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I'm very frustrated by some of the answers here and on Twitter. Carmack says: > The GPL virality wound up being a net negative, and more value would have come

I'm very frustrated by some of the answers here and on Twitter. Carmack says: > The GPL virality wound up being a net negative, and more value would have come from BSD. [...] The best aspects of GPL work didn't manifest, but tons of opportunities to just copy-paste-modify were lost due to license concerns. One of the answers on Twitter: > Then what if it's being exploited by big techs and make your work proprietary? GPL preserves the four essential freedoms, BSD does not. Yes. Okay. Carmack is aware of that. When he says "The best aspects of GPL work didn't manifest", he specifically addressing those concerns, and saying that he basically saw no benefit from "not being exploited by big techs". Like, I find it intensely frustrating that, when an industry veteran says "I've heard the pros and cons of each approach and I found that in my real-life experience GPL was a net negative", people answer with a 101 on the philosophy of GPL. Is there a word for that? Dismissing empirical evidence by clinging to philosophical assertions?

eurg 5y ago
Mansplaining? It happens to men too, not just by. A bit generic, though.
- alexeldeib 5y ago
  I'd use mansplaining. I do find it funny there isn't an older (?) phrase for the same.
  - pgcj_poster 5y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teaching_grandmother_to_suck_eggs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teaching_grandmother_to_suck_e...
    - alexeldeib 5y ago
      TIL. Hadn't heard the phrase before.
fao_ 5y ago
> Dismissing empirical evidence by clinging to philosophical assertions? Small nitpick -- Carmack's assertions are anecdotal, not empirical.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- amelius 5y ago
  You can very well reason about licenses in a logical (mathematical) manner, so it is a bit strange to speak in terms of "empirical" or "anecdotal".
  - pera 5y ago
    Maybe you can but the tweet is just Carmack expressing his opinion.
- pitkali 5y ago
  Aren't anecdotes pieces of empirical evidence?
  - nextlevelwizard 5y ago
    Calling anything and everything “just anecdotes” is HN’s favorite way of dismissing your arguments.
namdnay 5y ago
> Is there a word for that? Dismissing empirical evidence by clinging to philosophical assertions? Faith? Zealotry?
pavlov 5y ago
> “Dismissing empirical evidence by clinging to philosophical assertions?” Dogmatism usually means this.
pitkali 5y ago
Is it dismissing empirical evidence or do they just value their philosophical ideas above your utility function? The very statement that it was net negative is not an objective one, really.
bigbillheck 5y ago
> Is there a word for that? Dismissing empirical evidence by clinging to philosophical assertions? That word, I claim, is 'ideology'.
malka 5y ago
Carmack works for Facebook. The fact that he is unhappy with GPL is a feature, not a problem.
- scrollaway 5y ago
  You're doing pretty much what the GP calls out. The kindest reading of your comment is that you absolutely don't understand who Carmack is. Understandable; "Industry veteran" is quite the understatement, after all. But maybe don't start immediately assigning employer intent to people who have field experience on what their licensing decisions from long before their current employment led to.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  Yet I see plenty of people happy using React, React Native, PHP, Folly,... go figure.
belorn 5y ago
> The best aspects of GPL work didn't manifest Did someone get sued for downloading a copy of a game with the quake source code in it? Did someone release a game with quake code in it, only to go after users for patent infringement? DRM locked devices built on the quake code? A license is simply the condition for which an author allows others to do things for which copyright law make illegal. There is also a culture and a movement that has been built around common rules for software development. Carmack does not explain what he wanted out of the license, and so people attempt to fill in the gaps. That people interpret that as "Dismissing empirical evidence" is on those making that interpretation. I do have a word for that, but we should strive to improve the tone on HN and so its better to just explain the purpose of those who replied to Carmack. (I don't flag comments often but this is a prime example. Hugely frustrated, dismissive, with a bit snarky tone. The comment would be hugely improved by simply skipping the last paragraph. The outcome? A bunch of up and down votes in all the comments below in typical flame war fashion)
- jasode 5y ago
  >A license is simply the condition [...] I don't think reducing it to that actually helps the discussion. A license/law/policy can't be analyzed via its bare verbatim text. One also has to look at its unintended effects in the real world. Yes, the GPL license has noble intentions but that doesn't mean it's immune from causing actions that indirectly contradict its goal. (Wikipedia article on that phenomenon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive) A license or law can have a stated positive goal or ideal with the text written for that intention and motivation ... but the complexity of the real world may work also against it. >Carmack does not explain what he wanted out of the license, To use framework of "perverse incentive" to interpret his tweets.. He wrote: "The GPL virality wound up being a net negative," and followed up with: >the best aspects of GPL work didn't manifest, but tons of opportunities to just copy-paste-modify were lost due to license concerns. It is possible that some of the source ports wouldn't have been as open, but I'm pretty sure there would have been more total users of the code, likely making the amount shared in the open still greater. I'm still supportive of lots of GPL work, but I don't think the restrictions helped in this particular case. So in this particular case, he claims that GPL unintentionally caused less openness instead of more. Seems like a textbook example of Perverse Incentive. Yes, we could get pedantic and say GPL verbatim text mentions "freedom" instead of "openness". True, but many interpret GPL's copyleft reciprocal nature of "I share my code and you share your changes back" as trying to create source code abundance. Carmack is claiming that in his case, GPL's restrictions unintentionally caused less code to be shared. One can still disagree with Carmack but it's still worth understanding what he's claiming.
