5 ms·

Can somebody clarify for me - if you write 9,990 lines of proprietary code and include 10 lines of GPL code, the whole 10,000 becomes GPL, right? And then the w

by rmtech 7y ago

Can somebody clarify for me - if you write 9,990 lines of proprietary code and include 10 lines of GPL code, the whole 10,000 becomes GPL, right? And then the whole 10,000 becomes public property according to the GPL so the person who wrote the 9,990 lines of proprietary code starves to death and dies because you can't monetize public property, and our food system only accepts money in exchange for food, not "good deeds" or whatever? If so, then this is what people mean when they say the GPL is a "general public virus".

evmar 7y ago
If I make a movie and include your copyrighted song for just three minutes of the intro, my whole movie violates the law. Or if I write a book and copy-paste just one chapter you wrote on your blog into it, the book also violated your copyright. And I "starve to death and die" because yes, in this world you can't just take things that other people have made and use them in whatever way you like -- if you can't obey the terms that someone else has given for the use of their creative work, then don't use their work.
- rmtech 7y ago
  > if you can't obey the terms that someone else has given for the use of their creative work, then don't use their work. Yes I agree, but the conclusion to this is that you probably should never use the GPL. If you want other people to be able to use your code, use the MIT license. If you want to monetize your code/keep it secret/sell it, then don't try to open-source it. The GPL makes code radioactive and useless to everyone. I get the intent in the OP that people should obey the golden rule and only build open source on open source. But what actually happens in my limited experience is that when a company comes across GPL code, the boss asks you to find equivalent code with an MIT license and ditch the GPL code. If no such MIT code exists, the boss asks you to find another way, or to rewrite the GPL code yourself and keep it secret, or maybe even release it as MIT code. GPL code is a dead end because it poisons other code. And the fundamental reason for this is that programmers have to get money somehow, which almost always means being able to have some of the code they write as closed-source. MIT allows closed and open source to exist side-by-side. You can write some code that does something, release it under the MIT license on GitHub, and also use it as a component of your company's proprietary product which ultimately pays for you to eat and live. And this problem recurses. If I am not in a corporate setting and I am choosing between a GPL library or an equivalent MIT library to use in my own open source application, I should choose the MIT one because otherwise my open source code becomes "infected" with GPL, meaning that people in a corporate setting can't use it. If I'm deciding which library to learn as a hobby I should choose the MIT one because that will be useful for getting a job. Etc. GPL will IMO be radioactive for as long as we insist that most programmers have to sell something in order to have a house to live in and food on the table. If the rest of society sets up a big fund to hand out money to programmers who make useful software, then we can talk about GPL. But actually even if such a fund existed I still think MIT would be better.
  - mathnmusic 7y ago
    GPL is an activist license. They have a worldview that they think is more right than others. It's of course not optimal for everyone. They think that closed source software is "morally wrong", and therefore "allowing closed and open source to exist side-by-side" is not really their goal. As a user, I prefer GPL's activist stance, rather than MIT license's non-activist approach which essentially translates to an ethics of "might is right".
    - rmtech 7y ago
      > They think that closed source software is "morally wrong", and therefore "allowing closed and open source to exist side-by-side" is not really their goal. OK, that's nice but can these people explain to me how I should pay rent?
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      - icebraining 7y ago
        Work for one of the thousands of companies that pay you to write GPL licensed code? I can give you some references, having worked for one for a few years (specifically, we wrote Odoo modules for various businesses).
        rmtech 7y ago
        And how does the company get money?
        icebraining 7y ago
        Sales of the modules, optional support contracts, and SaaS hosting of the GPL application and our GPL modules for people who prefer it to self-hosting.
  - mcsofake 7y ago
- filmgirlcw 7y ago
  Except that analogy doesn't quite work. If you use a copyrighted song in a movie, you can choose to license that song (and the terms of use and cost will be up to the rights holder) -- licensing that song doesn't give the rights holder reciprocal access to your film. So yes, I agree with you that you need to obey the terms someone else has used for their work, or else you shouldn't use the work -- but your analogy with regards to a film or a book isn't accurate.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - mcguire 7y ago
    You are welcome to negotiate a second license to avoid the GPL.
    - rmtech 7y ago
