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Is the GPL Really Declining?

78 points by LaSombra 9y ago

pjmlp 9y ago
Yes it is, in about 10 years time, Linux kernel might be one of the few surviving GPL projects in wider use. We will get back to PD and shareware days, when releasing source code was a nice feature, but not necessarily compulsory. The speed embedded OEM are replacing gcc with clang in their forks, without having to keep contributing back, is a good example of things will evolve. Or the hardware companies that bundle *BSD instead of GNU/Linux on their boxes. Or Apple and Google ongoing effort's to clean (L)GPL from their stacks.
- belorn 9y ago
  Predicting the death of Debian in 10 years is a odd call since I have not seen any indication of decline in the use of Debian and its derivatives. Last time someone checked, projects in debian where around 90% GPL.
  - pjmlp 9y ago
    How many of those 90% GPL projects are actually used in the real world across companies, specially the SV loved ones?
    - belorn 9y ago
      A lot. I don't remember a exact study on popcon top 100, but just going main top 5, let see. top 1: Gnu sed. License: GPL. top 2 (if you ignore libs): base-passwd. GPL top 3: GNU core utilities: Mostly if not exclusively GPL. top 4: debianutils: SMAIL GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE top 5: dpkg: GPL (got bsd parts is distributed as a whole under gpl). http://popcon.debian.org/main/by_inst http://popcon.debian.org/main/by_inst if you want to dig through it. A lot of the top is part of base install. Further down we got things like wget, which surprise surprise, is gpl. Could always try to make a debian machine without udev, which is GPL. Honestly, making a debian installation, using debian main archives, without any copyleft'ed software would be a nice project just to see if anything resembling a function operative system would remain. One would have to start by using BSD kernel (which is supported), and go from there to try mimic a bsd operative system.
grabcocque 9y ago
I think it's important to separate the GPLv2 which is still vital and alive, and the GPL v3 which is now generally regarded to have been a failure.
- CJefferson 9y ago
  I'm not sure GPL v3 is a failure, but it has created a really bad taste -- at least 3 times I've been unable to link GPL V2 and GPL v3 code. In one case I reimplemented one piece of code, in the others I went in search of a BSD library instead.
  - hackits 9y ago
    Take this with a grain of salt. If you can prove that you project can work without the GPL V2/V3 code being present (eg... the GPL code isn't a major contributing factor in the working of your program) then it stands that under copyright law (Here in Australia) that it isn't a Derivative work and thus not infringing on the copyright owner. Playing it safe GPL V2, give credit to the source code in your credits page and push back any changes you've made to their original source. GPL V3, you're kind of screwed (even linking) that you need to adhere to their license agreement and have your source code open source. Personally for open source projects I use GPL V3, and leave a comment in the license agreement the business can contact me for a difference license that comes with support contract.
    - CJefferson 9y ago
      To be clear, my problem isn't linking GPL and non GPL code, it is a GPL V2 project, wanting to include GPL v3 code! Same way the kernel can't merge GPL v3 libraries.
- djsumdog 9y ago
  I am a huge supporter of GPLv3 and license most of my open source work with it. Still, the Linux kernel has been famously v2, and macos has removed as much v3 work as possible (to the point of using very outdated versions of many packages including bash). Things like CLang/LLVM, and don't get me wrong, they're technologically amazing, still have a huge focus of not being in the GPL world. Back in the early 2000s, the hardcore FSF people dreamed of a work with OSS replacements for Photoshop and every other major tool people felt they needed in the closed Win/Mac world. That never really happened: http://penguindreams.org/blog/the-philosophy-of-open-source-in-community-and-enterprise-software/ http://penguindreams.org/blog/the-philosophy-of-open-source-...
libeclipse 9y ago
I think there's two split types of developers. When I was younger, mostly hanging around on IRC servers and forums, coding just my own cool projects, I strongly believed in the GPL. All of my projects had it, and I wouldn't even dream of allowing someone to use my code without making their entire project open too. That's the first type I think. The second type is the more HN-style professional programmer. Now as I've grown up a little and interacted a lot more with the programming community, I've realised that the GPL licence just causes more pain and frustration to developers. If I want my source code under Apache-2.0, why should I have to change it to GPL just for you. I want anyone to be able to do whatever they want to with my code. That includes developers wanting to create a proprietary application. Telling them they can't is not freedom. I feel we've lost ourselves in the freedom of users and forgotten about the people that make the applications for the users. --- Edit: As a small P.S. to this, I think the middle ground is using the GPL for actual end-user applications, but leaving libraries and developer tools completely open with something like Apache-2.0 or MIT.
- Anon_2017124 9y ago
  As you correctly say, if you want anyone to be able to do whatever, you're right with choosing a permissive (non-reciprocal) license. GPL cares about the users of the software, not only the developers, and makes sure that, if they receive some software, they also get the source.
  - kstenerud 9y ago
    Non-developers don't care about the source.
    - icebraining 9y ago
      A good chunk of my paycheck proves you wrong - we develop custom addons for an Open Source software for non-developers (individuals and companies).
      - kstenerud 9y ago
endymi0n 9y ago
> The use and support of the GPL has grown with it, but new strengths have also emerged related to corporate adoption of open source, leading to stronger growth of associated approaches to licensing. TL;DR: Although we're trying to hide it in hundreds of lines of weaseling and CorpSpeak, yes, it's dying.
- pluma 9y ago
  Sounds more like "the market is growing but GPL is growing less". Dying would imply lack of growth altogether, no?
avar 9y ago
The main reason for this in my opinion is that the fear free software had of permissive licenses in the 90s by an large didn't come true. The GPL is excellent to guard against the sort of embrace, extend and close that the GPL prevented when it came to GCC, Emacs etc. back in its day, but would likely have otherwise happened. Times are different now, and while there's still some of that going on (e.g. Sony with FreeBSD) for the vast majority of free software out there companies see no point in maintaining some value-added fork, it's just going to cost them money. E.g. SQLite & cURL are a good example of this. Nowadays your project is much more likely to die because of overly restrictive licensing than because some company steals it from you and refuses to give back. Imagine how much smaller SQLite would be if it was GPL 3 instead of public domain, ditto for cURL.
- cr0sh 9y ago
  > Times are different now Now. But what about tomorrow? Neither you nor I can know what tomorrow will bring. But should it revert back to the old status-quo, what then? What if these self-same companies take all of the nice BSD/MIT/non-GPL'd code, package it up, make it better - so much so that people prefer it over the original! - and sell it, and make a mint off it, and it becomes much more popular. They continue to extend it, but never give anything back to the original authors, and perhaps the original project dies from lack of use by people, and faltering participation of developers because no one is using it. So now - wonderful open source software goes from being open - to closed and proprietary. The users don't care - they are getting great value for their money, right? But the software, which was once open and useful for the developers, is virtually gone. Don't think it could ever change back to this? Don't be a fool. Maybe not in 5 years, or 10 - or maybe it will! History does repeat - or at least echoes loud and clearly. Being prepared for such a possibility is better, in my perspective, than assuming the way things are today is the way they'll always be going forward.