loopz 5y ago
Ideology fits pretty well, as the term is used in modern times. In case of Linux, GPL is regarded as a good fit. In case of games, it'd be surprising now, to see GPL as a good fit. Open source and GPL are not used predominantly, thus never disrupted much in that space. However, this is based on a kind of hindsight bias as well. In many ways, Free Software is regarded a means by itself: To keep software Free. So the goals of the ideology might not ressonate with the goals of every game developer.
- MaxBarraclough 5y ago
  Right. Carmack's goals are clearly not aligned with those of the FSF. The FSF is perfectly happy for Free software to be of no value to those who develop non-Free Software, indeed they actively prefer it that way, viewing all non-Free software as unethical. Evidently Carmack would rather the Id source releases be of use to as many developers as possible. As he says though, My partners would never have gone for it, precisely because it would have been valuable to developers of non-Free games, who compete with Id.
fazgl 5y ago
Carmack explicitly mentions the BSD/GPL question in connection with copilot. He is working on AI now and has an explicit interest in the intellectual property discussions that flared up after copilot. It's natural that people think he's using his status as a super programmer to lobby for the position that currently benefits him. I don't see why he would be more qualified to assess the pros/cons of the GPL than the Linux and GCC authors.
- bluGill 5y ago
  > I don't see why he would be more qualified to assess the pros/cons of the GPL than the Linux and GCC authors. That is simple: he has thought about it in more depth than most of them. Most Linux and GCC authors don't really care about licensing much, just code they can work collaboratively on. Since the code they are working on is GPL they use GPL and get back to work. I suspect if Linus took the time to really think he would use BSD for Linux - it hasn't been possible to make this type of change since like 1992 at the latest though so there is no point in him thinking about it. And in turn that means my claim is not testable.
  - shagie 5y ago
    In https://youtu.be/PaKIZ7gJlRU https://youtu.be/PaKIZ7gJlRU Linus talks about BSD licenses at 8:30 (well, somewhere around there). Its a good watch for the philosophical background on which license Linux is under and Linus's feelings about the GPL v2 and v3. No, he wouldn't have used the BSD license - it didn't match what he wanted for linux.
- PoignardAzur 5y ago
  > I don't see why he would be more qualified to assess the pros/cons of the GPL than the Linux and GCC authors. I don't think he is. I would be equally frustrated if Linus Torvalds made an argument about the pros and cons of each license and people replied with generic proselytism. My point isn't that Carmack's status means people should automatically listen to him. I'm saying he made a thought-out argument, based on practical considerations, and the way most people answered didn't really address the argument, so much as re-state a previous held belief that license X is better than license Y.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
> Like, I find it intensely frustrating that, when an industry veteran says "I've heard the pros and cons of each approach and I found that in my real-life experience GPL was a net negative", people answer with a 101 on the philosophy of GPL. You think that's frustrating, try watching an expert talk about economics.
- tzs 5y ago
  > You think that's frustrating, try watching an expert talk about economics. Physics, too. I once mentioned on a forum that at least as the fat guy in my group of friends I coasted down a slope faster on my bicycle than did my skinny friends. (It was quite noticeable, too). The number of people who jumped in to tell me I was wrong and attempted to do that math using their first semester freshman physics knowledge to prove it was astounding. They did a decent job--for bicyclists on the Moon. For bicyclists on Earth--not so good. They all neglected wind resistance.
  - donkeybeer 5y ago
    Wind resistance should slow down the larger person more.
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
      Ignoring wind resistance is the problem. Undoubtedly mass was accounted for, but they got the incorrect answer because wind resistance has a much greater effect on the lighter rider. The extra momentum of the heavier rider easily overcomes the small increase in wind resistance. Anyone who has biked with someone of significantly different body mass will have seen ample evidence that bigger people coast downhill faster.
      - donkeybeer 5y ago
        I don't think momentum should affect how fast you slide down. The reasons are different.
glogla 5y ago
Carmack has net worth of $50 million. Him saying "exploitation by big tech is not a problem, really" is very different than normal person saying it - his well being is not on the line and never will be. Go ask authors of ElasticSearch or Airflow or whatever the new thing that AWS steals will be.
- javagram 5y ago
  ElasticSearch was GPL (AGPL). It didn’t help them because what their business model needed was not just sharing back changes to source code but to actually disincentivize competition in the space of providing cloud SaaS for the product. Hence why they and mongodb switched to a shared source license that is not Free software.
  - nopzor 5y ago
    elasticsearch wasn't ever GPL or AGPL to my knowledge. it was Apache licensed, and then they switched to SSPL.
