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I agree with your sentiment, but this is not the right reaction. It won't improve anything. What's the point of open source if companies just steal it, build b

I agree with your sentiment, but this is not the right reaction. It won't improve anything. What's the point of open source if companies just steal it, build billion dollar industries on top, and then lock everything down? You are free to adjust the license to prevent this. But then tomorrow everybody comes and rants about that the GPL is too restrictive. That's the price we pay for this. It's the license that keeps work free. The right reaction is not to stop producing open source software. The right reaction is to adjust the license.

echelon 6y ago
GPLv4 needs to address a number of new problems: * "any user data serviced by this software must be easily exportable; no attempt must be made to block other 3rd party companies or services from consuming this data" * "if this software is itself sold as a service, any automation or tooling built in service of this system must also be made available as open source" * "any devices using this software must not actively prevent or prohibit users from running their own software"
- LukeShu 6y ago
  Two of those are already in the GNU AGPLv3 (2007).
- gogopuppygogo 6y ago
  It’s like a catch-22 though. If I start a company using open source and must give away the software I then build on top of it as open source then I likely fail to capture revenues and my company fails. What would be a nice option in GPL 4 is a mandatory commercial licensing fee structure to pay either to author of software or to EFF / FSF if the author doesn’t provide payment details. That would give a commercial incentive to startups to pursue using open source AND provide real revenues back to the community.
  - StavrosK 6y ago
    > It’s like a catch-22 though. If I start a company using open source and must give away the software I then build on top of it as open source then I likely fail to capture revenues and my company fails. How is that the open source author's problem? Open source is meant to enable user freedom, not to save corporations money. If you want to use something, contact the author and get a commercial license.
    - icebraining 6y ago
      I agree. I guess what's missing is some coordination mechanism for the "contact the author and get a commercial license" part. If it's one author it's easy, but if it's eighty, it's hard to contact each even if they would all be willing to provide such a license. That's not a problem of open source itself, of course.
      - ghaff 6y ago
        If you want to dual license, you probably should have a contributor license agreement. (It may be possible to relicense absent such an agreement, especially if it's permissively licensed, but a CLA certainly makes things clearer.)
    - gogopuppygogo 6y ago
      It's a problem for the community that it still creates no long term motive for people to invest in the code. There needs to be sustainability (profits) that funnel back into the community somehow.
- naniwaduni 6y ago
  GPLv4 cannot exist. The GPL was a clever hack the first time it became popular, but it is fundamentally a singleton that cannot be instantiated more than once. Not like we didn't try.
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    Which is why we have three versi…oh, wait.
  - j15t 6y ago
    I'm curious, why not?
    - ralfd 6y ago
      For projects with copy-left license one has to contact all contributors and ask for their permission to relicense: https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/33/how-can-a-project-be-relicensed https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/33/how-can-a-...
      - qiqitori 6y ago
        Most of the time, when you license something under GPLv3, you explicitly allow for later versions of the GPL. The "either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version." part was famously removed in the Linux kernel. This clause is a bit dangerous -- if a bad actor gets control of the FSF and manages to release an official GPL version that is completely bonkers, all current GPL-or-later software can be distributed under that license. This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
      - bregma 6y ago
