7 ms·

First, I'm not a lawyer, but I've always seen the MIT license as being more "free", whereas the GPL is more "fair". Both licenses are pretty much the same for

First, I'm not a lawyer, but I've always seen the MIT license as being more "free", whereas the GPL is more "fair". Both licenses are pretty much the same for users of the code. Where they differ is that the MIT license gives you the freedom to make an awesome change to the free code you were given, and add it to your closed source application with no obligation to give those enhancements you made to the code to anyone else. This is more "free". You made the enhancements, why shouldn't you keep them for yourself? It's not unethical since the developer chose that license knowing what it entailed, but it's just less "fair". The GPL is all about making sure that those awesome changes you made can be used by others so that they can make other awesome changes to the code. You were given free code that benefited you, so you should pass on any changes you made to the code to others so they can also benefit from it. And so on. That's my basic understanding of the differences, anyway. I personally prefer the GPL way, but I have yet to use either license on code I've written.

CarVac 7y ago
Permissive licenses give freedom to the developers who use code under that license. The developer is free to restrict the users' freedoms. Copyleft licenses grant freedom to the users of software: a developer cannot restrict a user.
Wowfunhappy 7y ago
> the MIT license gives you the freedom to make an awesome change to the free code you were given, and add it to your closed source application with no obligation to give those enhancements you made to the code to anyone else. It's also the freedom to make zero changes to the free code you were given, reuse it in your closed source software, and pass it off as your own. In a way, I feel like I should be a big enough person to be okay with this, but I'm not. The possibility bothers me.
- umanwizard 7y ago
  Is this meaningfully different from being able to build a multi-billion dollar company like Red Hat on top of other people’s GPLed work? Yes, because of the GPL, they have to give RHEL customers the source to all their patches, but what difference does this make in practice?
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - papln 7y ago
    > but what difference does this make in practice? they have to give RHEL customers the source to all their patches, and allow them to share it with the entire world. In practice, that means everyone gets better software, and RedHat gets compensation for their hard work.
  - jeremyjh 7y ago
    > but what difference does this make in practice? CentOS is the difference; it is one of the most widely used distributions has the same stability and longevity characteristics and gets security fixes just as fast as RHEL.
    - umanwizard 7y ago
      That is a good point. Perhaps a better example would be FAANG making billions and running their servers on Linux, which (IIRC) is what things like the AGPL are designed to prevent.
      - pabs3 7y ago
        The AGPL wouldn't prevent FAANG making billions, just ensure they respect end-user freedom while doing so.
- moftz 7y ago
  The decision between MIT-like licenses and copyleft licenses all depend on the contextual usage of the code. Is it just some quick and dirty script I wrote to convert some obscure binary format to another obscure binary format? I literally do not care who uses it and why/where/when/how. The script was complete the day I made it, it does everything it needs to do and nothing it doesn't. School assignments fall under the same category, they were useful for that moment and will never be needed again. Writing my own linked-list in C++ stopped being useful to me the moment I turned the assignment in so I don't care who uses it. It's not anything special and licensing it any other way would (in theory) only limit someone trying to learn. Did I actually write something clever that could actually be used somewhere helpful? Is it something that I can see others would want to build upon and improve? That's definitely copyleft worthy.
- seandougall 7y ago
  > and pass it off as your own No, the MIT license requires attribution by including the original copyright notice with any distribution of the software. You can claim credit for the parts you build around it, but you can't claim to have written the MIT-licensed part.
- jerf 7y ago
  "In a way, I feel like I should be a big enough person to be okay with this, but I'm not." One of the distinctions I like to draw strongly is between "nice" and "good". They are not the same, and at times, are actively at odds with each other. It is certainly nice to give away your software to everybody, unconditionally, and not be bothered if your code does happen to end up being a fundamental component of some multi-billion-dollar company that gives you nothing. But I'm less convinced that's necessarily good. In a world where you must live under the assumption there are bad actors, I think it's OK to put into your license that they can't necessarily do that. It is good to prevent the exploitation of anybody, and that goodness extends to preventing the exploitation of yourself, even if you also clearly have direct personal interests of your own. I don't think "being comfortable with being exploited" is a component of "being a big person". On the other hand, we often bring to mind mental examples of software where we slaved away for years and years to bring some unique new product to the world, only for it to be stolen by the big bad corporation for no compensation. My verbiage above about "exploitation" probably brought that to the reader's mind as the topic of discussion. If that happens, yeah, it's bad. On the other hand, that's not really the dominant case for software. There's a lot of open source put out there that's just a few day's work, which is still plenty valuable at scale, but if someone took one of these little things and incorporated it into their product, it's not really that big a deal. I have several such small little things and they're all BSD. If a big corporation did somehow walk off with one of them, I'd legitimately be flattered, because I know that while it may have saved them a bit of time, it certainly isn't a core component of their product and had they needed to implement something themselves it would have been a trivial fraction of their time. I know I can say I'd be flattered because to some small extent, this really has happened, and I really was flattered and appreciative, so I'm not just hypothesizing about my future emotional states. I'm well aware on all levels that my ~two weeks total effort on the project in question, which I mostly did for my own purposes and for which the open source effort was essentially a bonus, doesn't entitle me to significant compensation for a product whose size is measured in person-decades.