    - javagram 5y ago
      Yes, sorry I confused it with mongodb.
- defaultname 5y ago
  The argument of big tech "exploiting" or stealing has always rang untrue to me. If Microsoft took the source code to Nano and made a Nano+ that reads word files or something, closed-source, selling it for big bucks, etc, the value of what they're offering cannot possibly be more than the delta from what is freely and openly available. They didn't make the original any less available, and a user is only possibly going to pay if the features are different enough to merit the cost over the freely available version. Similarly, if Amazon has a product based on an open source product, what they charge can only possibly be for the values that they've brought to it. They haven't stolen anything. A lot of GPL advocacy seems to be based in sour grapes and it's offputting.
meh99 5y ago
Empirical evidence of his subjective goals going unmet is not empirical evidence of an objective truth we all must follow.
phendrenad2 5y ago
Also seen at the very beginning of this video (where someone points out the flaws in Visual Studio, and people on Twitter assume he doesn't know how to use it): https://youtu.be/GC-0tCy4P1U https://youtu.be/GC-0tCy4P1U
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
k12sosse 5y ago
> Is there a word for that? Dismissing empirical evidence by clinging to philosophical assertions? Being in denial
gameswithgo 5y ago
Linus Torvalds has similar conversations with gpl advocates regularly. “no, i am happy for companies to use linux this way”. And the people just can’t handle this idea. Like suggesting that god doesn’t exist to someone devout.
- temac 5y ago
  It is probably more about a v2 vs v3 debate in the case of Linux. He really likes copyleft GPLv2-style and really thinks it has been a net-positive if not one of the key things for the success of the project.
- nextaccountic 5y ago
  But Linux is GPL! And Linus himself believes Linux wouldn't have become what it is now if it weren't for GPL. In the context of Linus values, open source means basically the right of forking software, but copyleft means the right of merging back worthwhile patches from downstream forks. This is absolutely critical in an industry full of binary blobs: this is basically the reason we have any kind of source code for Android kernel drivers, routers, and many other products. What Linus doesn't value is the goals of free software movement: empowering the user of the computer. He just wants the code. That's why he doesn't care about tivoization, but he cares a lot about GPL.
- whoknowswhat11 5y ago
  This was part of the v3 fight - he wanted software free, but also so you were free to use it. Didn't mind that you could use it with locked down hardware (TiVo / cars / phones / med devices / security etc)- still had to release source
temac 5y ago
And to be fair, he even concluded with "I'm still supportive of lots of GPL work, but I don't think the restrictions helped in this particular case."
tylermauthe 5y ago
It's called mansplaining.
elcapitan 5y ago
> Is there a word for that? Dismissing empirical evidence by clinging to philosophical assertions? Freshmansplaining?
- lodi 5y ago
  Genius.
jrochkind1 5y ago
Eh, people are allowed to disagree or challenge Cormack, it doesn't bother me that they brought up that worry despite knowing he is an experienced respected person. I do find it notable how many of my peer computer programmers/software engineers no longer believe in open source though. 15 years ago it was very popular to believe in open source, as a way of combating the power of giant corporations. The dislike/distrust/desire to combat large corporations is still there, but there seems to be a popular and growing opinion that, as they have seen big corporations get only more powerful while using open source, this must mean that open source serves big corporations, and we should be anti-open source if we want to combat big corporations. So it's still anti-corporate, but now much more popular to be anti-open source. The difference I guess is that now the idea is that open source privileges big corporations against smaller for-profit concerns, that it hurts the kind of "entrepreneurs" that the speakers want to be, hurts their ability to become rich themselves. Whereas before the idea was that open source would help "the people" against the corporations, not help some entrepeneurs get rich themselves. ANYHOW. This is definitely a thing. Anyone who's been in this "scene" for 20 years is seeing it. Is anyone writing more about it and what's going on?
- lukeschlather 5y ago
  Carmack is clearly still in favor of open source, he just wishes he had gone with BSD. And it doesn't sound like it's because he's anti-corporate. It sounds like it's because he works for a mega tech corp and his mega tech corp hates the GPL so he has to do a ton of paperwork to use any GPL code there. (which is the same as working for any tech corp.)
  - VectorLock 5y ago
    The crux of his argument seems to be that he wants to be able to copy and paste other people's code and create derivative work without the GPL carrying along.
  - tapoxi 5y ago
    Well it’s also because we didn’t see much done with the GPL’d source releases for his engines, just small improvements and standalone mods (The Dark Mod, Xonotic, etc) No commercial game developer is willing to ship a game with GPL’d code because the license is incompatible with most middleware and console SDKs. We missed out on what could have been a free and open competitor to Unity or Unreal.
trashcan 5y ago
> Is there a word for that? Dismissing empirical evidence by clinging to philosophical assertions? Cognitive dissonance
ksec 5y ago
I think from Carmack POV, Unreal Model would have been better ? Basically he want the code or software to be used more often. And the industry collaborate together to make better engine. I also kind of think 90% of the comments here misses the point. It isn't GPL vs BSD. Some software should be GPL, or APGL even. Some are better for MIT and BSD, or even CC0.

