8 ms·

Given three plus decades of FOSS experience, are the fears of permissive licenses like MIT and BSD (that companies will take, fork, and not give back in a meani

by mikece 5y ago

Given three plus decades of FOSS experience, are the fears of permissive licenses like MIT and BSD (that companies will take, fork, and not give back in a meaningful way which will kill open source) considered to be well-founded? Could Linux not be as pervasive and important as it is today had it been released under a BSD license?

ajross 5y ago
I guess that depends on definitions of "pervasive and important" more than it does facts on the ground. To my eyes, the number of open source drivers (near zero) available for Apple hardware, developed to run on their BSD-licensed kernel, pretty much provides all the evidence I need. No, a BSD Linux would have long since disappeared behind the curtain of some tech giant or another, just like Mach did into NeXT/Apple.
- ghaff 5y ago
  Though binary blobs are a thing, albeit a somewhat controversial thing. Assuming a BSD-licensed Linux is a fairly small step away from assuming that Linux didn't exist given the existence of various BSD Unix flavors. And most people I know feel fairly strongly that, in the absence of Linux, BSD Unix would have come to the forefront.
  - Macha 5y ago
    But would it have come to the forefront in the form of FreeBSD, or in the form of macOS or a similar system?
    - ghaff 5y ago
      Service providers were already using the BSDs in the dot-com buildup when Linux wasn't quite as far along. For anyone interested, here's a debate between Bryan Cantrill and Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols I recorded last year on the topic "If Linux didn't exist, would we have had to invent it?" https://grhpodcasts.s3.amazonaws.com/Cantrill_Nichols.mp3 https://grhpodcasts.s3.amazonaws.com/Cantrill_Nichols.mp3
      - pjmlp 5y ago
        During the dot-com buildup all Portuguese mobile provides were on our customer list, none of them cared about BSD. I was porting software between Windows NT/2000, HP-UX, Solaris and Aix. The Red-Hat Linux and FreeBSD boxes we had on the office were used for sharing mp3s, quake server, and replication of our CVS server.
  - ipaddr 5y ago
    Why do they feel that way? It is debatable they would have finished, gotten the same press vs one guy who did it and without requiring changes back development might not have been able to keep up.
    - ghaff 5y ago
      Linux largely won out over the BSDs for various reasons that may (or may not) have included the license. I personally think Linux would be roughly where it is even if it used a BSD license. And in the absence of Linux entirely, most people I know consider that one of the BSDs would have been rallied around because there was just too much market demand for an open source *nix operating system.
      - pjmlp 5y ago
        Had the BSD lawsuit not happened, commercial UNIXes would be getting BSD stuff like they did 10 years before it. Also all new POSIX FOSS OS for IoT are MIT/Apache license based, just give them a couple of years and see which one board makers will be picking.
Wxc2jjJmST9XWWL 5y ago
You're talking about a completely different thing here though than the article is about, and obviously we can only speculate. Linus' opinion always was: "I give you source code, you give me your changes back, we're even."[1] That's his summary of GPLv2 and I think such an attitude is reasonable, and it might have certainly aided the Linux kernel development over time (almost sure of it). He disliked the GPLv3 exactly because of that. Because in his opinion it's (paraphrased) "I give you the source code, and now I dictate to you how you are allowed to use it." (see same link). Whether a BSD/MIT license hurts or helps a project is pure speculation. More permissive licenses might make code reuse more attractive, and be considered "more free" regarding code reuse. As to what code contributions you miss out on? Hard to judge. There definitely are companies building products utilizing FreeBSD / OpenBSD without committing all their changes back (or none to begin with). Pick the right license for your project. You don't care and are happy if someone uses it? Use a permissive license (MIT/ISC). You want to develop the product, improve on it, and want the changes back? Use something like GPLv2. You deeply care about your code running on open devices? Use GPLv3. There's no "one obvious right way" as far as I am concerned. [1] https://youtu.be/5PmHRSeA2c8?t=2840 https://youtu.be/5PmHRSeA2c8?t=2840 (from there to 56:51 it's about open source licenses)
- pjmlp 5y ago
  One example are the some of the stuff BSDs and clang miss out from Apple, Sony and Nintendo, as they don't upstream everything.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - kryptiskt 5y ago
    GPL doesn't require upstreaming, only that it's available. Lots of hardware companies don't want their code in the mainline kernel and make no effort to make it fit in. There are huge masses of Linux kernel code out there that can't be upstreamed because the kernel developers wouldn't touch it with a ten-foot pole.
mcguire 5y ago
BSD Unix predates Linux by 10-15 years. Personal computer versions were roughly feature comparable around 1992 (when I made my "should I install Linux or 386BSD" decision; Linux had shared libraries, 386BSD didn't). I know how I'd answer your question.
- tzs 5y ago
  A big advantage for Linux in the early 90s was better support for cheap hardware. FreeBSD back then did not want to install on my PC. First problem was that I had an IDE CD-ROM and they only supported SCSI CD-ROM. Second problem was that it would not install in the unpartitioned space on my DOS/Windows SCSI hard disk. Linux supported IDE CD-ROM and could install on the same disk as DOS/Windows. Result: I installed Linux, and have used Linux ever since then when I need a free Unix-like system. According to their forums, there was no IDE support because nobody would seriously have IDE on a server. At the time you could make a reasonable case for that for hard disks, but not for CD-ROM (especially since IDE CD-ROMs were around $100 and SCSI CD-ROMs were around $400). The disk sharing limit was because they didn't think you could reliable infer the cylinder/head/sector (CHS) to logical black address (LBA) mapping that the other operating system(s) on the disk used. (The standard PC partition map at the time specified everything using CHS addressing, but disk interfaced had moved on the LBA addressing. Someone had to make up a pretend geometry for the disk, and then everyone had to consistently use that mapping to convert between CHS and LBA). In theory, you probably could find a legal partition setup with free space that was unsafe for another OS to use due to ambiguity of the mapping, but in practice that did not happen.