        This has nothing to do with copyleft outbound licensing. If you have BSD-style outbound licensing and you assume that all inbound copyright is transferred to you, you will wake up in court after you try to change the outbound license conditions of someone else's copyrighted code. The correct answer is that for any project in which there is no inbound contribution agreement in place, you would have to contact all contributors and seek their permission to relicense. Inbound and outbound licensing are orthogonal.
- orangeshark 6y ago
  last one is sort of basically what GPLv3 has.
- 2Gkashmiri 6y ago
  What about actually including a clause about pushing your changes upstream because from my recent HN readings, that clause is not present.
  - wolfgke 6y ago
    The source code has to be provided. From this, one can easily generate a diff. The only thing that such a clause will do is having to inform the original maintainer of this. But I don't think that such a clause is a good idea: very often these internal modifications are not of the required quality. Also, I can easily imagine that some projects might drown in low-quality upstream pushes.
    - 2Gkashmiri 6y ago
      Bug fixes is what I am thinking about.
      - wolfgke 6y ago
        It is often not clear what is a bug and what is "unexpected/surprising (but 'correct') behavior". Also, many bug fixes of authors that don't have a good understanding of the code cause lots of additional regressions or don't fit the original architecture of the software well.
- freemint 6y ago
  This is a bad idea. All licenses released under GPLvX or later where X<4 will be not affected by this as the company could always pick X. It would further increase license fragmentation in the GPL sphere which is one of the reasons why BSD style licenses became more popular. I'd recommend looking into Rob Landley and why he created 0BSD. [1] The whole reason why we are in this mess and why GPL died is because the people behind GPL wanted to push their political views using the weight of persons using GPLv2 or later. The Linux kernel reacted by switching GPLv2 only. The only reason why would might want to name it GPLv4 is to use the weight of code of GPLvX or later people. Don't do that In addition some of you clauses have been shown to be easily enforceable by laws like GDPR and attempting to use contract is a crutch. They way to some of your points is phrased might be unenforceable in court and might void the complete license if it is ever testing in court. -> very bad [1] https://youtube.com/watch?v=MkJkyMuBm3g https://youtube.com/watch?v=MkJkyMuBm3g somewhere around 25 min it starts
Karupan 6y ago
> The right reaction is not to stop producing open source software. The right reaction is to adjust the license. The right reaction is whatever the author/maintainer wants to do. If they want to re-license, that is fine. If they want to just shut the whole thing down, that is fine too.
- mikkom 6y ago
  > If they want to just shut the whole thing down, that is fine too. Actually if it's under a non-restrictive open source licence, it's not fine at all - the code will still be legally available for everyone.
  - Karupan 6y ago
    I should've worded that better. Of course they can't pull the existing versions, but then can shut down any further development and support.
    - kortilla 6y ago
      > but then can shut down any further development and support. Not really. A fork can easily continue developing and supporting it.
      - bregma 6y ago
        The original copyright holder can require the fork be distinguishable and non-confusable with the original project. There is plenty of precedent in that respect. There isn't much that can be done with lax distribution licenses, but there is still much that can be done under copyright law.
        ghaff 6y ago
        >fork be distinguishable and non-confusable You're mostly talking about trademarks at that point, not copyright.
jstgord 6y ago
Another potentially _right_ solution is for programmers to have a union, and put pressure on employers such as google/amazon/facebook/apple to donate x% of their profits back to open source initiatives.
- Seb-C 6y ago
  Google and Facebook already both contribute heavily to a lot of open source projects actually, despite some negative influences.
- randartie 6y ago
  If an app from google uses 1000 open source projects (probably more in practice), how do you distribute the x%?
3pt14159 6y ago
I don't want GPL. I want a license that prevents unpaid use by any entity that has any stakeholder worth more than a billion USD. That's it. That's all I want. MIT-Billionaires. Want to take funding from A16Z? That's a million a year for the license or something that maybe scales with a market cap just to level the playing field between a funded startup and Apple Computers. Don't get me wrong, I love Apple, but I don't love this hyper-centralization of wealth and it would be better for the world if we defanged the power that billionaires have.
