and use a GPL application named `dtrace` which makes systemtap take DTrace-like input and produce DTrace-like output), and if you actually want to run DTrace you have to grab the `dtrace4linux` project off of GitHub and modify only your own system with it and then every time you load the thing your syslog will remind you that "module license 'CDDL' taints kernel, disabling lock debugging due to kernel taint," so I don't know what lock debugging is but I hope you don't need it.
  - qb45 10y ago
    Incompatibility of copyleft licenses is indeed a PITA. This being said, your examples are rather unfortunate because 1. to avoid this exact trouble, RMS&FSF designed the GPL as one copyleft to rule them all and encouraged all copyleft supporters to standardize on it 2. rumor has it that Sun execs and lawyers deliberately used incompatible license to keep ZFS and DTrace from Linux vendors competing with Solaris and in any case they probably could have used GPL instead.
    - drostie 10y ago
      I mean, (1) has nothing to do with the Sun examples, it's not something unfortunate about CDDL but unfortunate about the GPL. If one thinks of it in national terms: there is a GPL Nation holding its land against a bunch of proprietary city-states; a huge swath of land is occupied by the neutral space of MIT and BSD, people who have no real national identity and GPL is fine with them, "Can you be press-ganged into our army? Yes? Great!". And then there's these strange lands MPL and CDDL which lie close to GPL; they culturally agree with GPL in many ways; they like copyleft and want their works to remain free... but they intentionally have a separate national identity because of practical and historical reasons (at some point they had trade deals with some proprietary city-states). And it's just unfortunate that the GPL does not allow for any collaboration anymore, because "if you have any national identity, that is against our nation's constitution and we cannot work together with you." Meanwhile all of these little nations can work with each other just fine, can work with the proprietary city-states just fine. Regarding (2), the history is a bit murky. Danese Cooper wrote the CDDL and has said that GPL incompatibility was intentional; but several others have come forth (both at the talk that he said that, like Phipps, and since then, like Cantrill) to say that it was not a design goal at all, it was in fact a compromise between engineers who wanted an MIT/BSD license and management who wanted a GPL license. The true story seems to be: Engineers were very firm about "if you force people to jump through the Purity Hoops to install proprietary drivers you are increasing the total quotient of worldsuck for generations to come and frankly, why the hell are we opening this system if we're going to make the world suck more." Meanwhile management was very firm about "we worked so unbelievably hard to open this thing up, we don't want some big player like IBM to just fork off a proprietary version, spend a big budget to become the big player in the Solaris game, and then all of our work open-sourcing this damn thing was for nothing." The CDDL was a clean-up of the Mozilla Public License which sensitively addresses both issues, it deliberately contains a big honking wall which is (and everything inside of it is) copyleft open-source, but the license has no problem being distributed with proprietary add-ons as long as the interfaces they use, baked into the copyleft open-source wall as they are, follow the copyleft open-source license of the wall and everything therein.
jasonkostempski 10y ago
I think "These requirements present risks to the preservation of proprietary software rights." (an objective fact, like you said), is being read as "Proprietary software rights MUST be preserved!"
pitaj 10y ago
Please don't quote with code blocks. Use italics or greater than symbols instead. Scrolling horizontally to read the quote on my phone is a PITA. Thanks.
mcguire 10y ago
The use of the term 'viral' is only appropriate if you assume you have the right to redistribute any software you get your hands on. The fourth category is proprietary licenses, which do not allow you to distribute or redistribute software combined with software under these licenses at all. But weirdly, these are never described as 'viral'.
- mook 10y ago
  Proprietary licenses are not viral, in that they don't spread. They'd be better described as poisonous, since distribution stops completely. (I have no issues with proprietary licenses, just trying to abuse the analogy.)
lolc 10y ago
I agree that it is a fair assessment, the problem is the perspective. They want to facilitate integration of Open Source code into proprietary code, not the other way around. I would interpret these statements to be read as "Linux Foundation has no respect for FOSS." Because apparently they don't accept what "free" stands for in "Free and Open Source Software" > These requirements present serious risks to the preservation of proprietary software rights. Which is why the GPL can be called "more free" than the BSD licenses. Code licensed under it is not "appropriable". In my view, that's a feature. In their view, that's a "restriction". I don't see how I should want other people applying their proprietary (read: way more restrictive than the GPL) licenses or not share the code at all. They want to, I don't want them to. Different perspective. It is clear to me that the GNU/Linux world would be very fragmented, if it existed at all, were it not for the GPL.
- cr0sh 10y ago
  The way I have always viewed the GPL is this: I write some code, and I want to share it with the world. But I don't want to just "give it away" - if that were the case, I'd make it "public domain". Instead, I license it as "GPL". My price to you, someone else who wants to use the code? Simple and cheap: If you make any changes to the code, and distribute it (binary or otherwise) publicly, you must give those changes back to the community, the public, and me the author, so that the code can continue to grow. Don't like that? Then don't use and change the code. Or don't distribute (sell or give away) the code. Basically, I consider it a way of paying for the code - by "paying it forward". Corporations should consider it a low price to pay, not a hindrance to business.