- acuozzo 9y ago
  > Times are different now This is perhaps due in part to the impact of widespread use of the GPL within the then-emerging FOSS community.
dagw 9y ago
Comparing the mid to late 90s with today it seems hackers have on the whole become more commercially minded. Back in the 90s there was a more idealistic and 'punk' ethos surrounding the hacker scene with documents like the Hacker Manifesto being a thing people actually believed in and aspired to. The GPL fit right into that. Then the world changed a bit and all of a sudden people realized that you could become both a millionaire and even a billionaire as a software developer. And do you know what's cooler than being part of an idealistic punk scene? A billion dollars! Now licenses that got in the way of you making money weren't as attractive anymore. And licenses that made it easier for you to make money off of software written by other people became the new hot thing. That at least is my naive take on what I've observed over the past 20-odd years.
- erikbye 9y ago
  Who are you calling hackers? Zuckerberg? Creators of Instagram? Snapchat? Please.
- err4nt 9y ago
  I'll offer a little counterpoint to that. I had known 'free software' as shareware until ~2001 when I had my first introduction to Linux. I was very curious, and took to open source software AND the ideals very easily. Because of my experience as a teenager poking around operating systems, fixing xorg.conf files after compiling nVidia drivers, and running and using thousands of different software applications - tools for many many different jobs I had never been exposed to before. I consider open-source being an education I received that has helped me to use computers and software today. Because I have benefitted so much from open-source, now that I'm in a position where I can write and release software I am very motivated to give back to the same community that first gave to me. I hope that by producing work and releasing it to open-source I can help build up those who follow in my footsteps - and that's a richer treasure than dollars in my pocket. Having said all of this, I can't choose GPL for giving away my own software because the viral nature of it feels like a chain letter. It leaves a really bad taste in your mouth and I wouldn't want anybody to feel compelled to pick between using something I'm TRYING to give away for free and having to GPL their project, or not be able to use something I'm trying to give away for free just because of the license. So I keep choosing MIT, which basically says: 'you have to acknowledge that I wrote it, and you can't sue me because of damages you got from using it' but leaves pretty much any other use (even commercial reselling) open. I can't imagine anybody looking at a piece of code under MIT and having objections, or a reason why the license prevents them from using it - and THAT is the point of free software to me. GPL software is arguably LESS free than the more liberal licenses :D
rbanffy 9y ago
Seems to be a dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14257316 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14257316 Did detection fail?
- lorenzhs 9y ago
  No, the dupe detector was changed about a year ago to allow for resubmission of articles that failed to gain traction. If you have questions for the mods, email them. Discussing the dupe detector is off-topic and boring.
  - rbanffy 9y ago
    Do you have a link to that announcement? I tried to look it up to gather more information without bothering the mods.
    - sctb 9y ago
      This is all I could quickly find: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10203933 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10203933. This change was just to bring the software in line with the FAQ, which has mentioned this since 2014.
nihonde 9y ago
There was a time when it seemed inconceivable that developers would be motivated to release code under MIT or BSD style licenses that lacked the "viral" distribution obligations of the GPL. Back then, it seemed obvious that a healthy open source community was going to need to force "borrowers" of the code to contribute their improvements in order to avoid freeloading. However, the reality is that plenty of healthy open source communities exist on MIT style licenses and even include corporate community members who are willing to subsidize improvements that get merged into the public editions. In this way, the "failure" of GPL is a story about people behaving well as a community without needing to have legal whips cracked at them
- douche 9y ago
  Damn near everything on npm is MIT licensed. Generally, that's cited as a thriving open-source community. I don't know that that Cambrian explosion happens if people have to deal with the cognitive and legal costs of fussing with the GPL.
- watwut 9y ago
  Licenses are legal and public relations whips cracked at people. They would not work otherwise.
ajdlinux 9y ago
The last time I went through my employer's process for releasing an open source project, the attorney assigned to our case emailed to ask if we really wanted to choose the GPL, as we'd stated on the application form, because getting approval for MIT or Apache was going to be quicker. We advised that yes, we did want the GPL, and indeed we didn't run into any further problems. Keeping up the good fight in the midst of a megacorp, one tiny little utility at a time...
- dleslie 9y ago
  In my experience the barrier is always the lawyers.
  - asdfjlkasdf88 9y ago
    Anecdotally, part of the reason why is the lawyers I've talked to don't feel like FSF have offered enough clarification regarding legal concerns, and the hostility of the community. When the community will burn you to the ground for inadvertently shipping a binary without code, even after you've apologized and shipped the code, why would legal want to bother with them? There's been half a dozen knee-jerk $XYZ Corp is in gross violation of the GPL! headlines here, only for the conversation to go "No, they're not. Go away." Look at the SystemD thing and countless other situations. The mantra is "open and welcome and use our stuff!" Then they go all Walter if you slip a toe over the line. Neckbeards need to get that they're responsible for the apprehension. It's another form of tribalism. You either need to be perfect in how you fit in, never err, or we'll figuratively tear you a new one.
stonesixone 9y ago
FWIW, both Los Angeles County and the City and County of San Francisco are leaning towards GPL for their open source voting system projects. And these are new, ambitious projects just starting out. For Los Angeles, see page 24 of their RFI: http://vsap.lavote.net/request-for-information/ http://vsap.lavote.net/request-for-information/ For San Francisco, see the March 2017 Director's Report here: http://sfgov.org/electionscommission/commission-agenda-packet-march-15-2017 http://sfgov.org/electionscommission/commission-agenda-packe...
kstenerud 9y ago
I've always likened GPL promoters and promoters of the more permissive licenses to conservatives vs liberals. GPL users are more worried about someone taking and not giving back. Other license users are more worried about lost opportunity to proliferate. In the same way, conservatives are more worried about bad behavior among their fellow citizens, whereas liberals are more worried about lost opportunities for their fellow citizens to grow and flourish. In every endeavor, there is risk and opportunity, and they must be balanced somehow. Conservatives err on the side of reducing risk of bad actors, who can spoil it for everyone. Liberals err on the side of reducing lost opportunities, which prevent us from going forward as a whole. It's also why I won't argue in favor of one over the other. You'd have about as much success arguing in in favor of liberal ideals to a conservative, or conservative ideals to a liberal. Their reasoning is emotional, which is why it gets uncomfortable real fast, and they dig their heels in, pulling all sorts of "facts" to prove their side.
