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Although Stallman argues otherwise, the nature of the GPL is really incompatible with how business is done in the real world. If the GPL requires you to releas

Although Stallman argues otherwise, the nature of the GPL is really incompatible with how business is done in the real world. If the GPL requires you to release source code, but the reason for your success is that you've found a clever way to do something that no one has thought of yet, doesn't that really put a damper on what people will try doing - because the invention is no longer yours and must be shared?

throwaway2037 5y ago
I'm confused by this comment: Although Stallman argues otherwise, the nature of the GPL is really incompatible with how business is done in the real world. Red Hat deals heavily in GPL'd code that it writes and maintains. It is a major contributor to many, many GPL'd open source projects. Even where it cannot get patches accepted upstream, they maintain many year, massive patch sets to satisfy needs of corporate clients. How do you explain their success? The same is true, to a lesser extent, for SuSE, which has a major economic footprint in corporate Germany (and Austria and Switzerland). And how about The Qt Company or MySQL / MariaDB?
- JohnHaugeland 5y ago
  > How do you explain their success? Red Hat is a rare outlier. The vast majority of business related software is not GPL, and cannot be.
  - lostcolony 5y ago
    Certainly consumer oriented stuff. The thing notable about every company I've seen relying on GPL code is that what they sell are services/support. People pay Red Hat to be able to email someone when they have a problem. That's it. That's the business mode. Same with MariaDB (MySQL is a little unique in that it was purchased by Oracle, and I can't speak to Qt having no familiarity with it). That works for B2B positioning, since the cost of support staff scales well when each new customer is worth thousands of dollars in revenue...and doesn't work well for B2C where the cost of support staff won't scale well when each new customer is worth a few bucks.
- chrisfinazzo 5y ago
  The distinction I would make is between companies who are in the business of developing software and people who use software to help them do a thing. Red Hat, Qt, and the rest give the core stuff they build away but make people pay for more complicated services and support. For them, that's reasonable and it works. Now, if you're Goldman Sachs and somebody gets a hold of the code that runs your trading platform (which surely includes some open-source components) and tries to use it as the basis of their work at another company, that's a problem. They're not in the business of selling software and paid people to develop something that supports the parts of the business that people can actually see. Allowing anyone to use that code simply based on policy gets problematic real fast.[1] [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Aleynikov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Aleynikov Just because some parts are open shouldn't mean everything must be and you can use it without repercussions. IANAL, but this is the basic reason why copyright exists, to make sure people can get paid for their work.
  - Macha 5y ago
    Sure, but I don't see the problem. These companies can't use GPL code if they don't want to share those. If the reason they don't want to share is because they feel it would get in their way of making money, they can find someone to take some of that money in exchange for producing code that they can use that does the same as the GPL library. For single copyright owner software, this might be the same code from the same owner, just under a commercial license. For free software you might have to implement your own clone. That's the prospective user and the software author being unable to agree on a price (the author wanting the release of the derivative source code), not any fatal flaw with free software.
    - simiones 5y ago
      The point is: can the ideal of the GPL actually work in the software development world? The answer seems to be "no". You can't build a software development company around a GPL code base. You can build a support services company around that (like RedHat or MySQL did), but that's it. You can build a service company that uses software internally, like Google and Facebook and AWS etc. But the idea that you can build and sell a piece of GPL software is a fantasy of Stallman's and no more than that. Free software has even helped encourage the software-as-a-service world, where no one owns even a copy of a propietary piece of software...
- orangepurple 5y ago