rbanffy 10y ago

Perhaps some people think "the preservation of proprietary software rights" is a good thing. I have pointed out numerous times the only restriction the GPL imposes on developers is on the "right" to deny others the freedoms the developer enjoys.

jimktrains2 10y ago
Exactly, the GPL focuses on the rights of the user, not the rights of the developer.
- bbatha 10y ago
  Those rights mean nothing if the user is not someone versed enough to modify the code. So in practice the rights are the rights of the developer.
  - xoa 10y ago
    Incorrect, you've mistakenly conflated "in practice the rights are the rights of the original developer" with what the GPL aims to ensure, which is "in practice the rights are the rights of any developer". A user (which could be a user or an entire organization) need not possess any development skills themselves in order to hire somebody else with developer skills. I don't have a moral problem with proprietary software and think it has strengths, but the part of the core value of open source (or even simple available source, given the appropriate contractual terms[1]) could be defined as "potential for interchangeability" with respects to devs. If the original devs go in a direction that isn't desirable or for that matter got hit by a bus, there is at least the option for an individual, organization, or community sufficiently dependent or seeing sufficient value to take up the torch. Whether they have the skills directly to do it themselves is as irrelevant as whether they have the skills to maintain hardware or do building engineering or construction or whatever themselves. The ability to have a flexible and redundant market around maintaining foundational infrastructure and tooling isn't without value. 1. I personally think available source, even if only escrowed, should be flat out requirement for copyright period but that's a different discussion.
  - Nursie 10y ago
    No, the GPL focusses on the rights of the user downstream of the developer, regardless of whether or not they are versed enough to be a developer, or just a tinkerer, or a kid just starting to learn about computers, or someone that can figure out enough to make that one tweak to something that's annoyed them or a user that pays a developer or... The point is the person who makes a few tweaks and distributes has to pass on that privilege.
  - jimktrains2 10y ago
    Entirely false. First, if the user is someone who can modify the code, then the rights aren't just those of the original developer. Second, if the user is someone who can't, it provides them with the ability to hire someone who is, or to learn themselves. This is especially important when the original developer cannot or chooses to not support the software (at all or on a specific platform.) Take the coming y2038. For many things, the changes aren't immense, but the original developer could die in 2027 and never make them. Access to the source is crucial, even if the user doesn't think they'll need it or be able to use it themselves.
ythn 10y ago
I mean, if I am just contributing to the community or using a technology in a non-linking way, I don't see a problem with GPL. However, from a business standpoint, can you explain to me how linking in GPL code wouldn't just cause my customers to grab the source for free and consume my work without paying? I'm not afraid of using LGPL or GPL with library exceptions, but linking in pure GPLv3 scares me because in my mind it says "Why would customers pay you to use your product when they can just do a git clone and use your product for free?"
- jimktrains2 10y ago
  > Why would customers pay you to use your product when they can just do a git clone and use your product for free? Support? Consulting? Hosting?
  - ythn 10y ago
    In other words, tech savvy customers will not be paying for my product since they will just host locally and use community support forums. And if my product is marketed to tech savvy people, that's a huge hit to my market.
    - jimktrains2 10y ago
      That's not entirely true. There are services I pay for that I don't want to run at home. Sometimes the convenience is worth it. Look at tarsnap. It's basically just encrypting files and sending it to S3, entirely open source, and he's still able to charge. I'm sure he's not living the high life off of it, but most people aren't off single products anyway.
- simion314 10y ago
  So don't link with GPL code, find a work-around, a different library or write your own code, if the original author has the copyright you could buy a better license for your need. Again GPL protects the user of the code not the developers that want to remove the user freedom.
drostie 10y ago
That's not quite right. Non-copyleft licenses say "I will not sue you"; a sort of first-level copyleft license says "I will not sue you unless you potentially threaten to sue other people"... but the GPL is fully recursive: "I will not sue you unless you threaten to sue others in the ways that I don't like or do not threaten to sue others in the ways that I do like (namely, this sentence)." As a concrete example of how this imposes real restrictions, the proprietary macOS got ZFS and DTrace starting, oh, ten years ago or so; Ubuntu got ZFS last year and there are still people who are pissed about it, wanting Ubuntu users to be forced to jump through the Purity Hoops that they already have to use for their proprietary drivers. Ubuntu's decision to ship ZFS cannot possibly be read as an attempt "to deny others the freedoms that Ubuntu enjoys." There is no freedom which Ubuntu enjoys which it is trying to deny others by shipping ZFS. You still need to jump through the Purity Hoops to run DTrace: the "official channels" way is to not run DTrace (they recommend that you install systemtap and use a GPL application named `dtrace` which makes systemtap take DTrace-like input and produce DTrace-like output), and if you actually want to run DTrace you have to grab the `dtrace4linux` project off of GitHub and modify only your own system with it and then every time you load the thing your syslog will remind you that "module license 'CDDL' taints kernel, disabling lock debugging due to kernel taint," so I don't know what lock debugging is but I hope you don't need it.
- qb45 10y ago
  Incompatibility of copyleft licenses is indeed a PITA. This being said, your examples are rather unfortunate because 1. to avoid this exact trouble, RMS&FSF designed the GPL as one copyleft to rule them all and encouraged all copyleft supporters to standardize on it 2. rumor has it that Sun execs and lawyers deliberately used incompatible license to keep ZFS and DTrace from Linux vendors competing with Solaris and in any case they probably could have used GPL instead.
  - drostie 10y ago
    I mean, (1) has nothing to do with the Sun examples, it's not something unfortunate about CDDL but unfortunate about the GPL. If one thinks of it in national terms: there is a GPL Nation holding its land against a bunch of proprietary city-states; a huge swath of land is occupied by the neutral space of MIT and BSD, people who have no real national identity and GPL is fine with them, "Can you be press-ganged into our army? Yes? Great!". And then there's these strange lands MPL and CDDL which lie close to GPL; they culturally agree with GPL in many ways; they like copyleft and want their works to remain free... but they intentionally have a separate national identity because of practical and historical reasons (at some point they had trade deals with some proprietary city-states). And it's just unfortunate that the GPL does not allow for any collaboration anymore, because "if you have any national identity, that is against our nation's constitution and we cannot work together with you." Meanwhile all of these little nations can work with each other just fine, can work with the proprietary city-states just fine. Regarding (2), the history is a bit murky. Danese Cooper wrote the CDDL and has said that GPL incompatibility was intentional; but several others have come forth (both at the talk that he said that, like Phipps, and since then, like Cantrill) to say that it was not a design goal at all, it was in fact a compromise between engineers who wanted an MIT/BSD license and management who wanted a GPL license. The true story seems to be: Engineers were very firm about "if you force people to jump through the Purity Hoops to install proprietary drivers you are increasing the total quotient of worldsuck for generations to come and frankly, why the hell are we opening this system if we're going to make the world suck more." Meanwhile management was very firm about "we worked so unbelievably hard to open this thing up, we don't want some big player like IBM to just fork off a proprietary version, spend a big budget to become the big player in the Solaris game, and then all of our work open-sourcing this damn thing was for nothing." The CDDL was a clean-up of the Mozilla Public License which sensitively addresses both issues, it deliberately contains a big honking wall which is (and everything inside of it is) copyleft open-source, but the license has no problem being distributed with proprietary add-ons as long as the interfaces they use, baked into the copyleft open-source wall as they are, follow the copyleft open-source license of the wall and everything therein.

