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I'm actually not sure how this is a failure mode of those licenses. I thought the point of permissive licenses over copyleft licenses is that you're explicitly

I'm actually not sure how this is a failure mode of those licenses. I thought the point of permissive licenses over copyleft licenses is that you're explicitly granting companies the right to make money off your code without giving anything back.

bradleyjg 8y ago
Right. These licenses are a thin layer on top of public domain mostly to disclaim liability. The whole point is that you don’t care what anyone else does with it. If you want a quid pro quo, then you should have been using copyleft (or something else) all along.
wmf 8y ago
Yeah, what has failed is the idea that licenses are all basically the same and thus you should choose whatever license all the cool kids are using lately. We're seeing that licenses matter and you can't choose a permissive license and later complain about "the spirit of open source".
kemitchell 8y ago
You might be interested in this work: https://blog.licensezero.com/2018/11/24/parity-5.0.0.html https://blog.licensezero.com/2018/11/24/parity-5.0.0.html
simonh 8y ago
It's the difference between believing that what matters is user rights and sharing code, and believing that what matters is the world containing more cool stuff. Tim O'Reilly has a story (which I'll probably butcher) where after publishing the BSD manuals as books he was accused by someone at a conference of stealing the author's work. One of the authors stood up and said something like "Actually what Tim is doing is exactly what we want - spreading the material as widely as possible and making it as useful as possible. We knew exactly what we were doing choosing that license". It's the same spirit in which MacOS being based on BSD is fine, even if not a single line of code is shared back. The question isn't "What did Apple share back to BSD programmers recently?", it's "Is the world a better place with MacOS in it as something people can choose to use?". The same applies to Amazon. It simply wouldn't have been possible to build something like Amazon purely on proprietary code, running only proprietary OSes and services. Even if they had, it would have been a lot less interesting. I think it's pretty clear that the world is a better place with services like AWS available. As long as they follow the licenses of the software they use, there isn't a problem, but if some licensors disagree they can always change their license.

bradleyjg 8y ago

Right. These licenses are a thin layer on top of public domain mostly to disclaim liability. The whole point is that you don’t care what anyone else does with it. If you want a quid pro quo, then you should have been using copyleft (or something else) all along.

wmf 8y ago

Yeah, what has failed is the idea that licenses are all basically the same and thus you should choose whatever license all the cool kids are using lately. We're seeing that licenses matter and you can't choose a permissive license and later complain about "the spirit of open source".

kemitchell 8y ago

You might be interested in this work: https://blog.licensezero.com/2018/11/24/parity-5.0.0.html https://blog.licensezero.com/2018/11/24/parity-5.0.0.html

simonh 8y ago

It's the difference between believing that what matters is user rights and sharing code, and believing that what matters is the world containing more cool stuff. Tim O'Reilly has a story (which I'll probably butcher) where after publishing the BSD manuals as books he was accused by someone at a conference of stealing the author's work. One of the authors stood up and said something like "Actually what Tim is doing is exactly what we want - spreading the material as widely as possible and making it as useful as possible. We knew exactly what we were doing choosing that license". It's the same spirit in which MacOS being based on BSD is fine, even if not a single line of code is shared back. The question isn't "What did Apple share back to BSD programmers recently?", it's "Is the world a better place with MacOS in it as something people can choose to use?". The same applies to Amazon. It simply wouldn't have been possible to build something like Amazon purely on proprietary code, running only proprietary OSes and services. Even if they had, it would have been a lot less interesting. I think it's pretty clear that the world is a better place with services like AWS available. As long as they follow the licenses of the software they use, there isn't a problem, but if some licensors disagree they can always change their license.