- wiz21c 9y ago
  To put it in a more positive way : GPL users think about others first and themselves second. Anti-GPL people think the other way around. I wouldn't say either is good or bad, but I'd say they sure don't mix well together.
  - kstenerud 9y ago
    Wow, that was fast. You're pro-GPL, and it shows in how you colored your words to favor your side and denigrate the other.
    - wiz21c 9y ago
      well, just like the OP I guess :-) But frankly I didn't mean to make it sound better. I truly think that some people think for themselves first and for the others second. It's not a matter of selfishness, it's a matter of direction. I can think about many people who were positive for the society in both categories. And I'd even say that we tend to change our "colour" every now and then. For example, many private companies are greedy, but it doesn't stop them to provide good things to me (it'd be better if they gave them away for free, but well, they have to make a living too). I'd say GPL is the other direction but as many mentioned, although we may like the idea, we have to recognize that the success (and therefore the value for society) is not exactly massive. But you're right I'm rather "pro GPL, anti capital and maybe a bit of an anarchist too" :-) But well, it doesn't prevent me to work on commercial things and GPL things :-) The fact is that it's very tough to discuss political ideas without getting too involved.
alkonaut 9y ago
I could be inclined to use GPL if I made some end user application rather than library code. Simply because I'd prefer the project not to be forked. If someone invents a great feature for my app, I'd like that to be either merged or killed, not merged into a fork. The problem of the GPL is that it assumes that infinite forking of software is a good thing (more choice!) when the opposite is normally true - it's better to have ONE project that isn't perfect for anyone, but that is easy to find and actively maintained, than it is to have a large number of forks each with the pet feature of different users. For library code it's a different story. If I write a library I'd hope to get commercial use of it. I suppose you could argue that in that case you should be using the LGPL rather than BSD/MIT/CDDL/Apache, but I honesly think the LGPL is underused simply because of it sounds a bit like GPL and it makes people nervous.
- icebraining 9y ago
  The GPL doesn't prevent others from forking your project, we've seen quite a bit of hostile forks over the years.
  - alkonaut 9y ago
    That's true. It prevents closed-source forks only.
  - gribbly 9y ago
    True, but this is typically a good thing in my opinion, the code remains fully open all the same and the developers/userbase will determine which project is the better.
- gribbly 9y ago
  >I could be inclined to use GPL if I made some end user application rather than library code. This very much mirrors my own preference. For popular end user applications there is a clear motive to do proprietary forks with extra features, which would lead to the original open project either lagging in features or having to spend effort in recreating the features of the proprietary fork while the latter can continously take any new features from the open project. For libraries/frameworks however, there is little if any real incentive for proprietary forks since it will be hard get developers buying into that.
sgentle 9y ago
> The GPL is a fine open source license that grants all the permissions needed by developer communities that adopt it. There is no sense in which it is not "permissive", so to use that term as an antonym to "copyleft" verges on abuse. Sigh. This attitude makes it enormously difficult to have any kind of conversation about the tradeoffs of open source licenses, because it reveals a profound lack of perspective or willingness to admit that even your darling license isn't perfect. Can we not just accept that there are two different attitudes towards freedom? One says that true freedom being able to do whatever you want, the other says true freedom is restricting others from infringing on your freedom (and being thus restricted in turn). This is anarchism vs libertarianism, Jon Stewart vs Bill Maher liberalism, and non-interventionism vs neoconservatism. Do you preserve freedom even if you need to do it by causing unfreedom? It's a question that has resisted all attempts to find a simple answer despite generations of attempts. It could be that all these people just need to read the GPL to find out that there's no sense in which being required to do something is not permissive. Or perhaps a little humility is in order, and we could make the effort the understand that different ideologies can, if not agree, at least respect each other.
- dleslie 9y ago
  An anarchist ought not care what the license terms are; they are already operating in an ethical framework that revokes concern for a collection of words that rely on state violence to have meaning.
  - sounds 9y ago
    Cool! A discussion where the anarchists are represented clearly! Do I understand libertarianism the way sgentle does? He compares anarchism:libertarianism::permissive license:GPL, so I guess he's using libertarianism in the sense of "absolute minimum amount of government necessary to enforce property rights." As to whether you preserve freedom best by causing "unfreedoms," philosophy already has some pretty useful things to say, such as ue_'s comment: Hegel ... described the freedom of the savage being a kind of unrefined freedom Some freedoms are conflicting by their very definition. Resolving the conflict is at its core the imposition of an ordering over the set of all freedoms, or in other words, a value system. Almost all the discussion on this article can be reduced to a comparison of well known value systems and attempts to sway readers to one or another.
watwut 9y ago
I would not use GPL for my projects, because I can not use GPL licensed libraries in work. We use plenty of Apache licensed libs, therefore when I did open source contributions I contributed back to that pool. It was no brainer to me. I also like the freedom in it - GPL is a bit about forcing people to do things your way because ideology which is attitude I find offputing. Apache is less political and more giving - here is a thing use it.
- belorn 9y ago
  When your workplace distribute the software you write to their customers, what political ideology does the license force onto them?
  - watwut 9y ago
    What does that have to do with anything? OSS and tech generally likes to praise itself as more rational fact based, but demagoguery is sometimes downright ridiculous. If I distribute open source library under GPL, the advantage of GPL is supposed to be that users of my library have to provide source code to their users. Making it "viral" and preventing them to do close source business. It was written this way because of ideology authors had - treating open source as moral value.
    - smichel17 9y ago
      That's just the thing: software freedom does have moral value. Power imbalances are abused. That's how you end up with stuff like nsa backdoors. Software freedom helps fix the power imbalance between users and developers.
      - watwut 9y ago
        That is kinda like saying that letters being private make it harder to caught terrorists, so we should make it question of morality to make all letters public.
    - belorn 9y ago
geokon 9y ago