eurg 5y ago

Mansplaining? It happens to men too, not just by. A bit generic, though.

alexeldeib 5y ago
I'd use mansplaining. I do find it funny there isn't an older (?) phrase for the same.
- pgcj_poster 5y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teaching_grandmother_to_suck_eggs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teaching_grandmother_to_suck_e...
  - alexeldeib 5y ago
    TIL. Hadn't heard the phrase before.

fao_ 5y ago

> Dismissing empirical evidence by clinging to philosophical assertions? Small nitpick -- Carmack's assertions are anecdotal, not empirical.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
amelius 5y ago
You can very well reason about licenses in a logical (mathematical) manner, so it is a bit strange to speak in terms of "empirical" or "anecdotal".
- pera 5y ago
  Maybe you can but the tweet is just Carmack expressing his opinion.
pitkali 5y ago
Aren't anecdotes pieces of empirical evidence?
- nextlevelwizard 5y ago
  Calling anything and everything “just anecdotes” is HN’s favorite way of dismissing your arguments.

namdnay 5y ago

> Is there a word for that? Dismissing empirical evidence by clinging to philosophical assertions? Faith? Zealotry?

pavlov 5y ago

> “Dismissing empirical evidence by clinging to philosophical assertions?” Dogmatism usually means this.

pitkali 5y ago

Is it dismissing empirical evidence or do they just value their philosophical ideas above your utility function? The very statement that it was net negative is not an objective one, really.

bigbillheck 5y ago

> Is there a word for that? Dismissing empirical evidence by clinging to philosophical assertions? That word, I claim, is 'ideology'.