- rusk 6y ago
  What is wrong with saying “all rights reserved. You are free to use this software for educational and nonprofit purposes but once you start to make money off it you must request permission in writing” - I’ve seen a few licences like this. I guess the down sides are it might send some people elsewhere and you might be on your own trying to enforce it in court.
  - Cthulhu_ 6y ago
    I think for a lot of companies that would be an instant turn-off, especially if they're still starting up. Besides, it would have to be a lot more formal; another commenter mentioned the Unreal Engine, which states something to the tune of "free to use until you earn over X, then you pay us Y% of your revenue". Cynically, open source libraries need to use the err, hook-and-sinker approach? Be really good at bootstrapping a company or part thereof, then when they have buy-in, start charging. It's what Unreal and (I think?) Unity do, it's what Slack did (really successfully, in a lot of places where it was introduced it was snuck in the back door by employees, used for a couple of months until the restrictions became too much, then the company started to pay for it; I've never seen 'grassroots' software deployment like that before and I'm impressed). But it'll be difficult to pull off fully without the software being as-a-service or DRM things. I wonder if the package manager systems could play a role in that. Require you to register your application at e.g. NPM, then every time an `npm install` is done, keep track of it. If usage does not decrease, start charging for things. One could also consider an alternative, compatible package manager; an open source publisher could opt to only push to and promote that one. The package manager charges for use, and pays package maintainers relative to usage.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
lvoudour 6y ago
I can't blame the authors for the choice permissive licenses. Maybe they were idealistic and starry-eyed, maybe they never thought their project would catch up, maybe they were naive victims of propaganda or maybe they had ulterior motives, who knows. I don't blame the companies that take advantage of it, they are profit-seeking entities - if they see an opportunity for profit they'll take it, morality be damned. I blame those that justify and help propagate this behavior, justifying abusers of free labor arguing that we wouldn't have all these nice products that make our lives easier. Yes we would, if there's a market for them we would - only now people would either get paid to create them or the companies would be forced to give back to the community just like they benefited from it. So, authors, if you are sick and tired of your good Samaritan efforts being abused, switch to GPL and let them rant
goatinaboat 6y ago
But then tomorrow everybody comes and rants about that the GPL is too restrictive. That's the price we pay for this. It's the license that keeps work free. SaaS is the “antidote” to GPL from a corporate point of view.
UweSchmidt 6y ago
Similarly like democracy is brittle and depends on the values being upheld and cultivated by everyone involved, open source is more than a legal license. Many people have paid it forward with a lot of hard work and built the entire infrastructure, starting with open source operating systems, bios and drivers. It's the motivation of these people that keeps work free, and they probably want to see a thriving ecosystem of software and an open internet.
fest 6y ago
What is the consensus on using/extending GPL licensed code in the web backend?
- ghaff 6y ago
  If it's just being used in the web backend (or not being made available for download generally), you're not distributing so GPL doesn't come into play. This is the "loophole" that AGPL was created to address.
fractalb 6y ago
GPL ftw!
ydlr 6y ago
> The right reaction is not to stop producing open source software. The right reaction is to adjust the license. I think the kind of software written also needs to be adjusted. Most open source software I've encountered recently has either been created to solve a business problem that only happens at a large scale or solves a developer tooling problem that only occurs when working in large groups. When the open source software is being made to address the problems of corporations and their employees, of course corporations are going to be the ones that benifit.