  - twic 5y ago
    There was also the lawsuit around BSD [1] which was only settled in 1994. I remember that uncertainty about the legal status of BSD lingered for a few years after that. I think Linux picked up a lot of steam from users and developers who wanted a unix on their PCs and were scared to touch BSD. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_Laboratories,_Inc._v._Berkeley_Software_Design,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_Laboratories,_Inc.....
pjmlp 5y ago
Not at all, everyone would keep taking their piece of the BSD pie and be done with it. In fact,I deeply believe had Microsoft been more serious about POSIX support on Windows NT and Linux wouldn't even had a chance. Fortunately for Linux, Windows NT/POSIX was only for fulfil a checkbox on government contracts.
blihp 5y ago
Yes, they are well-founded as has been shown time and again. But the article is about copyright assignment, not changing the license. The debate around copyright assignment is whether there's any need/benefit to have a single entity 'own' all contributions vs. the individual contributors retaining ownership. There are a couple of big downsides to copyright assignment in that there's a longer term risk that a malicious actor will gain influence on a given project and change the terms going forward which has a tendency to drive potential contributors away. This has happened with various partially-open source (dual license, open core etc. types of projects) projects over the years.
diegocg 5y ago
There has been a lot of talk lately about big cloud companies using open source projects and forking them privately. I think the principles of the FSF are becoming more and more relevant, not less. People considered the GPLv3 excessive. Now we see tivoization everywhere, and people cries because corporations are soooo evil. Well, maybe you should not use licences that let them do that. People who think the FSF is too idealistic are missing the point - the FSF is terribly realistic, it's the ones who don't care about software freedom who end up learning the hard way why the FSF exists.
- bombcar 5y ago
  What we're seeing is not tivoization but instead clouding - you have to go to the Affero GPL to protect against that. But that's a separate fight than the original GPL fight, and not necessarily one that really should be fought with the same fervor.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
ufo 5y ago
Absolutely. In the context of GCC, there is the famous example of the Objective C frontend, which NeXT/Apple tried hard to make proprietary.
prionassembly 5y ago
I don’t know exactly why, but this didn’t happen with shrink wrapped software (eg OS X) and def happened massively with the cloud.
- lanstin 5y ago
  Because the GPL works for non cloud software and does not work for cloud software. You would have to change the license rule from “in order to redistribute code based on a derived work from the covered work” to something like “in order to run code based on a derived work” which would be pretty broad. Maybe couldn’t keep you own kernel version on your own laptop without sharing the code with any people you do business with. And even then, Google and Aamazon can probably just rewrite / reverse engineer back to the stable interfaces people are using. So humanity will not really benefit in the long run from the wonders that they are developing.
kmeisthax 5y ago
Yes and no. Apple is perfectly willing to maintain, say, Swift and LLVM as Free projects; but they also have a proprietary fork with extra bits exclusive to their own hardware. For example, their proprietary GPU drivers compile shaders with it. LLVM being permissively licensed and owned by them means they have no reason to release those bits. This is not a hypothetical problem; it causes real harm to downstream users of LLVM. Rust has to support the current version of Apple's LLVM fork as well as the LLVM they ship with specifically just so you can compile watchOS apps, since that platform requires a proprietary bitcode format Apple never documented and only supports in their proprietary fork. Had Apple stuck with GCC they wouldn't have the legal ability to do this. Even if they had used GPL on LLVM, that license alone means that any contributions they take would also bind Apple to the same license. That's why people are extremely apprehensive about CLAs, because they're basically one-sided. The project vendor is free to sell exceptions or maintain proprietary forks, but you still have to comply with GPL.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- Gaelan 5y ago
  > proprietary bitcode format Apple never documented and only supports in their proprietary fork IIRC, the bitcode format isn't proprietary—it's part of the open-source LLVM. The only issue is that it's not a stable format, so they need to use Apple's LLVM version and not an earlier or later open-source one.
  - saagarjha 5y ago
    Note that there is lowercase-b bitcode, which is part of LLVM, and uppercase-B Bitcode, which is Apple’s thing built on top.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    Apple uses a special version of LLVM bitcode as deployment format for watchOS and iOS. This variant wasn't and will never be upstreamed.
- 5y ago
wmf 5y ago
One thing I noticed is that early BSD developers almost all moved on to work on proprietary derivatives like SunOS, BSDi, NetApp, NeXT/MacOS, etc. Yet early Linux developers have kept contributing to Linux for decades, possibly because their expertise can't really be proprietized.
goodpoint 5y ago
Many developers have been harmed by large cloud providers turning their software in SaaS and killing their source of income (or even small donations). Some moved from weak licenses to AGPL. Some, like MongoDB, to closed source. Based on this evidence, it's very likely that Linux has been protected by GPL.