malka 5y ago

Carmack works for Facebook. The fact that he is unhappy with GPL is a feature, not a problem.

scrollaway 5y ago
You're doing pretty much what the GP calls out. The kindest reading of your comment is that you absolutely don't understand who Carmack is. Understandable; "Industry veteran" is quite the understatement, after all. But maybe don't start immediately assigning employer intent to people who have field experience on what their licensing decisions from long before their current employment led to.
pjmlp 5y ago
Yet I see plenty of people happy using React, React Native, PHP, Folly,... go figure.

belorn 5y ago

> The best aspects of GPL work didn't manifest Did someone get sued for downloading a copy of a game with the quake source code in it? Did someone release a game with quake code in it, only to go after users for patent infringement? DRM locked devices built on the quake code? A license is simply the condition for which an author allows others to do things for which copyright law make illegal. There is also a culture and a movement that has been built around common rules for software development. Carmack does not explain what he wanted out of the license, and so people attempt to fill in the gaps. That people interpret that as "Dismissing empirical evidence" is on those making that interpretation. I do have a word for that, but we should strive to improve the tone on HN and so its better to just explain the purpose of those who replied to Carmack. (I don't flag comments often but this is a prime example. Hugely frustrated, dismissive, with a bit snarky tone. The comment would be hugely improved by simply skipping the last paragraph. The outcome? A bunch of up and down votes in all the comments below in typical flame war fashion)

jasode 5y ago
>A license is simply the condition [...] I don't think reducing it to that actually helps the discussion. A license/law/policy can't be analyzed via its bare verbatim text. One also has to look at its unintended effects in the real world. Yes, the GPL license has noble intentions but that doesn't mean it's immune from causing actions that indirectly contradict its goal. (Wikipedia article on that phenomenon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive) A license or law can have a stated positive goal or ideal with the text written for that intention and motivation ... but the complexity of the real world may work also against it. >Carmack does not explain what he wanted out of the license, To use framework of "perverse incentive" to interpret his tweets.. He wrote: "The GPL virality wound up being a net negative," and followed up with: >the best aspects of GPL work didn't manifest, but tons of opportunities to just copy-paste-modify were lost due to license concerns. It is possible that some of the source ports wouldn't have been as open, but I'm pretty sure there would have been more total users of the code, likely making the amount shared in the open still greater. I'm still supportive of lots of GPL work, but I don't think the restrictions helped in this particular case. So in this particular case, he claims that GPL unintentionally caused less openness instead of more. Seems like a textbook example of Perverse Incentive. Yes, we could get pedantic and say GPL verbatim text mentions "freedom" instead of "openness". True, but many interpret GPL's copyleft reciprocal nature of "I share my code and you share your changes back" as trying to create source code abundance. Carmack is claiming that in his case, GPL's restrictions unintentionally caused less code to be shared. One can still disagree with Carmack but it's still worth understanding what he's claiming.

loopz 5y ago

Ideology fits pretty well, as the term is used in modern times. In case of Linux, GPL is regarded as a good fit. In case of games, it'd be surprising now, to see GPL as a good fit. Open source and GPL are not used predominantly, thus never disrupted much in that space. However, this is based on a kind of hindsight bias as well. In many ways, Free Software is regarded a means by itself: To keep software Free. So the goals of the ideology might not ressonate with the goals of every game developer.

MaxBarraclough 5y ago
Right. Carmack's goals are clearly not aligned with those of the FSF. The FSF is perfectly happy for Free software to be of no value to those who develop non-Free Software, indeed they actively prefer it that way, viewing all non-Free software as unethical. Evidently Carmack would rather the Id source releases be of use to as many developers as possible. As he says though, My partners would never have gone for it, precisely because it would have been valuable to developers of non-Free games, who compete with Id.

fazgl 5y ago

Carmack explicitly mentions the BSD/GPL question in connection with copilot. He is working on AI now and has an explicit interest in the intellectual property discussions that flared up after copilot. It's natural that people think he's using his status as a super programmer to lobby for the position that currently benefits him. I don't see why he would be more qualified to assess the pros/cons of the GPL than the Linux and GCC authors.