I'm a bit surprised "dual licensing" hasn't come up at all in this discussion. To me that is the most logical next-step from the GPL. (ex: The Qt/JUCE people are using it to great effect) - If you want to work on expanding on what I started and then sharing it with everyone, then that's great! - If you want to make money with my work - then lets get in touch and work out some compensation. Seems only fair.. no? It's a little fuzzy because you can have opensource projects that make money, but it fits the general spirit of things. Though I'm not sure how it would work if for instance someone sends you a merge request.... do they have to also send something signing over the rights to their work? Is there a better license that does this automatically? (does anyone know how Qt handles that for example?)
- jasonkostempski 9y ago
  I'm not 100% sure but I think the GPL prevents itself from being used in a dual license scenario on purpose.
  - dbcurtis 9y ago
    No, to find the answer, fall back to copyright law. If you own the copyright to some body of code in entirety, you can license it under as many licenses as you want. GPL for the community, proprietary trade-secret in exchange for money, and everything works fine. But.... if you take a pull request from someone, either they have to sign over copyright to their patch, or else you have to involve them in every relicensing negotiation, because now they are a copyright holder, too, in the work.
  - ajross 9y ago
    It doesn't. There's nothing a "license" can do to prevent that. If I own the copyright to something, and I license it to party A under license X and party B under license Y, that's perfectly legal. This happens all the time in the commercial world where big software licenses are often written per-customer. If you make one of those licenses a blanket GPLv3 grant to the whole world, that's perfectly fine. Where it gets sticky is the "ownership" issue. This only works if you're the sole copyright holder. If you've taken contributions from community members to your GPL project, you can't then relicense those to anyone else without approval, of course. This is the big reason behind the desire on the part of big projects for copyright assignment aggreements. Even the FSF does it so they can migrate software to GPLv4 when needed.
shadowmint 9y ago
Just idly... > Deciding which is dominant may well be a matter for your ideological biases rather than an objective absolute. No, it's really not. That's what objective means; that you count the numbers and acknowledge that one number if bigger than another, by a significant margin. > If I can pick my own metric, I can prove anything! Sure, but there are some pretty solid metrics that no one is going to argue you're 'fudging the numbers to suit your bias on'. For example: - Total number of projects with a given license. - Total number of dependencies on projects with a given license. - Total number of new projects with a given license per year/month, normalized. - Total number of new dependencies on a given license per year/month, normalized. What is this rubbish about deciding which license you like the most because you think it has some kind of pretty ethical features, or calling it 'copy left' vs 'reciprocal behaviour'. You're just muddying the waters and making people who support GPL look stupid. Statistics can be jimmied to show a specific tale, its true... but you know what? A bunch of graphs, a raw data set I can check myself and a repo with the software that generated the graphs; I'll believe what I see in that any day over some arbitrary talk about how you can't really ever believe anything because heck, everyone has a bias. Hand waving is a lot easier than actually digging up data and checking the numbers; but it's largely meaningless he-said-she-said-they-said. A little while ago I met some folk who were absolutely convinced that hg was winning the hearts and minds of people around the world (over git). They were and are wrong. So is this post. ...yet people continue to argue the point. I think it's easy to end up trapped in a bubble where all you see is people who agree with you, and you can't see what's really going on. Everyone now and then you actually do need to dig through some hard data yourself and reevaluate your own assumptions I think...
ploggingdev 9y ago
How do investors view a startup that only builds GPL licensed software. Eg- Let's say Gitlab used only GPL, would it be a major red flag to investors? What about businesses, would they be willing to be buy GPL licensed software? Any examples of startups that only build GPL licensed software?
- marcinkuzminski 9y ago
  When we went to raise money for RhodeCode which was GPL at that time, it was no issue for investors. Nowe we're AGPL and switching the license was no issue for current investors too. Also so far no questions about AGPL beeing a problem for our customers.
motters 9y ago
For software I've written while working at companies I didn't have control over the license choice, but for that which I've written voluntarily nearly all of it (and there's quite a laundry list now) is under GPL or AGPL. This is because, as some other comments have mentioned, I want any other users of the software to have the same capabilities to change it as I did. I don't want there to be secret proprietary versions which then get distributed in closed form denying the potential for participation. The ability of users to have genuine control over their systems has been under sustained attack for a long time. I may be only one developer but at least I can make a small ding in the dark empire of bad software practices.
zzzeek 9y ago
> Surely the number of users using the software is the best metric? no. > Or the number of lines of code under the license? no. > Or the number of committers collectively working on projects under that license? Or the number of published articles advocating for it? sorry, no and no. If I sold cars, and you asked me how popular my car is, the only metric would be, how many did I sell (not how big is it, or how many people it took to build, or how many articles were published about it). This is not a hard question. You can count projects on github and elsewhere and what licenses they are using and that's your answer. the GPL is declining for reasons the author points out, that GPL doesn't work for libraries and frameworks: "For developers mixing ingredients from multiple origins – frameworks, components, libraries – reciprocal license requirements increase the uncertainty rather than decrease it." What he fails to quote a statistic for (and I'd be curious to see) would be what percentage of open source projects are fully realized applications (like LibreOffice) vs. libraries/ frameworks (like the enormous number of libraries for Python, Javascript, Ruby, Go), and how has that number been changing over the years. Years ago I was planning to release SQLAlchemy on the LGPL and I was quickly talked out of it, reminded that the langauge of the LGPL is archaically focused on C-centric concepts like linkers and that it scares the crap out of legal departments. I haven't looked since but it seems like Gnu hasn't improved upon that situation. The author refers to open source as " the “safe space” in which developers with an interest in a piece of software, for whatever reason, are able to collaborate over its evolution without the motivations of others impacting their own usage." - for me and probably most other people, that's a BSD-like license, so that all your collaborators who are after all using your software to produce something in-house at their place of employment, can freely use and contribute to your software without them being hindered by their company legal departments.
faragon 9y ago
BSD/Apache-like licenses are getting most of the traction, because of GPL "viral" issues, e.g. you can not ship GPLv3 Ghostscript with your product, even being "free", as it is not redistributable (the option is to tell the customer that Ghostscript is a "pre-requisite"). Although I have to recognize that 20 years ago I was more idealist than now, I'm not against the GPL, but against using the GPL not for freedom or sharing back modifications, but as a maquivelic vendor lock-in (e.g. spending $$$ in legal advice and some times not being 100% sure if using something is safe or not because of contradictory things).