      > You are welcome to negotiate a second license to avoid the GPL. I have seen this in real life a few times. Usually something gets released under the GPL and then the authors ask for $ to hand it out with a commercial license on a case-by-case basis. But in practice it is difficult to negotiate a truly fair price if the market is somewhat thin and the size of the code is relatively small. I've seen this for ML datasets for example, collected using taxpayers' money and the author wants $50k per license to allow a company to use it. But that $50k represents what the author thinks they can get away with, not the true value of the dataset to your algorithm. In reality companies (in my experience) stay away from this, and for good reason. In cases like this I definitely wish GPL didn't exist, because if the academics who made the dataset had to choose between MIT or secret/proprietary, they would not be able to get away with Keeping their taxpayer funded dataset secret. (Because then taxpayers would be like "yo, wtf are we paying you for?"). One reason open source is good is that code markets just don't seem to work very well. But the good kind of open source is MIT licensed code.
      - mcguire 7y ago
        "But that $50k represents what the author thinks they can get away with, not the true value of the dataset to your algorithm." That is how the market works, right? The price of something is set not by the "value" but by what the seller can get. Researchers "get away" with keeping their data proprietary all the time.
mathnmusic 7y ago
> if you write 9,990 lines of proprietary code and include 10 lines of GPL code, the whole 10,000 becomes GPL, right? NO. GPL mentions no where about 10 being the minimum # of lines. All it says is that if your work is a "derivative" of the GPL code, then it must be GPL'd. Courts will determine whether including 10 lines of GPL code make your product derivative or not. The assumption is that a reasonable criteria will be evolved to determine when is something derivative and when it isn't.
- rmtech 7y ago
  > Courts will determine whether including 10 lines of GPL code make your product derivative or not. OK but in reality that means the cost of including those 10 lines is that you are exposing yourself to an unknown amount of legal risk, and our legal system has a highly nonlinear penalty system, so it's basically as if the 10 lines infect your whole codebase with GPL.
  - mathnmusic 7y ago
    I feel this is a bit of exaggeration. You are copying someone else's work without complying with their license. That act, not the fact that it is GPL, is exposing yourself to unknown amount of legal risk. Legal system does have nonlinear penalty system but at the same time, judgments are expected to be reasonable and fair. Courts will not force you to GPL your code, but they may stop you from distributing your work - which is EXACTLY what they'd also do in case of a plain old copyrighted work. In the best case, GPL gives you more freedoms and in the worst case, it reduces to standard copyright law. To reduce the risk, you can go through how courts have interpreted and applied the definition of what a "derivative" work is.
    - rmtech 7y ago
      > You are copying someone else's work without complying with their license. That act, not the fact that it is GPL Right, so the correct conclusion is to never use, never contribute to and never write GPL-licensed software. Then you comply 100% with GPL, you have no legal risk and you also have money to pay for your Gatorade. In fact the best solution would just be to completely rid ourselves of GPL?
pessimizer 7y ago
If you wrote 9,990 lines of proprietary code and included 10 lines of proprietary code from another company, I imagine that your entire program would have to be approved of by the other company in writing, or you wouldn't be able to distribute it. What's supposed to be the difference here?
- rmtech 7y ago
  > proprietary code ... What's supposed to be the difference here? The difference is that GPL is claiming to not be proprietary...
  - icebraining 7y ago
    Which is why you don't need to ask for permission, just follow the license.
    - rmtech 7y ago
      If you're a business, the license effectively says "you can't use this software" though, because as discussed previously it makes all the software that it touches into GPL software so you can't sell it, which is the point of a business.
      - icebraining 7y ago
        You can sell GPL software. It paid my salary for years.
        rmtech 7y ago
        I don't understand?
        icebraining 7y ago
        What is there to understand? We sold GPL licensed extensions to a GPL application, and made money. All perfectly valid under the license: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html
craigsmansion 7y ago
> if you write 9,990 lines of proprietary code and include 10 lines of GPL code, the whole 10,000 becomes GPL, right? No. The 9990 lines remain under whatever license you desire. The 10 lines remain GPL. You can't distribute the whole work. > And then the whole 10,000 becomes public property according to the GPL The GPL doesn't make software "public property", whatever you think that entails. > so the person who wrote the 9,990 lines of proprietary code starves to death and dies because you can't monetize public property, No capable programmers starve to death, or even earn poorly because of the GPL. Approximately 90% of programming work is in-house development. > because you can't monetize public property, I don't know what this means; the GPL isn't about commercial software but proprietary software. >and our food system only accepts money in exchange for food, not "good deeds" or whatever? Again, I don't know what this means or what money (or even food), have to do with anything. >If so, then this is what people mean when they say the GPL is a "general public virus". If so, they are woefully misinformed and shouldn't be writing any sort of detraction lightly disguised as a very poor analysis online when the GPL is being discussed.
- bscphil 7y ago
  >> if you write 9,990 lines of proprietary code and include 10 lines of GPL code, the whole 10,000 becomes GPL, right? > No. The 9990 lines remain under whatever license you desire. The 10 lines remain GPL. You can't distribute the whole work. It would be more accurate to say that if you distribute a combined / derivative work that incorporates those 10 lines of GPL code, you have to do so under the terms of the GPL. To do otherwise is copyright infringement of the GPL code.