jasonkostempski 10y ago

I think "These requirements present risks to the preservation of proprietary software rights." (an objective fact, like you said), is being read as "Proprietary software rights MUST be preserved!"

pitaj 10y ago

Please don't quote with code blocks. Use italics or greater than symbols instead. Scrolling horizontally to read the quote on my phone is a PITA. Thanks.

mcguire 10y ago

The use of the term 'viral' is only appropriate if you assume you have the right to redistribute any software you get your hands on. The fourth category is proprietary licenses, which do not allow you to distribute or redistribute software combined with software under these licenses at all. But weirdly, these are never described as 'viral'.

mook 10y ago
Proprietary licenses are not viral, in that they don't spread. They'd be better described as poisonous, since distribution stops completely. (I have no issues with proprietary licenses, just trying to abuse the analogy.)

lolc 10y ago

I agree that it is a fair assessment, the problem is the perspective. They want to facilitate integration of Open Source code into proprietary code, not the other way around. I would interpret these statements to be read as "Linux Foundation has no respect for FOSS." Because apparently they don't accept what "free" stands for in "Free and Open Source Software" > These requirements present serious risks to the preservation of proprietary software rights. Which is why the GPL can be called "more free" than the BSD licenses. Code licensed under it is not "appropriable". In my view, that's a feature. In their view, that's a "restriction". I don't see how I should want other people applying their proprietary (read: way more restrictive than the GPL) licenses or not share the code at all. They want to, I don't want them to. Different perspective. It is clear to me that the GNU/Linux world would be very fragmented, if it existed at all, were it not for the GPL.

cr0sh 10y ago
The way I have always viewed the GPL is this: I write some code, and I want to share it with the world. But I don't want to just "give it away" - if that were the case, I'd make it "public domain". Instead, I license it as "GPL". My price to you, someone else who wants to use the code? Simple and cheap: If you make any changes to the code, and distribute it (binary or otherwise) publicly, you must give those changes back to the community, the public, and me the author, so that the code can continue to grow. Don't like that? Then don't use and change the code. Or don't distribute (sell or give away) the code. Basically, I consider it a way of paying for the code - by "paying it forward". Corporations should consider it a low price to pay, not a hindrance to business.