  > How do you explain their success? Release the source code in the most user-hostile, obfuscated, undocumented format possible while technically in legal compliance!
  - glowingly 5y ago
    I remember a time when the then-independent CentOS was afraid to even reference Red Hat by name, instead referring to a large North American Enterprise Linux vendor. A bit too "he-who-shall-not-be-named" for me.
- okprod 5y ago
  I believe Red Hat gets most of its revenue from subscriptions and maintenance/support. They don't really have an incentive to try and protect software they've developed; instead, they benefit the more of the software they maintain is deployed.
Drakim 5y ago
Even if you are correct, the point is moot because the GPL isn't there to protect business owners, but users. A business can't just grab a bunch of free GPL software, modify it, and then sell it with a whole bunch of restrictions about what the user may or may not do with their product. The GPL ensures the user has the right to examine, alter, fork, or manipulate the product. If that hurts a business because they need to restrict how their customers are allowed to utilize their product, they shouldn't be using GPL code to make their product.
- 2Gkashmiri 5y ago
  you are talking about MIT/BSD clause licenses. GPL is "infectious". if you use GPL 3.0 code, you have to give FULL source to your customers on demand. you CANNOT use GPL code in a proprietary software because you couldnt release the source of a proprietary one.
  - chrisfinazzo 5y ago
    This is the core of my concern about GPL - you can't make a distinction between open and closed because compliance requires you to give everything away.
    - 2Gkashmiri 5y ago
      no. by using GPL code in your software, you are telling the users that. if you use MIT instead, no one cares and you can use the code anyway you like. using GPL code REQUIRES COMPLIANCE, that is the only way to ensure the four freedoms. if you are not okay with that, like famously google is, they simply ban AGPL/GPL software from their organization and everyone is fine with that also.
      - andai 5y ago
        MIT/BSD (at least without the advertising/attribution clause) are essentially public domain, identical in spirit to the WTFPL (whose entire body text reads: "just do what the fuck you want to.") GPL actually restricts certain freedoms to preserve others. The "actually free" (public domain) licenses allow you to do things Stallman considers harmful, which he defines as a violation of user freedoms. In other words, his licenses remove the freedom to remove freedoms.
pooper 5y ago
> but the reason for your success is that you've found a clever way to do something that no one has thought of yet If you are in this situation, you do not have free software. The difference between free software and open source is the perspective. Open source comes from the perspective of the vendor. Free software comes from the perspective of the user. Free software is about freedom for the user, everything else builds upon this first principle. It is possible that the licenses have defects. The license is an artifact. The four essential freedoms are the business requirements on which the licenses are built in top of: The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0). The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this. The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others (freedom 2). The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html#four-freedoms https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html#four-freedoms
- JohnHaugeland 5y ago
  It is not the case that the words "free software" are defined by the FSF or GNU. This is good old fashioned Orwellian language control. Many things are genuinely free software that do not fit the FSF's "definition." They are not an authority on the language or all software. Much of my software costs $0. That makes it free. I do not follow the FSF's demands. It is still free software, even though you found a link with a bullet list that says things. None of these "essential freedoms" actually are essential to anyone but FSF people.
  - 8note 5y ago
    I'd call that gratuit software rather than libre software. Using a most descriptive language sidesteps the English conflation of free and free. North Korea is a very free country. Everything is gratuit, but it's not a free country at all, no libre
  - MaxBarraclough 5y ago
b20000 5y ago
one problem i have with licenses like the GPL is that the effort spent integrating and fixing open source code such that it achieves commercial usability or quality, cannot be protected. competitors can take the 10 lines of code you spent years on and which make all the difference, and they don’t need to pay you. it unfairly serves the interests of large companies where this cost is negligible.