  - Wowfunhappy 7y ago
    > I don't think "being comfortable with being exploited" is a component of "being a big person". In the context of the types of projects I was imagining, a company would likely just rewrite any code that wasn't available via MIT or similar. If I'm not getting anything in return either way, am I being exploited? Logically, if the outcome is the same for me, there's no reason to make others redo work.
karmakaze 7y ago
Even within the libre-sense there's differing axes of 'free'. You're describing one. Another is from the perspective of the software itself. Similar to the phrase "information wants to be free" (which sounds cheesy but gets the message across), if changes made to the software are kept isolated it's less free to spread which is the motivation for free software before it got fractured into open-source that's less free in that sense.
simion314 7y ago
>First, I'm not a lawyer, but I've always seen the MIT license as being more "free", If you are a lawyer can you maybe be more clear about "more free" , more free relative to what? AFAIK GPL protects the user freedom and I think you are referring at the programmers freedom, GPL is a license that respects the users/society as a group, most people here are developers sothey will say that this is less free for them as an individual, less free to take freedom from others(the freedom to study,modify and distribute).
- wrs 7y ago
  If “users” = “not programmers” (which I think must be the definition here) then neither license gives users anything except the freedom to hire programmers to do something they want more cheaply. (I include buying software and downloading free-as-in-beer software in “hiring programmers”.) With MIT/GPL the programmers can afford to charge a lot less to do the same job. It’s fundamentally programmer freedom in either case. Any user freedom is an indirect side effect.
  - simion314 7y ago
    You are correct if I am using an MIT/BSD program as a user I have all the freedoms the issue is if someone forks it and closes it up making it proprietary. You need to think at the larger picture, compare Linux kernel and BSD and how the licenses affect the projects and all of the users. With Linux GPL prevents parasitic use, like you get Linux, put your proprietary thing on top, close it off and give it to some users, this users will have no freedom to know what the code they run does, no freedom to change it and distribute it. The fact that a user does not code is irrelevant because they ca always pay for others to modify things.
    - c22 7y ago
      But if the proprietary fork is analogous to the original software the "user" can just seek out the MIT-licensed project and start from there. If the fork contains significant functional modifications then it seems fair to let the author of those changes choose how to distribute them. This doesn't restrict user's freedoms anymore than allowing greenfield projects to be proprietary already does. GPL is for people who are concerned with forcing their viewpoint into wider adoption. MIT is for people that are interested in truly gifting their work (and only their work) to society.
kemitchell 7y ago
I am a lawyer, and I really appreciated your "free" versus "fair" line. One tidbit on the GPLs: They require you to share alike if you share the software with others, but do not require you to share the software with others. You can make changes and larger programs entirely for your own or your company's internal use, and not share anything. The GPLs mention this explicitly, and implement it using concepts like "distribute" and "convey". Your obligation to share alike doesn't kick in unless you distribute or convey. That got GPL into trouble later on, when it turned out folks often ran software for others to use over networks, rather than sharing with users in copies for them to install locally. That led eventually to AGPL, a kind of fork of GPL, but outside FSF, also to licenses that simply require sharing back whether you distribute your work or not.
- cflewis 7y ago
  I like the idea of a license that is "fair", but there's something about GPL that rubs me the wrong way where I feel it accomplishes the goal of fair in some antagonistic manner. To me, GPL feels more like holding a legal gun to your head and say "You used my code, now play fair". It's not your Mum asking you nicely to share your toys with your brother. But then MIT is too far the other way where it's your Mum saying that if you don't want to give any toys to your brother even though he gave you a bunch then that's your ethical code and you have to live with it. I wish there was a license that did feel like the "it's the right thing to do" argument without the threat, but I just don't know how you'd achieve that. Even something where you license the core as GPL and then the majority supporting libraries as MIT doesn't feel right to me. As a lawyer, do you have any ideas along these lines?
  - rpeden 7y ago
    It's not as if they spring the GPL licence only after you use the code, though. It's more like "hi there, if you want to use my code, these are the terms under which I've made it available" than "you used my code, now play fair".
  - coldpie 7y ago
    Think of it more as the price you pay for using someone else's work. Just like when you pay $1k for a license to ship some proprietary software, you agree to instead pay for using this code by sharing your source, too. You're free to not pay either price and write your own, of course.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

