5 ms·

To me, that feels more like a hidden contract. Giving away for free a software only to require the user to do the same. That's why I prefer BSD-style licenses

by iSnow 8y ago

To me, that feels more like a hidden contract. Giving away for free a software only to require the user to do the same. That's why I prefer BSD-style licenses - when they write "free", they mean "free".

pjmlp 8y ago
And that is why BSDs will never be as big as Linux, companies don't like to give free beer back to the tap. Also why all new open source OSes done companies are all based on BSD/MIT licenses like Zephyr, RTOS, Fuchsia, ... When we get back to PD, Shareware world, don't start complaining companies don't contribute back.
- brobdingnagians 8y ago
  That's kind of the point though. BSD is truly free, and that means there are a lot of proprietary products which benefit massively from it and create worthwhile products with clear monetization strategies and thrive. Sure, they might not contribute back, but the point of the open source was often to share code to improve the state of the art and provide useful code for people so they don't have to start from scratch. Apple took BSD licensed code to make macOS, and it helped them, they contribute some OS code to Darwin, but there are probably lots of happy mac users who benefit immensely from that BSD code. There are lots of people who do BSD code and improve it, just as there are GPL people. Popularity is not always [i.e. almost never] a measure of correctness, principle, or goodness. I like BSD, because any code I release, I hope it helps someone somewhere to do something useful for the world [even when proprietary], and if it does, then great.
  - nbsd4life 8y ago
    Apple isn't the best example. They generally do publish the modified source code to FOSS projects they do, and sometimes they don't add their own license clause, so the changes can get merged back.
    - trasz 8y ago
      It is a good example, because that’s exactly how the BSD license works - it doesn’t force you to give your changes back, but there are other incentives to do so, such as not having to maintain your diffs forever.
  - lmm 8y ago
    "Truly free" is in the eye of the beholder: is a country with laws against slavery more or less free than one without them? I release my code as open-source because I don't want my end users to ever end up unable to fix bugs in the code they're using. I don't want my code used in something like macOS where users are stuck using what they're given; it might help those users in the short term, but I believe it leaves them worse off in the long term.
  - AsyncAwait 8y ago
    Yes, this is the sense of "truly free" that leads to people in the U.S. being able to marry children, not having healthcare taken care of etc. That's a true 'freedom' to go bankrupt, but am not sure that's a 'freedom' many actually want.
  - brobdingnagians 8y ago
    I think most of the commenters on my post misunderstood me very much. I think people should be free to license under GPL, AGPL, SSPL, VXMPL, or whatever the heck they want. I like BSD personally, and it meets my requirements, but someone who has a different need can do what they want. I think GPL has worked well for Linux, and I'm glad they did it the way they did; I think it is less free than BSD, but in a good way for their project and purposes. I think having both a GPL licensed OS and a BSD licensed OS is great. We have diversity of licenses for different purposes and different ideologies, and it enriches the market in a lot of ways. I think forcing everyone to use the same copyleft licenses for everything based on a radical ideology is a dangerous and useless endeavour; and that sort of ideology is completely _not_ free in every sense of the word. Do what you want, set your rules for your project as you wish, we are all better for it.
    - dhuramas 8y ago
      I guess it all comes down to whether one thinks free as in beer is "freer" than free as in freedom. Freedom has a price.
    - AsyncAwait 8y ago
      I don't think you were misunderstood. But, I think the way you think of freedom is that one has an absolute freedom do do whatever, including infringing on other freedoms whereas others disagree. By analogy; if one is free to rob someone, they're more free in absolute terms than they're free if they can't do that, but then the person who is about to get robbed isn't free to feel secure. So in other words, the robber is more free, but at the expense of the robbed. In that sense, the BSD license is more absolutely/selfishly free for the individual, whereas the GPL is more freedom-perusing for the entire community.