78 points by LaSombra 9y ago

Yes it is, in about 10 years time, Linux kernel might be one of the few surviving GPL projects in wider use. We will get back to PD and shareware days, when releasing source code was a nice feature, but not necessarily compulsory. The speed embedded OEM are replacing gcc with clang in their forks, without having to keep contributing back, is a good example of things will evolve. Or the hardware companies that bundle *BSD instead of GNU/Linux on their boxes. Or Apple and Google ongoing effort's to clean (L)GPL from their stacks.

belorn 9y ago
Predicting the death of Debian in 10 years is a odd call since I have not seen any indication of decline in the use of Debian and its derivatives. Last time someone checked, projects in debian where around 90% GPL.
- pjmlp 9y ago
  How many of those 90% GPL projects are actually used in the real world across companies, specially the SV loved ones?
  - belorn 9y ago
    A lot. I don't remember a exact study on popcon top 100, but just going main top 5, let see. top 1: Gnu sed. License: GPL. top 2 (if you ignore libs): base-passwd. GPL top 3: GNU core utilities: Mostly if not exclusively GPL. top 4: debianutils: SMAIL GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE top 5: dpkg: GPL (got bsd parts is distributed as a whole under gpl). http://popcon.debian.org/main/by_inst http://popcon.debian.org/main/by_inst if you want to dig through it. A lot of the top is part of base install. Further down we got things like wget, which surprise surprise, is gpl. Could always try to make a debian machine without udev, which is GPL. Honestly, making a debian installation, using debian main archives, without any copyleft'ed software would be a nice project just to see if anything resembling a function operative system would remain. One would have to start by using BSD kernel (which is supported), and go from there to try mimic a bsd operative system.

grabcocque 9y ago

I think it's important to separate the GPLv2 which is still vital and alive, and the GPL v3 which is now generally regarded to have been a failure.

CJefferson 9y ago
I'm not sure GPL v3 is a failure, but it has created a really bad taste -- at least 3 times I've been unable to link GPL V2 and GPL v3 code. In one case I reimplemented one piece of code, in the others I went in search of a BSD library instead.
- hackits 9y ago
  Take this with a grain of salt. If you can prove that you project can work without the GPL V2/V3 code being present (eg... the GPL code isn't a major contributing factor in the working of your program) then it stands that under copyright law (Here in Australia) that it isn't a Derivative work and thus not infringing on the copyright owner. Playing it safe GPL V2, give credit to the source code in your credits page and push back any changes you've made to their original source. GPL V3, you're kind of screwed (even linking) that you need to adhere to their license agreement and have your source code open source. Personally for open source projects I use GPL V3, and leave a comment in the license agreement the business can contact me for a difference license that comes with support contract.
  - CJefferson 9y ago
    To be clear, my problem isn't linking GPL and non GPL code, it is a GPL V2 project, wanting to include GPL v3 code! Same way the kernel can't merge GPL v3 libraries.
djsumdog 9y ago
I am a huge supporter of GPLv3 and license most of my open source work with it. Still, the Linux kernel has been famously v2, and macos has removed as much v3 work as possible (to the point of using very outdated versions of many packages including bash). Things like CLang/LLVM, and don't get me wrong, they're technologically amazing, still have a huge focus of not being in the GPL world. Back in the early 2000s, the hardcore FSF people dreamed of a work with OSS replacements for Photoshop and every other major tool people felt they needed in the closed Win/Mac world. That never really happened: http://penguindreams.org/blog/the-philosophy-of-open-source-in-community-and-enterprise-software/ http://penguindreams.org/blog/the-philosophy-of-open-source-...

libeclipse 9y ago

I think there's two split types of developers. When I was younger, mostly hanging around on IRC servers and forums, coding just my own cool projects, I strongly believed in the GPL. All of my projects had it, and I wouldn't even dream of allowing someone to use my code without making their entire project open too. That's the first type I think. The second type is the more HN-style professional programmer. Now as I've grown up a little and interacted a lot more with the programming community, I've realised that the GPL licence just causes more pain and frustration to developers. If I want my source code under Apache-2.0, why should I have to change it to GPL just for you. I want anyone to be able to do whatever they want to with my code. That includes developers wanting to create a proprietary application. Telling them they can't is not freedom. I feel we've lost ourselves in the freedom of users and forgotten about the people that make the applications for the users. --- Edit: As a small P.S. to this, I think the middle ground is using the GPL for actual end-user applications, but leaving libraries and developer tools completely open with something like Apache-2.0 or MIT.

Anon_2017124 9y ago
As you correctly say, if you want anyone to be able to do whatever, you're right with choosing a permissive (non-reciprocal) license. GPL cares about the users of the software, not only the developers, and makes sure that, if they receive some software, they also get the source.
- kstenerud 9y ago
  Non-developers don't care about the source.
  - icebraining 9y ago
    A good chunk of my paycheck proves you wrong - we develop custom addons for an Open Source software for non-developers (individuals and companies).
    - kstenerud 9y ago

endymi0n 9y ago

> The use and support of the GPL has grown with it, but new strengths have also emerged related to corporate adoption of open source, leading to stronger growth of associated approaches to licensing. TL;DR: Although we're trying to hide it in hundreds of lines of weaseling and CorpSpeak, yes, it's dying.

pluma 9y ago
Sounds more like "the market is growing but GPL is growing less". Dying would imply lack of growth altogether, no?

avar 9y ago

The main reason for this in my opinion is that the fear free software had of permissive licenses in the 90s by an large didn't come true. The GPL is excellent to guard against the sort of embrace, extend and close that the GPL prevented when it came to GCC, Emacs etc. back in its day, but would likely have otherwise happened. Times are different now, and while there's still some of that going on (e.g. Sony with FreeBSD) for the vast majority of free software out there companies see no point in maintaining some value-added fork, it's just going to cost them money. E.g. SQLite & cURL are a good example of this. Nowadays your project is much more likely to die because of overly restrictive licensing than because some company steals it from you and refuses to give back. Imagine how much smaller SQLite would be if it was GPL 3 instead of public domain, ditto for cURL.

