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Licensing is a utility. I have never really understood licensing as a political movement. In the past I have contributed to open source because I created tool

Licensing is a utility. I have never really understood licensing as a political movement. In the past I have contributed to open source because I created tools that were useful to me and could be useful to other people. By exposing such a tool other people report defects and the tool gets more sturdy. I would normally just license things with CC0. In my current project I am using the most restrictive open source license I can find: AGPLv3. The idea is to expose the source code to encourage trust and allow other people to reproduce the work in a practical manner without sacrificing authorship or trust. I considering turning the project into a business in the future would like to retain control of the idea and limit competition without sacrificing trust or integrity. None of this reasoning is political. It just about writing better software.

burntsushi 6y ago
Well, as I pointed out, my goal is for as many people to use my software as possible. The choice of license impacts this goal. One could also make hand wavy arguments about more use leading to better software. That's certainly the case for much of my code. If fewer people used it, it might not have improved as much as it has. (Obviously "more use" is not the only path to better software! And it does not guarantee improvements either.) I can say that without a doubt, if I had released, for example, ripgrep under the AGPLv3, far fewer people would be using it today.
pmcp 6y ago
I respect your position, and in general I agree. But your position on what political is, feels a bit unholistic. When more than one person is involved, everything is political, and very much so if you talk about contracts between people, which licenses are. A contract is a construct, it’s something that doesn’t exist, and has a lot of grey area. There is a system in place to debate whether specific actions are respecting the idea of the contract, in the case of licences, this can be a court of law. Wanting to write better software is a good, and I would think quite common goal. But so is wanting to have a good life. It’s on the road to that goal, with a lot of other people wanting the same goal but having just a slightly different idea of how to get there, that it gets political.

burntsushi 6y ago

Well, as I pointed out, my goal is for as many people to use my software as possible. The choice of license impacts this goal. One could also make hand wavy arguments about more use leading to better software. That's certainly the case for much of my code. If fewer people used it, it might not have improved as much as it has. (Obviously "more use" is not the only path to better software! And it does not guarantee improvements either.) I can say that without a doubt, if I had released, for example, ripgrep under the AGPLv3, far fewer people would be using it today.

pmcp 6y ago

I respect your position, and in general I agree. But your position on what political is, feels a bit unholistic. When more than one person is involved, everything is political, and very much so if you talk about contracts between people, which licenses are. A contract is a construct, it’s something that doesn’t exist, and has a lot of grey area. There is a system in place to debate whether specific actions are respecting the idea of the contract, in the case of licences, this can be a court of law. Wanting to write better software is a good, and I would think quite common goal. But so is wanting to have a good life. It’s on the road to that goal, with a lot of other people wanting the same goal but having just a slightly different idea of how to get there, that it gets political.