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libgit2 is used by GitHub (a Microsoft product); bash is packaged in macOS (an Apple product); MySQL is served in RDS (an Amazon product). Companies find vario

libgit2 is used by GitHub (a Microsoft product); bash is packaged in macOS (an Apple product); MySQL is served in RDS (an Amazon product). Companies find various ways to ship GPL software, depending on the situation. Sometimes it requires discussing it with the authors. Overall, it does ensure greater protection on the authors and on the propagation of the software.

jakobegger 8y ago
libgit2 has a "linking excemption", which is probably the only reason why Github can use it, so that's a bad example, because it isn't really GPL (it's more like LGPL). Shipping bash as a part of macOS is not what I had in mind. (and it's funny, because macOS ships an ancient version of bash, because they don't want to touch GPL3...) As for Amazon RDS, I thought that was SaaS? So they don't "ship" it either... I mean the whole purpose of GPL is to make using it with closed source difficult / impossible. And in practice, apart from the big Open Source projects, GPL is used a lot by people who don't want to give away their code for free, they just want to get people to pay for a commercial license. Which is odd, because it feels like it is totally against the spirit of the free software movement.
- rabidrat 8y ago
  > Which is odd, because it feels like it is totally against the spirit of the free software movement. And yet, it is completely within the original intended spirit. It is not about "giving source code away for free", it is about the user (who may very well have paid for the right to use the software) being "free" to do whatever they want with it...up to and including modifying the source code for their own benefit. With traditional proprietary (aka "non-free") software, even if you had access to the source code, you are not legally allowed to modify it. And then GPL goes a step further and allows you to redistribute your modifications! That's freedom. The idea that "open source" means "give everything away" is imho one of the primary mistakes of the "free software" movement. and why RMS now encourages the term "libre software" instead. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html

jakobegger 8y ago

libgit2 has a "linking excemption", which is probably the only reason why Github can use it, so that's a bad example, because it isn't really GPL (it's more like LGPL). Shipping bash as a part of macOS is not what I had in mind. (and it's funny, because macOS ships an ancient version of bash, because they don't want to touch GPL3...) As for Amazon RDS, I thought that was SaaS? So they don't "ship" it either... I mean the whole purpose of GPL is to make using it with closed source difficult / impossible. And in practice, apart from the big Open Source projects, GPL is used a lot by people who don't want to give away their code for free, they just want to get people to pay for a commercial license. Which is odd, because it feels like it is totally against the spirit of the free software movement.

rabidrat 8y ago
> Which is odd, because it feels like it is totally against the spirit of the free software movement. And yet, it is completely within the original intended spirit. It is not about "giving source code away for free", it is about the user (who may very well have paid for the right to use the software) being "free" to do whatever they want with it...up to and including modifying the source code for their own benefit. With traditional proprietary (aka "non-free") software, even if you had access to the source code, you are not legally allowed to modify it. And then GPL goes a step further and allows you to redistribute your modifications! That's freedom. The idea that "open source" means "give everything away" is imho one of the primary mistakes of the "free software" movement. and why RMS now encourages the term "libre software" instead. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html