5 ms·

>Sun could have written a license that was not GPL (to satisfy IHVs) but was compatible with GPL Why? Why even care about GPL? It's 100% compatible to MIT/BSD/

by nix23 6y ago

>Sun could have written a license that was not GPL (to satisfy IHVs) but was compatible with GPL Why? Why even care about GPL? It's 100% compatible to MIT/BSD/ISC and that's enough, even Linus said that he probably would choose the ISC today, he chose mainly the GPL because GCC had it...and now they have GPLv3 (an absolute shit decision if you ask me).

toyg 6y ago
(ISC is a troublesome license, but that's beyond the point) Licenses are not adopted in a vacuum. The license is what made GCC what it was when Linus had to pick a license, and arguably what made Linux what it is today. A "BSD Linux" would have likely ended up the same way BSD systems have: a largely academic project routinely cannibalized by behemoth closed-source companies. The question, yesterday and today, is really "why not care about the GPL?". The rights it grants are what made the F/OSS ecosystem what it is today. If you want to grant more rights to your users and developers, by all means use a less restrictive but compatible license like modified BSD, or MPL 2. It's easier to do that without fear of withering, now that opensource is the de-facto default choice in a lot of fields. It definitely was not as easy back in the '90s or early '00s, which is when the GPL effectively fought the war for the whole field. If you choose to stick with pre-MPL2 derivatives, though, you are clearly not interested in granting users and developers the same basic rights as the GPL.
- nix23 6y ago
  Look the problem is, you CAN make Linux as proprietary as you want if you DON'T redistribute it, like google, so google cannibalizes Linux too. It's just a different vision, if you want real freedom and want to work with a community go with BSD/MIT. >ended up the same way BSD systems have: a largely academic project routinely cannibalized by behemoth closed-source companies. That's BS, just look at how Netflix and Dell EMC work with FreeBSD. And for example Juniper, they learned a lesson not working with the community and fell far behind because of that. https://www.freebsd.org/releases/12.0R/relnotes.html https://www.freebsd.org/releases/12.0R/relnotes.html
  - toyg 6y ago
    I am not going to argue beliefs, MIT/BSD and GPL are compatible. My point on cannibalization was in the historical context. Today the situation is different (thanks largely to what the GPL did in the past). And of course Linux is GPL2, not 3 - which would address some of the issues you raise. All of these licenses would have avoided the problems we see with ZFS' adoption of CDDL or other MPL1 derivatives.
    - trasz 6y ago
      The historical context is that Linux had a proper community support at the time when everyone was looking for Unix on x86, to migrate off RISC workstations, and BSDs at the time were either a bunch of jerks, or had unclear status due to ATT vs UCB lawsuit. You could try to argue that licensing had played a role at this, but experience with other projects suggests otherwise.
      - toyg 6y ago
        You know what enabled that "proper community"? A license that provided a sort of moral compass, fostering collaboration and goodwill towards shared improvement, safe in the knowledge that efforts wouldn't be abused. Something that other licenses still fail to provide, to this day.
        trasz 6y ago
        Except that communities work equally well with other licenses. GPL doesn’t enable anything; there’s just no correlation there.
        toyg 6y ago
        > Except that communities work equally well with other licenses. Today. Not in the '90s cut-throat "pirates of SV" environment.
        6y ago
- trasz 6y ago
  Even a cursory look at the open source ecosystem shows that GPL doesn't work like that. In fact, you can easily find examples that show the exact opposite: look what happened to MySQL, while Postgres continues to thrive. Look at GPL-licensed X11 implementations, or GPL web servers, or DNS servers (which are pretty much nowhere).
  - cycloptic 6y ago
    I'm not sure those are good examples. MySQL lives on with a different name (MariaDB). X11 is currently being replaced by GPL implementations of Wayland, in the form of Kwin and Mutter. As far as I know there were never any serious attempts at making GPLed alternatives to Apache httpd, nginx and BIND.
  - toyg 6y ago
    You cannot argue on one side that Linux's success was due to commercial happenstance, as you do in another comment, and on the other hand that Postgresql's success vs MySQL is entirely due to the license. In fact, before the Sun acquisition and following mismanagement, MySQL was the opensource rdbms, the M in LAMP. When opensource started to take off and the likes of Microsoft fired back hard with FUD and lawsuits, 3 out of 4 main tools in that stack were GPL and the other was GPL-compatible. Obviously each project and field has a story; licensing and timing are both part of it. I would also argue that we are eventually going to pay for the ecosystem refusal to adopt GPL3, which is effectively "closing" away the software at another layer.
    - trasz 6y ago
      I’m not saying the success of Postgres is entirely due to license; what I’m saying is the license is not a significant factor. MySQL was always the more popular database, true. But it was also the one technically inferior, a PHP of databases. As for GPL3 - on the contrary, the problem is the adoption of GPL3, which forced many parties to switch to non-GPL alternatives. But it also gave boost to Open Source alternatives, putting an end to the unhealthy monopoly of GNU toolchain.
      - 6y ago