echelon 6y ago

GPLv4 needs to address a number of new problems: * "any user data serviced by this software must be easily exportable; no attempt must be made to block other 3rd party companies or services from consuming this data" * "if this software is itself sold as a service, any automation or tooling built in service of this system must also be made available as open source" * "any devices using this software must not actively prevent or prohibit users from running their own software"

LukeShu 6y ago
Two of those are already in the GNU AGPLv3 (2007).
gogopuppygogo 6y ago
It’s like a catch-22 though. If I start a company using open source and must give away the software I then build on top of it as open source then I likely fail to capture revenues and my company fails. What would be a nice option in GPL 4 is a mandatory commercial licensing fee structure to pay either to author of software or to EFF / FSF if the author doesn’t provide payment details. That would give a commercial incentive to startups to pursue using open source AND provide real revenues back to the community.
- StavrosK 6y ago
  > It’s like a catch-22 though. If I start a company using open source and must give away the software I then build on top of it as open source then I likely fail to capture revenues and my company fails. How is that the open source author's problem? Open source is meant to enable user freedom, not to save corporations money. If you want to use something, contact the author and get a commercial license.
  - icebraining 6y ago
    I agree. I guess what's missing is some coordination mechanism for the "contact the author and get a commercial license" part. If it's one author it's easy, but if it's eighty, it's hard to contact each even if they would all be willing to provide such a license. That's not a problem of open source itself, of course.
    - ghaff 6y ago
      If you want to dual license, you probably should have a contributor license agreement. (It may be possible to relicense absent such an agreement, especially if it's permissively licensed, but a CLA certainly makes things clearer.)
  - gogopuppygogo 6y ago
    It's a problem for the community that it still creates no long term motive for people to invest in the code. There needs to be sustainability (profits) that funnel back into the community somehow.
naniwaduni 6y ago
GPLv4 cannot exist. The GPL was a clever hack the first time it became popular, but it is fundamentally a singleton that cannot be instantiated more than once. Not like we didn't try.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  Which is why we have three versi…oh, wait.
- j15t 6y ago
  I'm curious, why not?
  - ralfd 6y ago
    For projects with copy-left license one has to contact all contributors and ask for their permission to relicense: https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/33/how-can-a-project-be-relicensed https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/33/how-can-a-...
    - qiqitori 6y ago
      Most of the time, when you license something under GPLv3, you explicitly allow for later versions of the GPL. The "either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version." part was famously removed in the Linux kernel. This clause is a bit dangerous -- if a bad actor gets control of the FSF and manages to release an official GPL version that is completely bonkers, all current GPL-or-later software can be distributed under that license. This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
    - bregma 6y ago
      This has nothing to do with copyleft outbound licensing. If you have BSD-style outbound licensing and you assume that all inbound copyright is transferred to you, you will wake up in court after you try to change the outbound license conditions of someone else's copyrighted code. The correct answer is that for any project in which there is no inbound contribution agreement in place, you would have to contact all contributors and seek their permission to relicense. Inbound and outbound licensing are orthogonal.
orangeshark 6y ago
last one is sort of basically what GPLv3 has.
2Gkashmiri 6y ago
What about actually including a clause about pushing your changes upstream because from my recent HN readings, that clause is not present.
- wolfgke 6y ago
  The source code has to be provided. From this, one can easily generate a diff. The only thing that such a clause will do is having to inform the original maintainer of this. But I don't think that such a clause is a good idea: very often these internal modifications are not of the required quality. Also, I can easily imagine that some projects might drown in low-quality upstream pushes.
  - 2Gkashmiri 6y ago
    Bug fixes is what I am thinking about.
    - wolfgke 6y ago
      It is often not clear what is a bug and what is "unexpected/surprising (but 'correct') behavior". Also, many bug fixes of authors that don't have a good understanding of the code cause lots of additional regressions or don't fit the original architecture of the software well.
freemint 6y ago
This is a bad idea. All licenses released under GPLvX or later where X<4 will be not affected by this as the company could always pick X. It would further increase license fragmentation in the GPL sphere which is one of the reasons why BSD style licenses became more popular. I'd recommend looking into Rob Landley and why he created 0BSD. [1] The whole reason why we are in this mess and why GPL died is because the people behind GPL wanted to push their political views using the weight of persons using GPLv2 or later. The Linux kernel reacted by switching GPLv2 only. The only reason why would might want to name it GPLv4 is to use the weight of code of GPLvX or later people. Don't do that In addition some of you clauses have been shown to be easily enforceable by laws like GDPR and attempting to use contract is a crutch. They way to some of your points is phrased might be unenforceable in court and might void the complete license if it is ever testing in court. -> very bad [1] https://youtube.com/watch?v=MkJkyMuBm3g https://youtube.com/watch?v=MkJkyMuBm3g somewhere around 25 min it starts

Karupan 6y ago

> The right reaction is not to stop producing open source software. The right reaction is to adjust the license. The right reaction is whatever the author/maintainer wants to do. If they want to re-license, that is fine. If they want to just shut the whole thing down, that is fine too.

mikkom 6y ago
> If they want to just shut the whole thing down, that is fine too. Actually if it's under a non-restrictive open source licence, it's not fine at all - the code will still be legally available for everyone.
- Karupan 6y ago
  I should've worded that better. Of course they can't pull the existing versions, but then can shut down any further development and support.
  - kortilla 6y ago
    > but then can shut down any further development and support. Not really. A fork can easily continue developing and supporting it.
    - bregma 6y ago
      The original copyright holder can require the fork be distinguishable and non-confusable with the original project. There is plenty of precedent in that respect. There isn't much that can be done with lax distribution licenses, but there is still much that can be done under copyright law.
      - ghaff 6y ago
        >fork be distinguishable and non-confusable You're mostly talking about trademarks at that point, not copyright.

jstgord 6y ago

Another potentially _right_ solution is for programmers to have a union, and put pressure on employers such as google/amazon/facebook/apple to donate x% of their profits back to open source initiatives.