CarVac 7y ago

Permissive licenses give freedom to the developers who use code under that license. The developer is free to restrict the users' freedoms. Copyleft licenses grant freedom to the users of software: a developer cannot restrict a user.

Wowfunhappy 7y ago

> the MIT license gives you the freedom to make an awesome change to the free code you were given, and add it to your closed source application with no obligation to give those enhancements you made to the code to anyone else. It's also the freedom to make zero changes to the free code you were given, reuse it in your closed source software, and pass it off as your own. In a way, I feel like I should be a big enough person to be okay with this, but I'm not. The possibility bothers me.

umanwizard 7y ago
Is this meaningfully different from being able to build a multi-billion dollar company like Red Hat on top of other people’s GPLed work? Yes, because of the GPL, they have to give RHEL customers the source to all their patches, but what difference does this make in practice?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- papln 7y ago
  > but what difference does this make in practice? they have to give RHEL customers the source to all their patches, and allow them to share it with the entire world. In practice, that means everyone gets better software, and RedHat gets compensation for their hard work.
- jeremyjh 7y ago
  > but what difference does this make in practice? CentOS is the difference; it is one of the most widely used distributions has the same stability and longevity characteristics and gets security fixes just as fast as RHEL.
  - umanwizard 7y ago
    That is a good point. Perhaps a better example would be FAANG making billions and running their servers on Linux, which (IIRC) is what things like the AGPL are designed to prevent.
    - pabs3 7y ago
      The AGPL wouldn't prevent FAANG making billions, just ensure they respect end-user freedom while doing so.
moftz 7y ago
The decision between MIT-like licenses and copyleft licenses all depend on the contextual usage of the code. Is it just some quick and dirty script I wrote to convert some obscure binary format to another obscure binary format? I literally do not care who uses it and why/where/when/how. The script was complete the day I made it, it does everything it needs to do and nothing it doesn't. School assignments fall under the same category, they were useful for that moment and will never be needed again. Writing my own linked-list in C++ stopped being useful to me the moment I turned the assignment in so I don't care who uses it. It's not anything special and licensing it any other way would (in theory) only limit someone trying to learn. Did I actually write something clever that could actually be used somewhere helpful? Is it something that I can see others would want to build upon and improve? That's definitely copyleft worthy.
seandougall 7y ago
> and pass it off as your own No, the MIT license requires attribution by including the original copyright notice with any distribution of the software. You can claim credit for the parts you build around it, but you can't claim to have written the MIT-licensed part.
jerf 7y ago
"In a way, I feel like I should be a big enough person to be okay with this, but I'm not." One of the distinctions I like to draw strongly is between "nice" and "good". They are not the same, and at times, are actively at odds with each other. It is certainly nice to give away your software to everybody, unconditionally, and not be bothered if your code does happen to end up being a fundamental component of some multi-billion-dollar company that gives you nothing. But I'm less convinced that's necessarily good. In a world where you must live under the assumption there are bad actors, I think it's OK to put into your license that they can't necessarily do that. It is good to prevent the exploitation of anybody, and that goodness extends to preventing the exploitation of yourself, even if you also clearly have direct personal interests of your own. I don't think "being comfortable with being exploited" is a component of "being a big person". On the other hand, we often bring to mind mental examples of software where we slaved away for years and years to bring some unique new product to the world, only for it to be stolen by the big bad corporation for no compensation. My verbiage above about "exploitation" probably brought that to the reader's mind as the topic of discussion. If that happens, yeah, it's bad. On the other hand, that's not really the dominant case for software. There's a lot of open source put out there that's just a few day's work, which is still plenty valuable at scale, but if someone took one of these little things and incorporated it into their product, it's not really that big a deal. I have several such small little things and they're all BSD. If a big corporation did somehow walk off with one of them, I'd legitimately be flattered, because I know that while it may have saved them a bit of time, it certainly isn't a core component of their product and had they needed to implement something themselves it would have been a trivial fraction of their time. I know I can say I'd be flattered because to some small extent, this really has happened, and I really was flattered and appreciative, so I'm not just hypothesizing about my future emotional states. I'm well aware on all levels that my ~two weeks total effort on the project in question, which I mostly did for my own purposes and for which the open source effort was essentially a bonus, doesn't entitle me to significant compensation for a product whose size is measured in person-decades.
- Wowfunhappy 7y ago
  > I don't think "being comfortable with being exploited" is a component of "being a big person". In the context of the types of projects I was imagining, a company would likely just rewrite any code that wasn't available via MIT or similar. If I'm not getting anything in return either way, am I being exploited? Logically, if the outcome is the same for me, there's no reason to make others redo work.