by mikece 5y ago

ajross 5y ago

I guess that depends on definitions of "pervasive and important" more than it does facts on the ground. To my eyes, the number of open source drivers (near zero) available for Apple hardware, developed to run on their BSD-licensed kernel, pretty much provides all the evidence I need. No, a BSD Linux would have long since disappeared behind the curtain of some tech giant or another, just like Mach did into NeXT/Apple.

ghaff 5y ago
Though binary blobs are a thing, albeit a somewhat controversial thing. Assuming a BSD-licensed Linux is a fairly small step away from assuming that Linux didn't exist given the existence of various BSD Unix flavors. And most people I know feel fairly strongly that, in the absence of Linux, BSD Unix would have come to the forefront.
- Macha 5y ago
  But would it have come to the forefront in the form of FreeBSD, or in the form of macOS or a similar system?
  - ghaff 5y ago
    Service providers were already using the BSDs in the dot-com buildup when Linux wasn't quite as far along. For anyone interested, here's a debate between Bryan Cantrill and Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols I recorded last year on the topic "If Linux didn't exist, would we have had to invent it?" https://grhpodcasts.s3.amazonaws.com/Cantrill_Nichols.mp3 https://grhpodcasts.s3.amazonaws.com/Cantrill_Nichols.mp3
    - pjmlp 5y ago
      During the dot-com buildup all Portuguese mobile provides were on our customer list, none of them cared about BSD. I was porting software between Windows NT/2000, HP-UX, Solaris and Aix. The Red-Hat Linux and FreeBSD boxes we had on the office were used for sharing mp3s, quake server, and replication of our CVS server.
- ipaddr 5y ago
  Why do they feel that way? It is debatable they would have finished, gotten the same press vs one guy who did it and without requiring changes back development might not have been able to keep up.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    Linux largely won out over the BSDs for various reasons that may (or may not) have included the license. I personally think Linux would be roughly where it is even if it used a BSD license. And in the absence of Linux entirely, most people I know consider that one of the BSDs would have been rallied around because there was just too much market demand for an open source *nix operating system.
    - pjmlp 5y ago
      Had the BSD lawsuit not happened, commercial UNIXes would be getting BSD stuff like they did 10 years before it. Also all new POSIX FOSS OS for IoT are MIT/Apache license based, just give them a couple of years and see which one board makers will be picking.