bluGill 5y ago
> I don't see why he would be more qualified to assess the pros/cons of the GPL than the Linux and GCC authors. That is simple: he has thought about it in more depth than most of them. Most Linux and GCC authors don't really care about licensing much, just code they can work collaboratively on. Since the code they are working on is GPL they use GPL and get back to work. I suspect if Linus took the time to really think he would use BSD for Linux - it hasn't been possible to make this type of change since like 1992 at the latest though so there is no point in him thinking about it. And in turn that means my claim is not testable.
- shagie 5y ago
  In https://youtu.be/PaKIZ7gJlRU https://youtu.be/PaKIZ7gJlRU Linus talks about BSD licenses at 8:30 (well, somewhere around there). Its a good watch for the philosophical background on which license Linux is under and Linus's feelings about the GPL v2 and v3. No, he wouldn't have used the BSD license - it didn't match what he wanted for linux.
PoignardAzur 5y ago
> I don't see why he would be more qualified to assess the pros/cons of the GPL than the Linux and GCC authors. I don't think he is. I would be equally frustrated if Linus Torvalds made an argument about the pros and cons of each license and people replied with generic proselytism. My point isn't that Carmack's status means people should automatically listen to him. I'm saying he made a thought-out argument, based on practical considerations, and the way most people answered didn't really address the argument, so much as re-state a previous held belief that license X is better than license Y.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago

> Like, I find it intensely frustrating that, when an industry veteran says "I've heard the pros and cons of each approach and I found that in my real-life experience GPL was a net negative", people answer with a 101 on the philosophy of GPL. You think that's frustrating, try watching an expert talk about economics.

tzs 5y ago
> You think that's frustrating, try watching an expert talk about economics. Physics, too. I once mentioned on a forum that at least as the fat guy in my group of friends I coasted down a slope faster on my bicycle than did my skinny friends. (It was quite noticeable, too). The number of people who jumped in to tell me I was wrong and attempted to do that math using their first semester freshman physics knowledge to prove it was astounding. They did a decent job--for bicyclists on the Moon. For bicyclists on Earth--not so good. They all neglected wind resistance.
- donkeybeer 5y ago
  Wind resistance should slow down the larger person more.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
    Ignoring wind resistance is the problem. Undoubtedly mass was accounted for, but they got the incorrect answer because wind resistance has a much greater effect on the lighter rider. The extra momentum of the heavier rider easily overcomes the small increase in wind resistance. Anyone who has biked with someone of significantly different body mass will have seen ample evidence that bigger people coast downhill faster.
    - donkeybeer 5y ago
      I don't think momentum should affect how fast you slide down. The reasons are different.

glogla 5y ago

Carmack has net worth of $50 million. Him saying "exploitation by big tech is not a problem, really" is very different than normal person saying it - his well being is not on the line and never will be. Go ask authors of ElasticSearch or Airflow or whatever the new thing that AWS steals will be.

javagram 5y ago
ElasticSearch was GPL (AGPL). It didn’t help them because what their business model needed was not just sharing back changes to source code but to actually disincentivize competition in the space of providing cloud SaaS for the product. Hence why they and mongodb switched to a shared source license that is not Free software.
- nopzor 5y ago
  elasticsearch wasn't ever GPL or AGPL to my knowledge. it was Apache licensed, and then they switched to SSPL.
  - javagram 5y ago
    Yes, sorry I confused it with mongodb.
defaultname 5y ago
The argument of big tech "exploiting" or stealing has always rang untrue to me. If Microsoft took the source code to Nano and made a Nano+ that reads word files or something, closed-source, selling it for big bucks, etc, the value of what they're offering cannot possibly be more than the delta from what is freely and openly available. They didn't make the original any less available, and a user is only possibly going to pay if the features are different enough to merit the cost over the freely available version. Similarly, if Amazon has a product based on an open source product, what they charge can only possibly be for the values that they've brought to it. They haven't stolen anything. A lot of GPL advocacy seems to be based in sour grapes and it's offputting.

meh99 5y ago

Empirical evidence of his subjective goals going unmet is not empirical evidence of an objective truth we all must follow.