by rmtech 7y ago

evmar 7y ago

If I make a movie and include your copyrighted song for just three minutes of the intro, my whole movie violates the law. Or if I write a book and copy-paste just one chapter you wrote on your blog into it, the book also violated your copyright. And I "starve to death and die" because yes, in this world you can't just take things that other people have made and use them in whatever way you like -- if you can't obey the terms that someone else has given for the use of their creative work, then don't use their work.

rmtech 7y ago
> if you can't obey the terms that someone else has given for the use of their creative work, then don't use their work. Yes I agree, but the conclusion to this is that you probably should never use the GPL. If you want other people to be able to use your code, use the MIT license. If you want to monetize your code/keep it secret/sell it, then don't try to open-source it. The GPL makes code radioactive and useless to everyone. I get the intent in the OP that people should obey the golden rule and only build open source on open source. But what actually happens in my limited experience is that when a company comes across GPL code, the boss asks you to find equivalent code with an MIT license and ditch the GPL code. If no such MIT code exists, the boss asks you to find another way, or to rewrite the GPL code yourself and keep it secret, or maybe even release it as MIT code. GPL code is a dead end because it poisons other code. And the fundamental reason for this is that programmers have to get money somehow, which almost always means being able to have some of the code they write as closed-source. MIT allows closed and open source to exist side-by-side. You can write some code that does something, release it under the MIT license on GitHub, and also use it as a component of your company's proprietary product which ultimately pays for you to eat and live. And this problem recurses. If I am not in a corporate setting and I am choosing between a GPL library or an equivalent MIT library to use in my own open source application, I should choose the MIT one because otherwise my open source code becomes "infected" with GPL, meaning that people in a corporate setting can't use it. If I'm deciding which library to learn as a hobby I should choose the MIT one because that will be useful for getting a job. Etc. GPL will IMO be radioactive for as long as we insist that most programmers have to sell something in order to have a house to live in and food on the table. If the rest of society sets up a big fund to hand out money to programmers who make useful software, then we can talk about GPL. But actually even if such a fund existed I still think MIT would be better.
- mathnmusic 7y ago
  GPL is an activist license. They have a worldview that they think is more right than others. It's of course not optimal for everyone. They think that closed source software is "morally wrong", and therefore "allowing closed and open source to exist side-by-side" is not really their goal. As a user, I prefer GPL's activist stance, rather than MIT license's non-activist approach which essentially translates to an ethics of "might is right".
  - rmtech 7y ago
    > They think that closed source software is "morally wrong", and therefore "allowing closed and open source to exist side-by-side" is not really their goal. OK, that's nice but can these people explain to me how I should pay rent?
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - icebraining 7y ago
      Work for one of the thousands of companies that pay you to write GPL licensed code? I can give you some references, having worked for one for a few years (specifically, we wrote Odoo modules for various businesses).
      - rmtech 7y ago
        And how does the company get money?
        icebraining 7y ago
        Sales of the modules, optional support contracts, and SaaS hosting of the GPL application and our GPL modules for people who prefer it to self-hosting.
- mcsofake 7y ago
filmgirlcw 7y ago
Except that analogy doesn't quite work. If you use a copyrighted song in a movie, you can choose to license that song (and the terms of use and cost will be up to the rights holder) -- licensing that song doesn't give the rights holder reciprocal access to your film. So yes, I agree with you that you need to obey the terms someone else has used for their work, or else you shouldn't use the work -- but your analogy with regards to a film or a book isn't accurate.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- mcguire 7y ago
  You are welcome to negotiate a second license to avoid the GPL.
  - rmtech 7y ago
    > You are welcome to negotiate a second license to avoid the GPL. I have seen this in real life a few times. Usually something gets released under the GPL and then the authors ask for $ to hand it out with a commercial license on a case-by-case basis. But in practice it is difficult to negotiate a truly fair price if the market is somewhat thin and the size of the code is relatively small. I've seen this for ML datasets for example, collected using taxpayers' money and the author wants $50k per license to allow a company to use it. But that $50k represents what the author thinks they can get away with, not the true value of the dataset to your algorithm. In reality companies (in my experience) stay away from this, and for good reason. In cases like this I definitely wish GPL didn't exist, because if the academics who made the dataset had to choose between MIT or secret/proprietary, they would not be able to get away with Keeping their taxpayer funded dataset secret. (Because then taxpayers would be like "yo, wtf are we paying you for?"). One reason open source is good is that code markets just don't seem to work very well. But the good kind of open source is MIT licensed code.
    - mcguire 7y ago
      "But that $50k represents what the author thinks they can get away with, not the true value of the dataset to your algorithm." That is how the market works, right? The price of something is set not by the "value" but by what the seller can get. Researchers "get away" with keeping their data proprietary all the time.