Wxc2jjJmST9XWWL 5y ago

You're talking about a completely different thing here though than the article is about, and obviously we can only speculate. Linus' opinion always was: "I give you source code, you give me your changes back, we're even."[1] That's his summary of GPLv2 and I think such an attitude is reasonable, and it might have certainly aided the Linux kernel development over time (almost sure of it). He disliked the GPLv3 exactly because of that. Because in his opinion it's (paraphrased) "I give you the source code, and now I dictate to you how you are allowed to use it." (see same link). Whether a BSD/MIT license hurts or helps a project is pure speculation. More permissive licenses might make code reuse more attractive, and be considered "more free" regarding code reuse. As to what code contributions you miss out on? Hard to judge. There definitely are companies building products utilizing FreeBSD / OpenBSD without committing all their changes back (or none to begin with). Pick the right license for your project. You don't care and are happy if someone uses it? Use a permissive license (MIT/ISC). You want to develop the product, improve on it, and want the changes back? Use something like GPLv2. You deeply care about your code running on open devices? Use GPLv3. There's no "one obvious right way" as far as I am concerned. [1] https://youtu.be/5PmHRSeA2c8?t=2840 https://youtu.be/5PmHRSeA2c8?t=2840 (from there to 56:51 it's about open source licenses)

pjmlp 5y ago
One example are the some of the stuff BSDs and clang miss out from Apple, Sony and Nintendo, as they don't upstream everything.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- kryptiskt 5y ago
  GPL doesn't require upstreaming, only that it's available. Lots of hardware companies don't want their code in the mainline kernel and make no effort to make it fit in. There are huge masses of Linux kernel code out there that can't be upstreamed because the kernel developers wouldn't touch it with a ten-foot pole.

mcguire 5y ago

BSD Unix predates Linux by 10-15 years. Personal computer versions were roughly feature comparable around 1992 (when I made my "should I install Linux or 386BSD" decision; Linux had shared libraries, 386BSD didn't). I know how I'd answer your question.

tzs 5y ago
A big advantage for Linux in the early 90s was better support for cheap hardware. FreeBSD back then did not want to install on my PC. First problem was that I had an IDE CD-ROM and they only supported SCSI CD-ROM. Second problem was that it would not install in the unpartitioned space on my DOS/Windows SCSI hard disk. Linux supported IDE CD-ROM and could install on the same disk as DOS/Windows. Result: I installed Linux, and have used Linux ever since then when I need a free Unix-like system. According to their forums, there was no IDE support because nobody would seriously have IDE on a server. At the time you could make a reasonable case for that for hard disks, but not for CD-ROM (especially since IDE CD-ROMs were around $100 and SCSI CD-ROMs were around $400). The disk sharing limit was because they didn't think you could reliable infer the cylinder/head/sector (CHS) to logical black address (LBA) mapping that the other operating system(s) on the disk used. (The standard PC partition map at the time specified everything using CHS addressing, but disk interfaced had moved on the LBA addressing. Someone had to make up a pretend geometry for the disk, and then everyone had to consistently use that mapping to convert between CHS and LBA). In theory, you probably could find a legal partition setup with free space that was unsafe for another OS to use due to ambiguity of the mapping, but in practice that did not happen.
- twic 5y ago
  There was also the lawsuit around BSD [1] which was only settled in 1994. I remember that uncertainty about the legal status of BSD lingered for a few years after that. I think Linux picked up a lot of steam from users and developers who wanted a unix on their PCs and were scared to touch BSD. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_Laboratories,_Inc._v._Berkeley_Software_Design,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_Laboratories,_Inc.....