phendrenad2 5y ago

Also seen at the very beginning of this video (where someone points out the flaws in Visual Studio, and people on Twitter assume he doesn't know how to use it): https://youtu.be/GC-0tCy4P1U https://youtu.be/GC-0tCy4P1U

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

k12sosse 5y ago

> Is there a word for that? Dismissing empirical evidence by clinging to philosophical assertions? Being in denial

gameswithgo 5y ago

Linus Torvalds has similar conversations with gpl advocates regularly. “no, i am happy for companies to use linux this way”. And the people just can’t handle this idea. Like suggesting that god doesn’t exist to someone devout.

temac 5y ago
It is probably more about a v2 vs v3 debate in the case of Linux. He really likes copyleft GPLv2-style and really thinks it has been a net-positive if not one of the key things for the success of the project.
nextaccountic 5y ago
But Linux is GPL! And Linus himself believes Linux wouldn't have become what it is now if it weren't for GPL. In the context of Linus values, open source means basically the right of forking software, but copyleft means the right of merging back worthwhile patches from downstream forks. This is absolutely critical in an industry full of binary blobs: this is basically the reason we have any kind of source code for Android kernel drivers, routers, and many other products. What Linus doesn't value is the goals of free software movement: empowering the user of the computer. He just wants the code. That's why he doesn't care about tivoization, but he cares a lot about GPL.
whoknowswhat11 5y ago
This was part of the v3 fight - he wanted software free, but also so you were free to use it. Didn't mind that you could use it with locked down hardware (TiVo / cars / phones / med devices / security etc)- still had to release source

temac 5y ago

And to be fair, he even concluded with "I'm still supportive of lots of GPL work, but I don't think the restrictions helped in this particular case."

tylermauthe 5y ago

It's called mansplaining.

elcapitan 5y ago

> Is there a word for that? Dismissing empirical evidence by clinging to philosophical assertions? Freshmansplaining?

lodi 5y ago
Genius.

jrochkind1 5y ago

Eh, people are allowed to disagree or challenge Cormack, it doesn't bother me that they brought up that worry despite knowing he is an experienced respected person. I do find it notable how many of my peer computer programmers/software engineers no longer believe in open source though. 15 years ago it was very popular to believe in open source, as a way of combating the power of giant corporations. The dislike/distrust/desire to combat large corporations is still there, but there seems to be a popular and growing opinion that, as they have seen big corporations get only more powerful while using open source, this must mean that open source serves big corporations, and we should be anti-open source if we want to combat big corporations. So it's still anti-corporate, but now much more popular to be anti-open source. The difference I guess is that now the idea is that open source privileges big corporations against smaller for-profit concerns, that it hurts the kind of "entrepreneurs" that the speakers want to be, hurts their ability to become rich themselves. Whereas before the idea was that open source would help "the people" against the corporations, not help some entrepeneurs get rich themselves. ANYHOW. This is definitely a thing. Anyone who's been in this "scene" for 20 years is seeing it. Is anyone writing more about it and what's going on?

lukeschlather 5y ago
Carmack is clearly still in favor of open source, he just wishes he had gone with BSD. And it doesn't sound like it's because he's anti-corporate. It sounds like it's because he works for a mega tech corp and his mega tech corp hates the GPL so he has to do a ton of paperwork to use any GPL code there. (which is the same as working for any tech corp.)
- VectorLock 5y ago
  The crux of his argument seems to be that he wants to be able to copy and paste other people's code and create derivative work without the GPL carrying along.
- tapoxi 5y ago
  Well it’s also because we didn’t see much done with the GPL’d source releases for his engines, just small improvements and standalone mods (The Dark Mod, Xonotic, etc) No commercial game developer is willing to ship a game with GPL’d code because the license is incompatible with most middleware and console SDKs. We missed out on what could have been a free and open competitor to Unity or Unreal.

trashcan 5y ago

> Is there a word for that? Dismissing empirical evidence by clinging to philosophical assertions? Cognitive dissonance

ksec 5y ago

I think from Carmack POV, Unreal Model would have been better ? Basically he want the code or software to be used more often. And the industry collaborate together to make better engine. I also kind of think 90% of the comments here misses the point. It isn't GPL vs BSD. Some software should be GPL, or APGL even. Some are better for MIT and BSD, or even CC0.