cr0sh 9y ago
> Times are different now Now. But what about tomorrow? Neither you nor I can know what tomorrow will bring. But should it revert back to the old status-quo, what then? What if these self-same companies take all of the nice BSD/MIT/non-GPL'd code, package it up, make it better - so much so that people prefer it over the original! - and sell it, and make a mint off it, and it becomes much more popular. They continue to extend it, but never give anything back to the original authors, and perhaps the original project dies from lack of use by people, and faltering participation of developers because no one is using it. So now - wonderful open source software goes from being open - to closed and proprietary. The users don't care - they are getting great value for their money, right? But the software, which was once open and useful for the developers, is virtually gone. Don't think it could ever change back to this? Don't be a fool. Maybe not in 5 years, or 10 - or maybe it will! History does repeat - or at least echoes loud and clearly. Being prepared for such a possibility is better, in my perspective, than assuming the way things are today is the way they'll always be going forward.
acuozzo 9y ago
> Times are different now This is perhaps due in part to the impact of widespread use of the GPL within the then-emerging FOSS community.

dagw 9y ago

Comparing the mid to late 90s with today it seems hackers have on the whole become more commercially minded. Back in the 90s there was a more idealistic and 'punk' ethos surrounding the hacker scene with documents like the Hacker Manifesto being a thing people actually believed in and aspired to. The GPL fit right into that. Then the world changed a bit and all of a sudden people realized that you could become both a millionaire and even a billionaire as a software developer. And do you know what's cooler than being part of an idealistic punk scene? A billion dollars! Now licenses that got in the way of you making money weren't as attractive anymore. And licenses that made it easier for you to make money off of software written by other people became the new hot thing. That at least is my naive take on what I've observed over the past 20-odd years.

erikbye 9y ago
Who are you calling hackers? Zuckerberg? Creators of Instagram? Snapchat? Please.
err4nt 9y ago
I'll offer a little counterpoint to that. I had known 'free software' as shareware until ~2001 when I had my first introduction to Linux. I was very curious, and took to open source software AND the ideals very easily. Because of my experience as a teenager poking around operating systems, fixing xorg.conf files after compiling nVidia drivers, and running and using thousands of different software applications - tools for many many different jobs I had never been exposed to before. I consider open-source being an education I received that has helped me to use computers and software today. Because I have benefitted so much from open-source, now that I'm in a position where I can write and release software I am very motivated to give back to the same community that first gave to me. I hope that by producing work and releasing it to open-source I can help build up those who follow in my footsteps - and that's a richer treasure than dollars in my pocket. Having said all of this, I can't choose GPL for giving away my own software because the viral nature of it feels like a chain letter. It leaves a really bad taste in your mouth and I wouldn't want anybody to feel compelled to pick between using something I'm TRYING to give away for free and having to GPL their project, or not be able to use something I'm trying to give away for free just because of the license. So I keep choosing MIT, which basically says: 'you have to acknowledge that I wrote it, and you can't sue me because of damages you got from using it' but leaves pretty much any other use (even commercial reselling) open. I can't imagine anybody looking at a piece of code under MIT and having objections, or a reason why the license prevents them from using it - and THAT is the point of free software to me. GPL software is arguably LESS free than the more liberal licenses :D

rbanffy 9y ago

Seems to be a dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14257316 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14257316 Did detection fail?

lorenzhs 9y ago
No, the dupe detector was changed about a year ago to allow for resubmission of articles that failed to gain traction. If you have questions for the mods, email them. Discussing the dupe detector is off-topic and boring.
- rbanffy 9y ago
  Do you have a link to that announcement? I tried to look it up to gather more information without bothering the mods.
  - sctb 9y ago
    This is all I could quickly find: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10203933 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10203933. This change was just to bring the software in line with the FAQ, which has mentioned this since 2014.

nihonde 9y ago

There was a time when it seemed inconceivable that developers would be motivated to release code under MIT or BSD style licenses that lacked the "viral" distribution obligations of the GPL. Back then, it seemed obvious that a healthy open source community was going to need to force "borrowers" of the code to contribute their improvements in order to avoid freeloading. However, the reality is that plenty of healthy open source communities exist on MIT style licenses and even include corporate community members who are willing to subsidize improvements that get merged into the public editions. In this way, the "failure" of GPL is a story about people behaving well as a community without needing to have legal whips cracked at them

douche 9y ago
Damn near everything on npm is MIT licensed. Generally, that's cited as a thriving open-source community. I don't know that that Cambrian explosion happens if people have to deal with the cognitive and legal costs of fussing with the GPL.
watwut 9y ago
Licenses are legal and public relations whips cracked at people. They would not work otherwise.

ajdlinux 9y ago

The last time I went through my employer's process for releasing an open source project, the attorney assigned to our case emailed to ask if we really wanted to choose the GPL, as we'd stated on the application form, because getting approval for MIT or Apache was going to be quicker. We advised that yes, we did want the GPL, and indeed we didn't run into any further problems. Keeping up the good fight in the midst of a megacorp, one tiny little utility at a time...

dleslie 9y ago
In my experience the barrier is always the lawyers.
- asdfjlkasdf88 9y ago
  Anecdotally, part of the reason why is the lawyers I've talked to don't feel like FSF have offered enough clarification regarding legal concerns, and the hostility of the community. When the community will burn you to the ground for inadvertently shipping a binary without code, even after you've apologized and shipped the code, why would legal want to bother with them? There's been half a dozen knee-jerk $XYZ Corp is in gross violation of the GPL! headlines here, only for the conversation to go "No, they're not. Go away." Look at the SystemD thing and countless other situations. The mantra is "open and welcome and use our stuff!" Then they go all Walter if you slip a toe over the line. Neckbeards need to get that they're responsible for the apprehension. It's another form of tribalism. You either need to be perfect in how you fit in, never err, or we'll figuratively tear you a new one.

stonesixone 9y ago

FWIW, both Los Angeles County and the City and County of San Francisco are leaning towards GPL for their open source voting system projects. And these are new, ambitious projects just starting out. For Los Angeles, see page 24 of their RFI: http://vsap.lavote.net/request-for-information/ http://vsap.lavote.net/request-for-information/ For San Francisco, see the March 2017 Director's Report here: http://sfgov.org/electionscommission/commission-agenda-packet-march-15-2017 http://sfgov.org/electionscommission/commission-agenda-packe...