pjmlp 5y ago

Not at all, everyone would keep taking their piece of the BSD pie and be done with it. In fact,I deeply believe had Microsoft been more serious about POSIX support on Windows NT and Linux wouldn't even had a chance. Fortunately for Linux, Windows NT/POSIX was only for fulfil a checkbox on government contracts.

blihp 5y ago

Yes, they are well-founded as has been shown time and again. But the article is about copyright assignment, not changing the license. The debate around copyright assignment is whether there's any need/benefit to have a single entity 'own' all contributions vs. the individual contributors retaining ownership. There are a couple of big downsides to copyright assignment in that there's a longer term risk that a malicious actor will gain influence on a given project and change the terms going forward which has a tendency to drive potential contributors away. This has happened with various partially-open source (dual license, open core etc. types of projects) projects over the years.

diegocg 5y ago

There has been a lot of talk lately about big cloud companies using open source projects and forking them privately. I think the principles of the FSF are becoming more and more relevant, not less. People considered the GPLv3 excessive. Now we see tivoization everywhere, and people cries because corporations are soooo evil. Well, maybe you should not use licences that let them do that. People who think the FSF is too idealistic are missing the point - the FSF is terribly realistic, it's the ones who don't care about software freedom who end up learning the hard way why the FSF exists.

bombcar 5y ago
What we're seeing is not tivoization but instead clouding - you have to go to the Affero GPL to protect against that. But that's a separate fight than the original GPL fight, and not necessarily one that really should be fought with the same fervor.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

ufo 5y ago

Absolutely. In the context of GCC, there is the famous example of the Objective C frontend, which NeXT/Apple tried hard to make proprietary.

prionassembly 5y ago

I don’t know exactly why, but this didn’t happen with shrink wrapped software (eg OS X) and def happened massively with the cloud.

lanstin 5y ago
Because the GPL works for non cloud software and does not work for cloud software. You would have to change the license rule from “in order to redistribute code based on a derived work from the covered work” to something like “in order to run code based on a derived work” which would be pretty broad. Maybe couldn’t keep you own kernel version on your own laptop without sharing the code with any people you do business with. And even then, Google and Aamazon can probably just rewrite / reverse engineer back to the stable interfaces people are using. So humanity will not really benefit in the long run from the wonders that they are developing.

kmeisthax 5y ago

Yes and no. Apple is perfectly willing to maintain, say, Swift and LLVM as Free projects; but they also have a proprietary fork with extra bits exclusive to their own hardware. For example, their proprietary GPU drivers compile shaders with it. LLVM being permissively licensed and owned by them means they have no reason to release those bits. This is not a hypothetical problem; it causes real harm to downstream users of LLVM. Rust has to support the current version of Apple's LLVM fork as well as the LLVM they ship with specifically just so you can compile watchOS apps, since that platform requires a proprietary bitcode format Apple never documented and only supports in their proprietary fork. Had Apple stuck with GCC they wouldn't have the legal ability to do this. Even if they had used GPL on LLVM, that license alone means that any contributions they take would also bind Apple to the same license. That's why people are extremely apprehensive about CLAs, because they're basically one-sided. The project vendor is free to sell exceptions or maintain proprietary forks, but you still have to comply with GPL.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Gaelan 5y ago
> proprietary bitcode format Apple never documented and only supports in their proprietary fork IIRC, the bitcode format isn't proprietary—it's part of the open-source LLVM. The only issue is that it's not a stable format, so they need to use Apple's LLVM version and not an earlier or later open-source one.
- saagarjha 5y ago
  Note that there is lowercase-b bitcode, which is part of LLVM, and uppercase-B Bitcode, which is Apple’s thing built on top.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  Apple uses a special version of LLVM bitcode as deployment format for watchOS and iOS. This variant wasn't and will never be upstreamed.
5y ago

wmf 5y ago

One thing I noticed is that early BSD developers almost all moved on to work on proprietary derivatives like SunOS, BSDi, NetApp, NeXT/MacOS, etc. Yet early Linux developers have kept contributing to Linux for decades, possibly because their expertise can't really be proprietized.

goodpoint 5y ago

Many developers have been harmed by large cloud providers turning their software in SaaS and killing their source of income (or even small donations). Some moved from weak licenses to AGPL. Some, like MongoDB, to closed source. Based on this evidence, it's very likely that Linux has been protected by GPL.