mathnmusic 7y ago

> if you write 9,990 lines of proprietary code and include 10 lines of GPL code, the whole 10,000 becomes GPL, right? NO. GPL mentions no where about 10 being the minimum # of lines. All it says is that if your work is a "derivative" of the GPL code, then it must be GPL'd. Courts will determine whether including 10 lines of GPL code make your product derivative or not. The assumption is that a reasonable criteria will be evolved to determine when is something derivative and when it isn't.

rmtech 7y ago
> Courts will determine whether including 10 lines of GPL code make your product derivative or not. OK but in reality that means the cost of including those 10 lines is that you are exposing yourself to an unknown amount of legal risk, and our legal system has a highly nonlinear penalty system, so it's basically as if the 10 lines infect your whole codebase with GPL.
- mathnmusic 7y ago
  I feel this is a bit of exaggeration. You are copying someone else's work without complying with their license. That act, not the fact that it is GPL, is exposing yourself to unknown amount of legal risk. Legal system does have nonlinear penalty system but at the same time, judgments are expected to be reasonable and fair. Courts will not force you to GPL your code, but they may stop you from distributing your work - which is EXACTLY what they'd also do in case of a plain old copyrighted work. In the best case, GPL gives you more freedoms and in the worst case, it reduces to standard copyright law. To reduce the risk, you can go through how courts have interpreted and applied the definition of what a "derivative" work is.
  - rmtech 7y ago
    > You are copying someone else's work without complying with their license. That act, not the fact that it is GPL Right, so the correct conclusion is to never use, never contribute to and never write GPL-licensed software. Then you comply 100% with GPL, you have no legal risk and you also have money to pay for your Gatorade. In fact the best solution would just be to completely rid ourselves of GPL?

pessimizer 7y ago

If you wrote 9,990 lines of proprietary code and included 10 lines of proprietary code from another company, I imagine that your entire program would have to be approved of by the other company in writing, or you wouldn't be able to distribute it. What's supposed to be the difference here?

rmtech 7y ago
> proprietary code ... What's supposed to be the difference here? The difference is that GPL is claiming to not be proprietary...
- icebraining 7y ago
  Which is why you don't need to ask for permission, just follow the license.
  - rmtech 7y ago
    If you're a business, the license effectively says "you can't use this software" though, because as discussed previously it makes all the software that it touches into GPL software so you can't sell it, which is the point of a business.
    - icebraining 7y ago
      You can sell GPL software. It paid my salary for years.
      - rmtech 7y ago
        I don't understand?
        icebraining 7y ago
        What is there to understand? We sold GPL licensed extensions to a GPL application, and made money. All perfectly valid under the license: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html

craigsmansion 7y ago

> if you write 9,990 lines of proprietary code and include 10 lines of GPL code, the whole 10,000 becomes GPL, right? No. The 9990 lines remain under whatever license you desire. The 10 lines remain GPL. You can't distribute the whole work. > And then the whole 10,000 becomes public property according to the GPL The GPL doesn't make software "public property", whatever you think that entails. > so the person who wrote the 9,990 lines of proprietary code starves to death and dies because you can't monetize public property, No capable programmers starve to death, or even earn poorly because of the GPL. Approximately 90% of programming work is in-house development. > because you can't monetize public property, I don't know what this means; the GPL isn't about commercial software but proprietary software. >and our food system only accepts money in exchange for food, not "good deeds" or whatever? Again, I don't know what this means or what money (or even food), have to do with anything. >If so, then this is what people mean when they say the GPL is a "general public virus". If so, they are woefully misinformed and shouldn't be writing any sort of detraction lightly disguised as a very poor analysis online when the GPL is being discussed.

bscphil 7y ago
>> if you write 9,990 lines of proprietary code and include 10 lines of GPL code, the whole 10,000 becomes GPL, right? > No. The 9990 lines remain under whatever license you desire. The 10 lines remain GPL. You can't distribute the whole work. It would be more accurate to say that if you distribute a combined / derivative work that incorporates those 10 lines of GPL code, you have to do so under the terms of the GPL. To do otherwise is copyright infringement of the GPL code.