by nix23 6y ago

toyg 6y ago

(ISC is a troublesome license, but that's beyond the point) Licenses are not adopted in a vacuum. The license is what made GCC what it was when Linus had to pick a license, and arguably what made Linux what it is today. A "BSD Linux" would have likely ended up the same way BSD systems have: a largely academic project routinely cannibalized by behemoth closed-source companies. The question, yesterday and today, is really "why not care about the GPL?". The rights it grants are what made the F/OSS ecosystem what it is today. If you want to grant more rights to your users and developers, by all means use a less restrictive but compatible license like modified BSD, or MPL 2. It's easier to do that without fear of withering, now that opensource is the de-facto default choice in a lot of fields. It definitely was not as easy back in the '90s or early '00s, which is when the GPL effectively fought the war for the whole field. If you choose to stick with pre-MPL2 derivatives, though, you are clearly not interested in granting users and developers the same basic rights as the GPL.

nix23 6y ago
Look the problem is, you CAN make Linux as proprietary as you want if you DON'T redistribute it, like google, so google cannibalizes Linux too. It's just a different vision, if you want real freedom and want to work with a community go with BSD/MIT. >ended up the same way BSD systems have: a largely academic project routinely cannibalized by behemoth closed-source companies. That's BS, just look at how Netflix and Dell EMC work with FreeBSD. And for example Juniper, they learned a lesson not working with the community and fell far behind because of that. https://www.freebsd.org/releases/12.0R/relnotes.html https://www.freebsd.org/releases/12.0R/relnotes.html
- toyg 6y ago
  I am not going to argue beliefs, MIT/BSD and GPL are compatible. My point on cannibalization was in the historical context. Today the situation is different (thanks largely to what the GPL did in the past). And of course Linux is GPL2, not 3 - which would address some of the issues you raise. All of these licenses would have avoided the problems we see with ZFS' adoption of CDDL or other MPL1 derivatives.
  - trasz 6y ago
    The historical context is that Linux had a proper community support at the time when everyone was looking for Unix on x86, to migrate off RISC workstations, and BSDs at the time were either a bunch of jerks, or had unclear status due to ATT vs UCB lawsuit. You could try to argue that licensing had played a role at this, but experience with other projects suggests otherwise.
    - toyg 6y ago
      You know what enabled that "proper community"? A license that provided a sort of moral compass, fostering collaboration and goodwill towards shared improvement, safe in the knowledge that efforts wouldn't be abused. Something that other licenses still fail to provide, to this day.
      - trasz 6y ago
        Except that communities work equally well with other licenses. GPL doesn’t enable anything; there’s just no correlation there.
        toyg 6y ago
        > Except that communities work equally well with other licenses. Today. Not in the '90s cut-throat "pirates of SV" environment.
        6y ago
trasz 6y ago
Even a cursory look at the open source ecosystem shows that GPL doesn't work like that. In fact, you can easily find examples that show the exact opposite: look what happened to MySQL, while Postgres continues to thrive. Look at GPL-licensed X11 implementations, or GPL web servers, or DNS servers (which are pretty much nowhere).
- cycloptic 6y ago
  I'm not sure those are good examples. MySQL lives on with a different name (MariaDB). X11 is currently being replaced by GPL implementations of Wayland, in the form of Kwin and Mutter. As far as I know there were never any serious attempts at making GPLed alternatives to Apache httpd, nginx and BIND.
- toyg 6y ago
  You cannot argue on one side that Linux's success was due to commercial happenstance, as you do in another comment, and on the other hand that Postgresql's success vs MySQL is entirely due to the license. In fact, before the Sun acquisition and following mismanagement, MySQL was the opensource rdbms, the M in LAMP. When opensource started to take off and the likes of Microsoft fired back hard with FUD and lawsuits, 3 out of 4 main tools in that stack were GPL and the other was GPL-compatible. Obviously each project and field has a story; licensing and timing are both part of it. I would also argue that we are eventually going to pay for the ecosystem refusal to adopt GPL3, which is effectively "closing" away the software at another layer.
  - trasz 6y ago
    I’m not saying the success of Postgres is entirely due to license; what I’m saying is the license is not a significant factor. MySQL was always the more popular database, true. But it was also the one technically inferior, a PHP of databases. As for GPL3 - on the contrary, the problem is the adoption of GPL3, which forced many parties to switch to non-GPL alternatives. But it also gave boost to Open Source alternatives, putting an end to the unhealthy monopoly of GNU toolchain.
    - 6y ago