kstenerud 9y ago

I've always likened GPL promoters and promoters of the more permissive licenses to conservatives vs liberals. GPL users are more worried about someone taking and not giving back. Other license users are more worried about lost opportunity to proliferate. In the same way, conservatives are more worried about bad behavior among their fellow citizens, whereas liberals are more worried about lost opportunities for their fellow citizens to grow and flourish. In every endeavor, there is risk and opportunity, and they must be balanced somehow. Conservatives err on the side of reducing risk of bad actors, who can spoil it for everyone. Liberals err on the side of reducing lost opportunities, which prevent us from going forward as a whole. It's also why I won't argue in favor of one over the other. You'd have about as much success arguing in in favor of liberal ideals to a conservative, or conservative ideals to a liberal. Their reasoning is emotional, which is why it gets uncomfortable real fast, and they dig their heels in, pulling all sorts of "facts" to prove their side.

wiz21c 9y ago
To put it in a more positive way : GPL users think about others first and themselves second. Anti-GPL people think the other way around. I wouldn't say either is good or bad, but I'd say they sure don't mix well together.
- kstenerud 9y ago
  Wow, that was fast. You're pro-GPL, and it shows in how you colored your words to favor your side and denigrate the other.
  - wiz21c 9y ago
    well, just like the OP I guess :-) But frankly I didn't mean to make it sound better. I truly think that some people think for themselves first and for the others second. It's not a matter of selfishness, it's a matter of direction. I can think about many people who were positive for the society in both categories. And I'd even say that we tend to change our "colour" every now and then. For example, many private companies are greedy, but it doesn't stop them to provide good things to me (it'd be better if they gave them away for free, but well, they have to make a living too). I'd say GPL is the other direction but as many mentioned, although we may like the idea, we have to recognize that the success (and therefore the value for society) is not exactly massive. But you're right I'm rather "pro GPL, anti capital and maybe a bit of an anarchist too" :-) But well, it doesn't prevent me to work on commercial things and GPL things :-) The fact is that it's very tough to discuss political ideas without getting too involved.

alkonaut 9y ago

I could be inclined to use GPL if I made some end user application rather than library code. Simply because I'd prefer the project not to be forked. If someone invents a great feature for my app, I'd like that to be either merged or killed, not merged into a fork. The problem of the GPL is that it assumes that infinite forking of software is a good thing (more choice!) when the opposite is normally true - it's better to have ONE project that isn't perfect for anyone, but that is easy to find and actively maintained, than it is to have a large number of forks each with the pet feature of different users. For library code it's a different story. If I write a library I'd hope to get commercial use of it. I suppose you could argue that in that case you should be using the LGPL rather than BSD/MIT/CDDL/Apache, but I honesly think the LGPL is underused simply because of it sounds a bit like GPL and it makes people nervous.

icebraining 9y ago
The GPL doesn't prevent others from forking your project, we've seen quite a bit of hostile forks over the years.
- alkonaut 9y ago
  That's true. It prevents closed-source forks only.
- gribbly 9y ago
  True, but this is typically a good thing in my opinion, the code remains fully open all the same and the developers/userbase will determine which project is the better.
gribbly 9y ago
>I could be inclined to use GPL if I made some end user application rather than library code. This very much mirrors my own preference. For popular end user applications there is a clear motive to do proprietary forks with extra features, which would lead to the original open project either lagging in features or having to spend effort in recreating the features of the proprietary fork while the latter can continously take any new features from the open project. For libraries/frameworks however, there is little if any real incentive for proprietary forks since it will be hard get developers buying into that.

sgentle 9y ago

> The GPL is a fine open source license that grants all the permissions needed by developer communities that adopt it. There is no sense in which it is not "permissive", so to use that term as an antonym to "copyleft" verges on abuse. Sigh. This attitude makes it enormously difficult to have any kind of conversation about the tradeoffs of open source licenses, because it reveals a profound lack of perspective or willingness to admit that even your darling license isn't perfect. Can we not just accept that there are two different attitudes towards freedom? One says that true freedom being able to do whatever you want, the other says true freedom is restricting others from infringing on your freedom (and being thus restricted in turn). This is anarchism vs libertarianism, Jon Stewart vs Bill Maher liberalism, and non-interventionism vs neoconservatism. Do you preserve freedom even if you need to do it by causing unfreedom? It's a question that has resisted all attempts to find a simple answer despite generations of attempts. It could be that all these people just need to read the GPL to find out that there's no sense in which being required to do something is not permissive. Or perhaps a little humility is in order, and we could make the effort the understand that different ideologies can, if not agree, at least respect each other.

dleslie 9y ago
An anarchist ought not care what the license terms are; they are already operating in an ethical framework that revokes concern for a collection of words that rely on state violence to have meaning.
- sounds 9y ago
  Cool! A discussion where the anarchists are represented clearly! Do I understand libertarianism the way sgentle does? He compares anarchism:libertarianism::permissive license:GPL, so I guess he's using libertarianism in the sense of "absolute minimum amount of government necessary to enforce property rights." As to whether you preserve freedom best by causing "unfreedoms," philosophy already has some pretty useful things to say, such as ue_'s comment: Hegel ... described the freedom of the savage being a kind of unrefined freedom Some freedoms are conflicting by their very definition. Resolving the conflict is at its core the imposition of an ordering over the set of all freedoms, or in other words, a value system. Almost all the discussion on this article can be reduced to a comparison of well known value systems and attempts to sway readers to one or another.

watwut 9y ago

I would not use GPL for my projects, because I can not use GPL licensed libraries in work. We use plenty of Apache licensed libs, therefore when I did open source contributions I contributed back to that pool. It was no brainer to me. I also like the freedom in it - GPL is a bit about forcing people to do things your way because ideology which is attitude I find offputing. Apache is less political and more giving - here is a thing use it.

belorn 9y ago
When your workplace distribute the software you write to their customers, what political ideology does the license force onto them?
- watwut 9y ago
  What does that have to do with anything? OSS and tech generally likes to praise itself as more rational fact based, but demagoguery is sometimes downright ridiculous. If I distribute open source library under GPL, the advantage of GPL is supposed to be that users of my library have to provide source code to their users. Making it "viral" and preventing them to do close source business. It was written this way because of ideology authors had - treating open source as moral value.
  - smichel17 9y ago
    That's just the thing: software freedom does have moral value. Power imbalances are abused. That's how you end up with stuff like nsa backdoors. Software freedom helps fix the power imbalance between users and developers.
    - watwut 9y ago
      That is kinda like saying that letters being private make it harder to caught terrorists, so we should make it question of morality to make all letters public.
  - belorn 9y ago

geokon 9y ago

I'm a bit surprised "dual licensing" hasn't come up at all in this discussion. To me that is the most logical next-step from the GPL. (ex: The Qt/JUCE people are using it to great effect) - If you want to work on expanding on what I started and then sharing it with everyone, then that's great! - If you want to make money with my work - then lets get in touch and work out some compensation. Seems only fair.. no? It's a little fuzzy because you can have opensource projects that make money, but it fits the general spirit of things. Though I'm not sure how it would work if for instance someone sends you a merge request.... do they have to also send something signing over the rights to their work? Is there a better license that does this automatically? (does anyone know how Qt handles that for example?)