  - eadmund 8y ago
    > the point of the open source was often to share code to improve the state of the art and provide useful code for people so they don't have to start from scratch Was that the point of free software? I thought that the point was freedom: that users be permitted to use, modify & redistribute the software they use. Inclusion of BSD-licensed code in proprietary software fails at that: a macOS user is unable to use macOS without paying for it; unable to legally modify it; and even if he did modify unable to legally distribute those modifications. BSD-licensed code is awesome for vendors of proprietary software who want a head start; it's not so great for users.
    - imtringued 8y ago
      You're forgetting that those businesses that depend on your software are your users. The first step of making useful software is by having users. If nobody uses your software because of licensing reasons nobody will ever contribute to it and it might as well not exist. On the other hand if there are users then there is a chance that a subset of the users will contribute back voluntarily.
      - pjmlp 8y ago
        Trying to do business with desktop software proves otherwise regarding contributions.
- trasz 8y ago
  Not true - if you compare various cases of GPL vs BSD, the theory of GPL helping the project just doesn’t hold. See MySQL vs Postgres, or GCC vs LLVM, or various MTAs.
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    LLVM in particular lacks many improvements done by embedded OEMs, one of them being Sony which has only contributed parts of the PS4 toolchain.
    - trasz 8y ago
      Perhaps. But GCC lacks those same improvements from Sony, simply because Sony went with LLVM instead, doesn’t it?
      - pjmlp 8y ago
        That is exactly the point, with GCC the community would have enjoyed those improvements. With LLVM, Sony gets to cut down their compiler research budget, and the community sees whatever Sony feels like giving back, minor improvements without the juicy optimizer sauce that actually matters. Personally I don't care, given I use mostly commercial stuff nowadays, but I do see the return of shareware long term. Then MIT/BSD license advocates can consider how much those licenses are actually worth to the overall community.
        trasz 8y ago
        No - with GCC those improvements never got written, because the license used by GCC prevented it from happening in the first place. The decision whether to share the code usually happens before choosing the codebase to build upon, not the other way around.
        pjmlp 8y ago
        In this specific case, Sony would have been forced to actually spend money doing a compiler from the ground up instead of cutting costs down costs while giving a few crumbs back to keep the plebe happy. What I find ironic with the current anti-GPL trend is the eventual return of the shareware model, then lets see how well the MIT/BSD folks will appreciate it.
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  > And that is why BSDs will never be as big as Linux, companies don't like to give free beer back to the tap BSDs will (perhaps) never be as big as Linux because Linux had first mover advantage in the FOSS operating system world, and hasn't (yet) fumbled it badly enough to be displaced. OTOH, Postgres and SQLite do quite well (with plenty of contributions from big downstream users and sellers), despite being permissively-licensed, and (in Postgres case) despite having a GPL competitor that used to be much further ahead of it in acceptance.
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    BSD was the first mover, getting contributions until the suit happened. A suit that was settled in about 2 years, and Linux also had its own set of suits. Most companies that use BSD seldom give anything back thanks to the license. MySQL is not a competitor to Postgres when one cares about real SQL support.
    - dragonwriter 8y ago
      > MySQL is not a competitor to Postgres when one cares about real SQL support. Which almost no one does, at least not as the sole decision factor. Even while being recognized as better on that dimension, Postgres was far behind MySQL for a number of reasons and caught up because of much stronger contribution from downstream users.
AsyncAwait 8y ago
Just to be clear with regards to BSD vs the GPL - the GPL "free" does not refer to cost.