- cupofpython 5y ago
  >competitors can take the 10 lines of code you spent years on and which make all the difference, and they don’t need to pay you Isnt that the point? Your contribution is freely accessible to the community. If your work gets used, then you contributed If you want to get paid for your work, set up a contract beforehand. Get paid to work on GPL code upfront - dont try to get paid for how it is used after. How it is used is heavily effected by not needing to pay for it in the first place. Otherwise you are like the guy at the gas station who randomly cleans your windshield and then asks for a tip. Like yes, my windshield was dirty and you deserve to be paid for your work, but no one asked
  - b20000 5y ago
    let's say it costs you $100K to fix an open source issue. you are a self funded bootstrapped startup. that 100K is serious money. the same 100K, for a FAANG, is lunch money. the FAANG can take your contribution and compete with you, and put its marketing dollars to work, which you don't have. "get paid" for open source work typically means become a contractor, paid per hour. that doesn't scale, I'm interested in getting paid repeatedly without any additional effort on my part, rather than getting paid per hour. it would be interesting if there was a model where a contribution would cost $0.001 to use in a product. if I am a small business selling a product with that contribution in it, and I sell 1,000 products, I pay $1. if I am a FAANG and sell 20 million products, I pay 20K. that sounds like a much more fair situation. perhaps blockchain can enable this. now let's say I am a regular contributor and FAANGs use my software. I can now make let's say ~100K per year from my few contributors from FAANGs without any additional work. that would be pretty awesome.
CogitoCogito 5y ago
No one is required to use GPL software. You're free to implement your clever idea in a way that doesn't make use of GPL software.
- chrisfinazzo 5y ago
  Stallman views sharing of source code as imperative, so the idea that you wouldn't use the GPL is anathema to him. He claims that it protects users, but this leaves out the people who spend the time and effort to develop that software product. At that point, you're back to traditional copyright and other less restrictive schemes.
  - Macha 5y ago
    Sure, Stallman's preferred option is that you use free software and release yours as such accordingly, but I think he'd still prefer you to write your own and release that as proprietary than take free software and bundle it up in a way that takes away the user's freedoms. > He claims that it protects users, but this leaves out the people who spend the time and effort to develop that software product. Some things really aren't all positives for everyone. The free software movement prioritises users first. Sometimes this is a negative for the developer's goals. But clearly by the existence of a large amount of free software, there are enough developer's sympathetic to this goal to make it work, and by eliminating those restrictions, I don't see how that's preferable (or even different) to the all rights reserved world.
cupofpython 5y ago
>you've found a clever way to do something Dont use GPL licensing if you want to turn a trade secret into profit.
jrm4 5y ago
Yes; but it's a fair price to pay. What you're saying is simply a part of the big question of "intellectual property," though I think perhaps one thing we forget is that the protection is the ARTIFICIAL part; IP is the thing we made up out of nowhere. Probably one of the reasons I find the GPL to be so brilliant and clever -- one could whinge about the problems with overbearing copyright, or one can use some clever judo and just roll with it.
imtringued 5y ago
It puts a damper on conventional business models. It doesn't put a damper on societal progress because you benefit from the existence of GPL software so it is only fair to let others benefit.
Spooky23 5y ago
For a few years, I had a consulting practice that implemented stuff written by Microsoft, IBM and others, mostly using scripts and little applications that were posted on the web for free. It was the only way to make the business work, as work for hire would be owned by the customer, and we didn't have the money to waste arguing with massive corporations. It's like anything else tools + labor = work product.
okprod 5y ago
The reason most devs have told me is basically security by obscurity, or they "don't care" about monetary gain/competitive advantage of their package/product.