jasonkostempski 9y ago
I'm not 100% sure but I think the GPL prevents itself from being used in a dual license scenario on purpose.
- dbcurtis 9y ago
  No, to find the answer, fall back to copyright law. If you own the copyright to some body of code in entirety, you can license it under as many licenses as you want. GPL for the community, proprietary trade-secret in exchange for money, and everything works fine. But.... if you take a pull request from someone, either they have to sign over copyright to their patch, or else you have to involve them in every relicensing negotiation, because now they are a copyright holder, too, in the work.
- ajross 9y ago
  It doesn't. There's nothing a "license" can do to prevent that. If I own the copyright to something, and I license it to party A under license X and party B under license Y, that's perfectly legal. This happens all the time in the commercial world where big software licenses are often written per-customer. If you make one of those licenses a blanket GPLv3 grant to the whole world, that's perfectly fine. Where it gets sticky is the "ownership" issue. This only works if you're the sole copyright holder. If you've taken contributions from community members to your GPL project, you can't then relicense those to anyone else without approval, of course. This is the big reason behind the desire on the part of big projects for copyright assignment aggreements. Even the FSF does it so they can migrate software to GPLv4 when needed.

shadowmint 9y ago

Just idly... > Deciding which is dominant may well be a matter for your ideological biases rather than an objective absolute. No, it's really not. That's what objective means; that you count the numbers and acknowledge that one number if bigger than another, by a significant margin. > If I can pick my own metric, I can prove anything! Sure, but there are some pretty solid metrics that no one is going to argue you're 'fudging the numbers to suit your bias on'. For example: - Total number of projects with a given license. - Total number of dependencies on projects with a given license. - Total number of new projects with a given license per year/month, normalized. - Total number of new dependencies on a given license per year/month, normalized. What is this rubbish about deciding which license you like the most because you think it has some kind of pretty ethical features, or calling it 'copy left' vs 'reciprocal behaviour'. You're just muddying the waters and making people who support GPL look stupid. Statistics can be jimmied to show a specific tale, its true... but you know what? A bunch of graphs, a raw data set I can check myself and a repo with the software that generated the graphs; I'll believe what I see in that any day over some arbitrary talk about how you can't really ever believe anything because heck, everyone has a bias. Hand waving is a lot easier than actually digging up data and checking the numbers; but it's largely meaningless he-said-she-said-they-said. A little while ago I met some folk who were absolutely convinced that hg was winning the hearts and minds of people around the world (over git). They were and are wrong. So is this post. ...yet people continue to argue the point. I think it's easy to end up trapped in a bubble where all you see is people who agree with you, and you can't see what's really going on. Everyone now and then you actually do need to dig through some hard data yourself and reevaluate your own assumptions I think...

ploggingdev 9y ago

How do investors view a startup that only builds GPL licensed software. Eg- Let's say Gitlab used only GPL, would it be a major red flag to investors? What about businesses, would they be willing to be buy GPL licensed software? Any examples of startups that only build GPL licensed software?

marcinkuzminski 9y ago
When we went to raise money for RhodeCode which was GPL at that time, it was no issue for investors. Nowe we're AGPL and switching the license was no issue for current investors too. Also so far no questions about AGPL beeing a problem for our customers.

motters 9y ago

For software I've written while working at companies I didn't have control over the license choice, but for that which I've written voluntarily nearly all of it (and there's quite a laundry list now) is under GPL or AGPL. This is because, as some other comments have mentioned, I want any other users of the software to have the same capabilities to change it as I did. I don't want there to be secret proprietary versions which then get distributed in closed form denying the potential for participation. The ability of users to have genuine control over their systems has been under sustained attack for a long time. I may be only one developer but at least I can make a small ding in the dark empire of bad software practices.

zzzeek 9y ago

> Surely the number of users using the software is the best metric? no. > Or the number of lines of code under the license? no. > Or the number of committers collectively working on projects under that license? Or the number of published articles advocating for it? sorry, no and no. If I sold cars, and you asked me how popular my car is, the only metric would be, how many did I sell (not how big is it, or how many people it took to build, or how many articles were published about it). This is not a hard question. You can count projects on github and elsewhere and what licenses they are using and that's your answer. the GPL is declining for reasons the author points out, that GPL doesn't work for libraries and frameworks: "For developers mixing ingredients from multiple origins – frameworks, components, libraries – reciprocal license requirements increase the uncertainty rather than decrease it." What he fails to quote a statistic for (and I'd be curious to see) would be what percentage of open source projects are fully realized applications (like LibreOffice) vs. libraries/ frameworks (like the enormous number of libraries for Python, Javascript, Ruby, Go), and how has that number been changing over the years. Years ago I was planning to release SQLAlchemy on the LGPL and I was quickly talked out of it, reminded that the langauge of the LGPL is archaically focused on C-centric concepts like linkers and that it scares the crap out of legal departments. I haven't looked since but it seems like Gnu hasn't improved upon that situation. The author refers to open source as " the “safe space” in which developers with an interest in a piece of software, for whatever reason, are able to collaborate over its evolution without the motivations of others impacting their own usage." - for me and probably most other people, that's a BSD-like license, so that all your collaborators who are after all using your software to produce something in-house at their place of employment, can freely use and contribute to your software without them being hindered by their company legal departments.

faragon 9y ago

BSD/Apache-like licenses are getting most of the traction, because of GPL "viral" issues, e.g. you can not ship GPLv3 Ghostscript with your product, even being "free", as it is not redistributable (the option is to tell the customer that Ghostscript is a "pre-requisite"). Although I have to recognize that 20 years ago I was more idealist than now, I'm not against the GPL, but against using the GPL not for freedom or sharing back modifications, but as a maquivelic vendor lock-in (e.g. spending $$$ in legal advice and some times not being 100% sure if using something is safe or not because of contradictory things).