karmakaze 7y ago

Even within the libre-sense there's differing axes of 'free'. You're describing one. Another is from the perspective of the software itself. Similar to the phrase "information wants to be free" (which sounds cheesy but gets the message across), if changes made to the software are kept isolated it's less free to spread which is the motivation for free software before it got fractured into open-source that's less free in that sense.

simion314 7y ago

>First, I'm not a lawyer, but I've always seen the MIT license as being more "free", If you are a lawyer can you maybe be more clear about "more free" , more free relative to what? AFAIK GPL protects the user freedom and I think you are referring at the programmers freedom, GPL is a license that respects the users/society as a group, most people here are developers sothey will say that this is less free for them as an individual, less free to take freedom from others(the freedom to study,modify and distribute).

wrs 7y ago
If “users” = “not programmers” (which I think must be the definition here) then neither license gives users anything except the freedom to hire programmers to do something they want more cheaply. (I include buying software and downloading free-as-in-beer software in “hiring programmers”.) With MIT/GPL the programmers can afford to charge a lot less to do the same job. It’s fundamentally programmer freedom in either case. Any user freedom is an indirect side effect.
- simion314 7y ago
  You are correct if I am using an MIT/BSD program as a user I have all the freedoms the issue is if someone forks it and closes it up making it proprietary. You need to think at the larger picture, compare Linux kernel and BSD and how the licenses affect the projects and all of the users. With Linux GPL prevents parasitic use, like you get Linux, put your proprietary thing on top, close it off and give it to some users, this users will have no freedom to know what the code they run does, no freedom to change it and distribute it. The fact that a user does not code is irrelevant because they ca always pay for others to modify things.
  - c22 7y ago
    But if the proprietary fork is analogous to the original software the "user" can just seek out the MIT-licensed project and start from there. If the fork contains significant functional modifications then it seems fair to let the author of those changes choose how to distribute them. This doesn't restrict user's freedoms anymore than allowing greenfield projects to be proprietary already does. GPL is for people who are concerned with forcing their viewpoint into wider adoption. MIT is for people that are interested in truly gifting their work (and only their work) to society.

kemitchell 7y ago

I am a lawyer, and I really appreciated your "free" versus "fair" line. One tidbit on the GPLs: They require you to share alike if you share the software with others, but do not require you to share the software with others. You can make changes and larger programs entirely for your own or your company's internal use, and not share anything. The GPLs mention this explicitly, and implement it using concepts like "distribute" and "convey". Your obligation to share alike doesn't kick in unless you distribute or convey. That got GPL into trouble later on, when it turned out folks often ran software for others to use over networks, rather than sharing with users in copies for them to install locally. That led eventually to AGPL, a kind of fork of GPL, but outside FSF, also to licenses that simply require sharing back whether you distribute your work or not.

cflewis 7y ago
I like the idea of a license that is "fair", but there's something about GPL that rubs me the wrong way where I feel it accomplishes the goal of fair in some antagonistic manner. To me, GPL feels more like holding a legal gun to your head and say "You used my code, now play fair". It's not your Mum asking you nicely to share your toys with your brother. But then MIT is too far the other way where it's your Mum saying that if you don't want to give any toys to your brother even though he gave you a bunch then that's your ethical code and you have to live with it. I wish there was a license that did feel like the "it's the right thing to do" argument without the threat, but I just don't know how you'd achieve that. Even something where you license the core as GPL and then the majority supporting libraries as MIT doesn't feel right to me. As a lawyer, do you have any ideas along these lines?
- rpeden 7y ago
  It's not as if they spring the GPL licence only after you use the code, though. It's more like "hi there, if you want to use my code, these are the terms under which I've made it available" than "you used my code, now play fair".
- coldpie 7y ago
  Think of it more as the price you pay for using someone else's work. Just like when you pay $1k for a license to ship some proprietary software, you agree to instead pay for using this code by sharing your source, too. You're free to not pay either price and write your own, of course.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]