Seb-C 6y ago
Google and Facebook already both contribute heavily to a lot of open source projects actually, despite some negative influences.
randartie 6y ago
If an app from google uses 1000 open source projects (probably more in practice), how do you distribute the x%?

3pt14159 6y ago

I don't want GPL. I want a license that prevents unpaid use by any entity that has any stakeholder worth more than a billion USD. That's it. That's all I want. MIT-Billionaires. Want to take funding from A16Z? That's a million a year for the license or something that maybe scales with a market cap just to level the playing field between a funded startup and Apple Computers. Don't get me wrong, I love Apple, but I don't love this hyper-centralization of wealth and it would be better for the world if we defanged the power that billionaires have.

rusk 6y ago
What is wrong with saying “all rights reserved. You are free to use this software for educational and nonprofit purposes but once you start to make money off it you must request permission in writing” - I’ve seen a few licences like this. I guess the down sides are it might send some people elsewhere and you might be on your own trying to enforce it in court.
- Cthulhu_ 6y ago
  I think for a lot of companies that would be an instant turn-off, especially if they're still starting up. Besides, it would have to be a lot more formal; another commenter mentioned the Unreal Engine, which states something to the tune of "free to use until you earn over X, then you pay us Y% of your revenue". Cynically, open source libraries need to use the err, hook-and-sinker approach? Be really good at bootstrapping a company or part thereof, then when they have buy-in, start charging. It's what Unreal and (I think?) Unity do, it's what Slack did (really successfully, in a lot of places where it was introduced it was snuck in the back door by employees, used for a couple of months until the restrictions became too much, then the company started to pay for it; I've never seen 'grassroots' software deployment like that before and I'm impressed). But it'll be difficult to pull off fully without the software being as-a-service or DRM things. I wonder if the package manager systems could play a role in that. Require you to register your application at e.g. NPM, then every time an `npm install` is done, keep track of it. If usage does not decrease, start charging for things. One could also consider an alternative, compatible package manager; an open source publisher could opt to only push to and promote that one. The package manager charges for use, and pays package maintainers relative to usage.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

lvoudour 6y ago

I can't blame the authors for the choice permissive licenses. Maybe they were idealistic and starry-eyed, maybe they never thought their project would catch up, maybe they were naive victims of propaganda or maybe they had ulterior motives, who knows. I don't blame the companies that take advantage of it, they are profit-seeking entities - if they see an opportunity for profit they'll take it, morality be damned. I blame those that justify and help propagate this behavior, justifying abusers of free labor arguing that we wouldn't have all these nice products that make our lives easier. Yes we would, if there's a market for them we would - only now people would either get paid to create them or the companies would be forced to give back to the community just like they benefited from it. So, authors, if you are sick and tired of your good Samaritan efforts being abused, switch to GPL and let them rant

goatinaboat 6y ago

But then tomorrow everybody comes and rants about that the GPL is too restrictive. That's the price we pay for this. It's the license that keeps work free. SaaS is the “antidote” to GPL from a corporate point of view.

UweSchmidt 6y ago

Similarly like democracy is brittle and depends on the values being upheld and cultivated by everyone involved, open source is more than a legal license. Many people have paid it forward with a lot of hard work and built the entire infrastructure, starting with open source operating systems, bios and drivers. It's the motivation of these people that keeps work free, and they probably want to see a thriving ecosystem of software and an open internet.

fest 6y ago

What is the consensus on using/extending GPL licensed code in the web backend?

ghaff 6y ago
If it's just being used in the web backend (or not being made available for download generally), you're not distributing so GPL doesn't come into play. This is the "loophole" that AGPL was created to address.

fractalb 6y ago

GPL ftw!

ydlr 6y ago

> The right reaction is not to stop producing open source software. The right reaction is to adjust the license. I think the kind of software written also needs to be adjusted. Most open source software I've encountered recently has either been created to solve a business problem that only happens at a large scale or solves a developer tooling problem that only occurs when working in large groups. When the open source software is being made to address the problems of corporations and their employees, of course corporations are going to be the ones that benifit.