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I frankly think that the "free culture" label and extremely permissive licenses of many open source project are nothing but a redistribution of wealth upwards.

I frankly think that the "free culture" label and extremely permissive licenses of many open source project are nothing but a redistribution of wealth upwards. Those with existing capital can make profitable unfree derivative works without any benefit to original authors. This relationship must go both ways if you want actual free culture. Stop producing MIT/BSD code in your non-work time. This is not a research project, this is a commercial work that produces verbatim copies of code without disclosing its license (or having a license grant in many cases). It doesn't matter how it manages to reproduce it either. It does.

wccrawford 5y ago
This is the closest anyone has ever come to convincing me to use GPL instead of MIT license. But I still want to support small developers with anything I produce for fun, and I'm not willing to give that up to spite the big developers. For instance, I wrote a small class to load OBJ files in Unity because I needed it for an idea. I went ahead and put it on Github for others that need it, too. I could easily see someone having an idea similar to mine that needed that and couldn't find it out there. (I think there are more libraries like that now, though.) I wanted them to feel comfortable using it, even if they eventually make money with their game. If a big corp uses that code, too, that sucks. But there's no good way to draw that line in a license, so I didn't. Having said that, in the future I could see releasing some software that I don't think anyone should profit from, and in that case I'd GPL it. Previously, I'd have just defaulted to the same MIT license. I'm just not sure what that'd be yet.
- enriquto 5y ago
  > This is the closest anyone has ever come to convincing me to use GPL instead of MIT license. > But I still want to support small developers with anything I produce for fun, and I'm not willing to give that up to spite the big developers. Another line of thought that may help you choose a license: Do not think only about other developers. Think about the final users of your code that will be running your algorithms on their computers. The GPL protects the right of these users to see and modify the code they run (your code). So-called permissive licenses, on the other hand, let middlemen to strip this right from your users. Users of your code are in fact freer thanks to copyleft licenses.
- dgb23 5y ago
  Just to be sure: GPL doesn’t prevent anyone from selling.
  - wccrawford 5y ago
    No, but it does force them to GPL their own code if they do. And that's a no-go for most companies.
    - enriquto 5y ago
      > No, but it does force them to GPL their own code if they do. And that's a no-go for most companies. There's many companies who release source code. I don't know enough to say if that makes the word "most" in your sentence false or not. Anyways, a company using GPL code need not release all their own code. Just their modifications to that particular GPL program. And then again, only if they do intend to distribute the modified program.
indigochill 5y ago
> extremely permissive licenses of many open source project are nothing but a redistribution of wealth upwards Although I license all my amateur work GPLv3, I dispute the assertion that more permissive licenses are "nothing but" a redistribution of wealth upwards. Permissive licenses commoditize their features. This is of benefit to everyone, but organizations with more capital are better positioned to leverage that commodity, and typically when they do, they do so selfishly. This further centralizes value with them, but I believe this is still a better outcome than a closed license because of the educational/cultural/technical benefits to everyone of the open license. The capital leverage problem is orthogonal to that. Copyleft licenses kind of do the same commoditization thing, but explicitly only for share-alike uses, which is why they're the only way to grow open culture relative to proprietary culture: they're designed to deny "freeloaders" on open culture by requiring all derivative works to also be open. > without any benefit to original authors Benefiting the original authors is not (directly) the point of open source. MIT: "Here's some code, go nuts." GPL: "Here's some code, go nuts, but share the nuts if you do." There's zero value capture for the original author built into these licenses. If the original author wants to ensure they capture the value from their work, I recommend using a closed, proprietary license. Just be aware they're applying friction to the overall technological development of humanity by doing so.
Kiro 5y ago
I don't expect any benefits when releasing stuff under MIT, regardless of who uses it. That's the whole point or I wouldn't use that license.
FranchuFranchu 5y ago
> without any benefit to original authors I don't really expect any benefit when writing some pieces of code. These days I just make certain types of code I make public domain, because if it's MIT then BigCorp inc. will just make my name one in a really long list of contributors, and I won't get any benefit either.

wccrawford 5y ago

This is the closest anyone has ever come to convincing me to use GPL instead of MIT license. But I still want to support small developers with anything I produce for fun, and I'm not willing to give that up to spite the big developers. For instance, I wrote a small class to load OBJ files in Unity because I needed it for an idea. I went ahead and put it on Github for others that need it, too. I could easily see someone having an idea similar to mine that needed that and couldn't find it out there. (I think there are more libraries like that now, though.) I wanted them to feel comfortable using it, even if they eventually make money with their game. If a big corp uses that code, too, that sucks. But there's no good way to draw that line in a license, so I didn't. Having said that, in the future I could see releasing some software that I don't think anyone should profit from, and in that case I'd GPL it. Previously, I'd have just defaulted to the same MIT license. I'm just not sure what that'd be yet.

enriquto 5y ago
> This is the closest anyone has ever come to convincing me to use GPL instead of MIT license. > But I still want to support small developers with anything I produce for fun, and I'm not willing to give that up to spite the big developers. Another line of thought that may help you choose a license: Do not think only about other developers. Think about the final users of your code that will be running your algorithms on their computers. The GPL protects the right of these users to see and modify the code they run (your code). So-called permissive licenses, on the other hand, let middlemen to strip this right from your users. Users of your code are in fact freer thanks to copyleft licenses.
dgb23 5y ago
Just to be sure: GPL doesn’t prevent anyone from selling.
- wccrawford 5y ago
  No, but it does force them to GPL their own code if they do. And that's a no-go for most companies.
  - enriquto 5y ago
    > No, but it does force them to GPL their own code if they do. And that's a no-go for most companies. There's many companies who release source code. I don't know enough to say if that makes the word "most" in your sentence false or not. Anyways, a company using GPL code need not release all their own code. Just their modifications to that particular GPL program. And then again, only if they do intend to distribute the modified program.

indigochill 5y ago

> extremely permissive licenses of many open source project are nothing but a redistribution of wealth upwards Although I license all my amateur work GPLv3, I dispute the assertion that more permissive licenses are "nothing but" a redistribution of wealth upwards. Permissive licenses commoditize their features. This is of benefit to everyone, but organizations with more capital are better positioned to leverage that commodity, and typically when they do, they do so selfishly. This further centralizes value with them, but I believe this is still a better outcome than a closed license because of the educational/cultural/technical benefits to everyone of the open license. The capital leverage problem is orthogonal to that. Copyleft licenses kind of do the same commoditization thing, but explicitly only for share-alike uses, which is why they're the only way to grow open culture relative to proprietary culture: they're designed to deny "freeloaders" on open culture by requiring all derivative works to also be open. > without any benefit to original authors Benefiting the original authors is not (directly) the point of open source. MIT: "Here's some code, go nuts." GPL: "Here's some code, go nuts, but share the nuts if you do." There's zero value capture for the original author built into these licenses. If the original author wants to ensure they capture the value from their work, I recommend using a closed, proprietary license. Just be aware they're applying friction to the overall technological development of humanity by doing so.

Kiro 5y ago

I don't expect any benefits when releasing stuff under MIT, regardless of who uses it. That's the whole point or I wouldn't use that license.

FranchuFranchu 5y ago

> without any benefit to original authors I don't really expect any benefit when writing some pieces of code. These days I just make certain types of code I make public domain, because if it's MIT then BigCorp inc. will just make my name one in a really long list of contributors, and I won't get any benefit either.