by iSnow 8y ago

pjmlp 8y ago

And that is why BSDs will never be as big as Linux, companies don't like to give free beer back to the tap. Also why all new open source OSes done companies are all based on BSD/MIT licenses like Zephyr, RTOS, Fuchsia, ... When we get back to PD, Shareware world, don't start complaining companies don't contribute back.

brobdingnagians 8y ago
That's kind of the point though. BSD is truly free, and that means there are a lot of proprietary products which benefit massively from it and create worthwhile products with clear monetization strategies and thrive. Sure, they might not contribute back, but the point of the open source was often to share code to improve the state of the art and provide useful code for people so they don't have to start from scratch. Apple took BSD licensed code to make macOS, and it helped them, they contribute some OS code to Darwin, but there are probably lots of happy mac users who benefit immensely from that BSD code. There are lots of people who do BSD code and improve it, just as there are GPL people. Popularity is not always [i.e. almost never] a measure of correctness, principle, or goodness. I like BSD, because any code I release, I hope it helps someone somewhere to do something useful for the world [even when proprietary], and if it does, then great.
- nbsd4life 8y ago
  Apple isn't the best example. They generally do publish the modified source code to FOSS projects they do, and sometimes they don't add their own license clause, so the changes can get merged back.
  - trasz 8y ago
    It is a good example, because that’s exactly how the BSD license works - it doesn’t force you to give your changes back, but there are other incentives to do so, such as not having to maintain your diffs forever.
- lmm 8y ago
  "Truly free" is in the eye of the beholder: is a country with laws against slavery more or less free than one without them? I release my code as open-source because I don't want my end users to ever end up unable to fix bugs in the code they're using. I don't want my code used in something like macOS where users are stuck using what they're given; it might help those users in the short term, but I believe it leaves them worse off in the long term.
- AsyncAwait 8y ago
  Yes, this is the sense of "truly free" that leads to people in the U.S. being able to marry children, not having healthcare taken care of etc. That's a true 'freedom' to go bankrupt, but am not sure that's a 'freedom' many actually want.
- brobdingnagians 8y ago
  I think most of the commenters on my post misunderstood me very much. I think people should be free to license under GPL, AGPL, SSPL, VXMPL, or whatever the heck they want. I like BSD personally, and it meets my requirements, but someone who has a different need can do what they want. I think GPL has worked well for Linux, and I'm glad they did it the way they did; I think it is less free than BSD, but in a good way for their project and purposes. I think having both a GPL licensed OS and a BSD licensed OS is great. We have diversity of licenses for different purposes and different ideologies, and it enriches the market in a lot of ways. I think forcing everyone to use the same copyleft licenses for everything based on a radical ideology is a dangerous and useless endeavour; and that sort of ideology is completely _not_ free in every sense of the word. Do what you want, set your rules for your project as you wish, we are all better for it.
  - dhuramas 8y ago
    I guess it all comes down to whether one thinks free as in beer is "freer" than free as in freedom. Freedom has a price.
  - AsyncAwait 8y ago
    I don't think you were misunderstood. But, I think the way you think of freedom is that one has an absolute freedom do do whatever, including infringing on other freedoms whereas others disagree. By analogy; if one is free to rob someone, they're more free in absolute terms than they're free if they can't do that, but then the person who is about to get robbed isn't free to feel secure. So in other words, the robber is more free, but at the expense of the robbed. In that sense, the BSD license is more absolutely/selfishly free for the individual, whereas the GPL is more freedom-perusing for the entire community.
- eadmund 8y ago
  > the point of the open source was often to share code to improve the state of the art and provide useful code for people so they don't have to start from scratch Was that the point of free software? I thought that the point was freedom: that users be permitted to use, modify & redistribute the software they use. Inclusion of BSD-licensed code in proprietary software fails at that: a macOS user is unable to use macOS without paying for it; unable to legally modify it; and even if he did modify unable to legally distribute those modifications. BSD-licensed code is awesome for vendors of proprietary software who want a head start; it's not so great for users.
  - imtringued 8y ago
    You're forgetting that those businesses that depend on your software are your users. The first step of making useful software is by having users. If nobody uses your software because of licensing reasons nobody will ever contribute to it and it might as well not exist. On the other hand if there are users then there is a chance that a subset of the users will contribute back voluntarily.
    - pjmlp 8y ago
      Trying to do business with desktop software proves otherwise regarding contributions.
trasz 8y ago
Not true - if you compare various cases of GPL vs BSD, the theory of GPL helping the project just doesn’t hold. See MySQL vs Postgres, or GCC vs LLVM, or various MTAs.
- pjmlp 8y ago
  LLVM in particular lacks many improvements done by embedded OEMs, one of them being Sony which has only contributed parts of the PS4 toolchain.
  - trasz 8y ago
    Perhaps. But GCC lacks those same improvements from Sony, simply because Sony went with LLVM instead, doesn’t it?
    - pjmlp 8y ago
      That is exactly the point, with GCC the community would have enjoyed those improvements. With LLVM, Sony gets to cut down their compiler research budget, and the community sees whatever Sony feels like giving back, minor improvements without the juicy optimizer sauce that actually matters. Personally I don't care, given I use mostly commercial stuff nowadays, but I do see the return of shareware long term. Then MIT/BSD license advocates can consider how much those licenses are actually worth to the overall community.
      - trasz 8y ago
        No - with GCC those improvements never got written, because the license used by GCC prevented it from happening in the first place. The decision whether to share the code usually happens before choosing the codebase to build upon, not the other way around.
        pjmlp 8y ago
        In this specific case, Sony would have been forced to actually spend money doing a compiler from the ground up instead of cutting costs down costs while giving a few crumbs back to keep the plebe happy. What I find ironic with the current anti-GPL trend is the eventual return of the shareware model, then lets see how well the MIT/BSD folks will appreciate it.
dragonwriter 8y ago
> And that is why BSDs will never be as big as Linux, companies don't like to give free beer back to the tap BSDs will (perhaps) never be as big as Linux because Linux had first mover advantage in the FOSS operating system world, and hasn't (yet) fumbled it badly enough to be displaced. OTOH, Postgres and SQLite do quite well (with plenty of contributions from big downstream users and sellers), despite being permissively-licensed, and (in Postgres case) despite having a GPL competitor that used to be much further ahead of it in acceptance.
- pjmlp 8y ago
  BSD was the first mover, getting contributions until the suit happened. A suit that was settled in about 2 years, and Linux also had its own set of suits. Most companies that use BSD seldom give anything back thanks to the license. MySQL is not a competitor to Postgres when one cares about real SQL support.
  - dragonwriter 8y ago
    > MySQL is not a competitor to Postgres when one cares about real SQL support. Which almost no one does, at least not as the sole decision factor. Even while being recognized as better on that dimension, Postgres was far behind MySQL for a number of reasons and caught up because of much stronger contribution from downstream users.

AsyncAwait 8y ago

Just to be clear with regards to BSD vs the GPL - the GPL "free" does not refer to cost.