4 ms·

My company does whatever it can to comply with GPL requirements and it is nothing short of a goddamn nightmare. Nothing like sitting in a conference room for ho

My company does whatever it can to comply with GPL requirements and it is nothing short of a goddamn nightmare. Nothing like sitting in a conference room for hours with lawyers while we poured through the licenses for 250 different packages; we would have been better off just burning the money. My conclusions are that most Linux distributions are an amalgam of software packages with licenses that are fundamentally incompatible with each other; the GPL is extremely poorly written with lots of vagaries. I don't think there is a path to 100% compliance; you just make sure your heart is in the right place and hope for the best. Ultimately, we concluded we are moving to BSD on future projects where possible. Not because of some overwhelming need to keep source closed from customers, rather just to avoid the mess.

nix23 5y ago
>short of a goddamn nightmare It is....don't touch lawyers if you want to get real wok done.
posguy 5y ago
Those 250 packages likely don't have custom forks of the GPL license. Handling of legal requirements for each package should be templatable by management based on whether a particular package is GPLv2, GPLv3 or AGPLv3 and has a linking exception.
jka 5y ago
The other way to avoid this would be to lean copyleft for your own codebase(s). If they're made public and you include the appropriate source code references for the dependencies you rely on, then you should be in the clear legally (and perhaps morally, although that's a separate topic).
simion314 5y ago
>Ultimately, we concluded we are moving to BSD on future projects where possible. Not because of some overwhelming need to keep source closed from customers, rather just to avoid the mess. It makes sense that developers or slave owners want different freedoms then users or slaves. If your code was BSD or GPL do you still need a layer ? If you are not a slave owner you are not affected by the fact there is a law that does not allow owning slaves.
- nix23 5y ago
  >It makes sense that developers or slave owners want different freedoms then users or slaves Can you stop with that extremely stupid comparison? It's wrong on so many layers (pun intended)
  - simion314 5y ago
    I will not stop, that exact thing was used to justify that America is the land of the free because you have the freedom to own slaves, the same way BSD is the land of the free because you can take all the freedoms from the users.
    - nix23 5y ago
      Maybe you need a reality shakedown...are you 14 or younger? Because then i just leave you alone, and it's ok to think like that at your age.
      - simion314 5y ago
        Am much much older, but I won't stop because you don't like a perfect valid thing, do you want to censor me or the books where that phrase was printed? I will also not stop using it each time some dev or software publisher attempts to use a the word "free" in a undefined way to promote something that takes freedom away from others. If you want people stopping doing this you need to be honest and clear, say "BSD gives developers and publishers more freedoms" , or "from a developer popint of view BSD is offering freedom where GPL puts restriction on taking away those "pesky users/products" freedoms" . I could do an analogy with order relations and ordered/unordered sets but might be too complex so previous well knows quote does the job done, your are the first that got offended so far, maybe you can reflect on why you are so special.
        nix23 5y ago
        > Am much much older, but I won't stop because you don't like a perfect valid thing, do you want to censor me or the books where that phrase was printed? You compare a free license with slavery....no one forces you to work on a project that uses BSD/MIT/ISC, also no one forces you to live in the US, that's the "small" difference, no one takes your freedom away.
coliveira 5y ago
So why don't you just use commercial software and skip all this? I will answer this question: because you and your company don't want to pay for it! If your company had to pay for every library and application that you now use for free because of GPL software, you probably wouldn't be on a job in the first place. So, yes, I think GPL is doing a good job, and I'll never write a single line of code that is at least not GPL.
- nix23 5y ago
  >So why don't you just use commercial software and skip all this? Because commercial software have even worse licenses than the gpl is. And btw, developers are much more expensive then software, linux is not everywhere because it's free but because it need's less maintenance then windows (serverside that is). And exactly because of that VMware is still making lots of money.

nix23 5y ago

>short of a goddamn nightmare It is....don't touch lawyers if you want to get real wok done.

posguy 5y ago

Those 250 packages likely don't have custom forks of the GPL license. Handling of legal requirements for each package should be templatable by management based on whether a particular package is GPLv2, GPLv3 or AGPLv3 and has a linking exception.

jka 5y ago

The other way to avoid this would be to lean copyleft for your own codebase(s). If they're made public and you include the appropriate source code references for the dependencies you rely on, then you should be in the clear legally (and perhaps morally, although that's a separate topic).

simion314 5y ago

>Ultimately, we concluded we are moving to BSD on future projects where possible. Not because of some overwhelming need to keep source closed from customers, rather just to avoid the mess. It makes sense that developers or slave owners want different freedoms then users or slaves. If your code was BSD or GPL do you still need a layer ? If you are not a slave owner you are not affected by the fact there is a law that does not allow owning slaves.

nix23 5y ago
>It makes sense that developers or slave owners want different freedoms then users or slaves Can you stop with that extremely stupid comparison? It's wrong on so many layers (pun intended)
- simion314 5y ago
  I will not stop, that exact thing was used to justify that America is the land of the free because you have the freedom to own slaves, the same way BSD is the land of the free because you can take all the freedoms from the users.
  - nix23 5y ago
    Maybe you need a reality shakedown...are you 14 or younger? Because then i just leave you alone, and it's ok to think like that at your age.
    - simion314 5y ago
      Am much much older, but I won't stop because you don't like a perfect valid thing, do you want to censor me or the books where that phrase was printed? I will also not stop using it each time some dev or software publisher attempts to use a the word "free" in a undefined way to promote something that takes freedom away from others. If you want people stopping doing this you need to be honest and clear, say "BSD gives developers and publishers more freedoms" , or "from a developer popint of view BSD is offering freedom where GPL puts restriction on taking away those "pesky users/products" freedoms" . I could do an analogy with order relations and ordered/unordered sets but might be too complex so previous well knows quote does the job done, your are the first that got offended so far, maybe you can reflect on why you are so special.
      - nix23 5y ago
        > Am much much older, but I won't stop because you don't like a perfect valid thing, do you want to censor me or the books where that phrase was printed? You compare a free license with slavery....no one forces you to work on a project that uses BSD/MIT/ISC, also no one forces you to live in the US, that's the "small" difference, no one takes your freedom away.

coliveira 5y ago

So why don't you just use commercial software and skip all this? I will answer this question: because you and your company don't want to pay for it! If your company had to pay for every library and application that you now use for free because of GPL software, you probably wouldn't be on a job in the first place. So, yes, I think GPL is doing a good job, and I'll never write a single line of code that is at least not GPL.

nix23 5y ago
>So why don't you just use commercial software and skip all this? Because commercial software have even worse licenses than the gpl is. And btw, developers are much more expensive then software, linux is not everywhere because it's free but because it need's less maintenance then windows (serverside that is). And exactly because of that VMware is still making lots of money.