throwaway2037 5y ago

I'm confused by this comment: Although Stallman argues otherwise, the nature of the GPL is really incompatible with how business is done in the real world. Red Hat deals heavily in GPL'd code that it writes and maintains. It is a major contributor to many, many GPL'd open source projects. Even where it cannot get patches accepted upstream, they maintain many year, massive patch sets to satisfy needs of corporate clients. How do you explain their success? The same is true, to a lesser extent, for SuSE, which has a major economic footprint in corporate Germany (and Austria and Switzerland). And how about The Qt Company or MySQL / MariaDB?

JohnHaugeland 5y ago
> How do you explain their success? Red Hat is a rare outlier. The vast majority of business related software is not GPL, and cannot be.
- lostcolony 5y ago
  Certainly consumer oriented stuff. The thing notable about every company I've seen relying on GPL code is that what they sell are services/support. People pay Red Hat to be able to email someone when they have a problem. That's it. That's the business mode. Same with MariaDB (MySQL is a little unique in that it was purchased by Oracle, and I can't speak to Qt having no familiarity with it). That works for B2B positioning, since the cost of support staff scales well when each new customer is worth thousands of dollars in revenue...and doesn't work well for B2C where the cost of support staff won't scale well when each new customer is worth a few bucks.
chrisfinazzo 5y ago
The distinction I would make is between companies who are in the business of developing software and people who use software to help them do a thing. Red Hat, Qt, and the rest give the core stuff they build away but make people pay for more complicated services and support. For them, that's reasonable and it works. Now, if you're Goldman Sachs and somebody gets a hold of the code that runs your trading platform (which surely includes some open-source components) and tries to use it as the basis of their work at another company, that's a problem. They're not in the business of selling software and paid people to develop something that supports the parts of the business that people can actually see. Allowing anyone to use that code simply based on policy gets problematic real fast.[1] [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Aleynikov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Aleynikov Just because some parts are open shouldn't mean everything must be and you can use it without repercussions. IANAL, but this is the basic reason why copyright exists, to make sure people can get paid for their work.
- Macha 5y ago
  Sure, but I don't see the problem. These companies can't use GPL code if they don't want to share those. If the reason they don't want to share is because they feel it would get in their way of making money, they can find someone to take some of that money in exchange for producing code that they can use that does the same as the GPL library. For single copyright owner software, this might be the same code from the same owner, just under a commercial license. For free software you might have to implement your own clone. That's the prospective user and the software author being unable to agree on a price (the author wanting the release of the derivative source code), not any fatal flaw with free software.
  - simiones 5y ago
    The point is: can the ideal of the GPL actually work in the software development world? The answer seems to be "no". You can't build a software development company around a GPL code base. You can build a support services company around that (like RedHat or MySQL did), but that's it. You can build a service company that uses software internally, like Google and Facebook and AWS etc. But the idea that you can build and sell a piece of GPL software is a fantasy of Stallman's and no more than that. Free software has even helped encourage the software-as-a-service world, where no one owns even a copy of a propietary piece of software...
orangepurple 5y ago
> How do you explain their success? Release the source code in the most user-hostile, obfuscated, undocumented format possible while technically in legal compliance!
- glowingly 5y ago
  I remember a time when the then-independent CentOS was afraid to even reference Red Hat by name, instead referring to a large North American Enterprise Linux vendor. A bit too "he-who-shall-not-be-named" for me.
okprod 5y ago
I believe Red Hat gets most of its revenue from subscriptions and maintenance/support. They don't really have an incentive to try and protect software they've developed; instead, they benefit the more of the software they maintain is deployed.

Drakim 5y ago

Even if you are correct, the point is moot because the GPL isn't there to protect business owners, but users. A business can't just grab a bunch of free GPL software, modify it, and then sell it with a whole bunch of restrictions about what the user may or may not do with their product. The GPL ensures the user has the right to examine, alter, fork, or manipulate the product. If that hurts a business because they need to restrict how their customers are allowed to utilize their product, they shouldn't be using GPL code to make their product.

2Gkashmiri 5y ago
you are talking about MIT/BSD clause licenses. GPL is "infectious". if you use GPL 3.0 code, you have to give FULL source to your customers on demand. you CANNOT use GPL code in a proprietary software because you couldnt release the source of a proprietary one.
- chrisfinazzo 5y ago
  This is the core of my concern about GPL - you can't make a distinction between open and closed because compliance requires you to give everything away.
  - 2Gkashmiri 5y ago
    no. by using GPL code in your software, you are telling the users that. if you use MIT instead, no one cares and you can use the code anyway you like. using GPL code REQUIRES COMPLIANCE, that is the only way to ensure the four freedoms. if you are not okay with that, like famously google is, they simply ban AGPL/GPL software from their organization and everyone is fine with that also.
    - andai 5y ago
      MIT/BSD (at least without the advertising/attribution clause) are essentially public domain, identical in spirit to the WTFPL (whose entire body text reads: "just do what the fuck you want to.") GPL actually restricts certain freedoms to preserve others. The "actually free" (public domain) licenses allow you to do things Stallman considers harmful, which he defines as a violation of user freedoms. In other words, his licenses remove the freedom to remove freedoms.

pooper 5y ago

> but the reason for your success is that you've found a clever way to do something that no one has thought of yet If you are in this situation, you do not have free software. The difference between free software and open source is the perspective. Open source comes from the perspective of the vendor. Free software comes from the perspective of the user. Free software is about freedom for the user, everything else builds upon this first principle. It is possible that the licenses have defects. The license is an artifact. The four essential freedoms are the business requirements on which the licenses are built in top of: The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0). The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this. The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others (freedom 2). The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html#four-freedoms https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html#four-freedoms

JohnHaugeland 5y ago
It is not the case that the words "free software" are defined by the FSF or GNU. This is good old fashioned Orwellian language control. Many things are genuinely free software that do not fit the FSF's "definition." They are not an authority on the language or all software. Much of my software costs $0. That makes it free. I do not follow the FSF's demands. It is still free software, even though you found a link with a bullet list that says things. None of these "essential freedoms" actually are essential to anyone but FSF people.
- 8note 5y ago
  I'd call that gratuit software rather than libre software. Using a most descriptive language sidesteps the English conflation of free and free. North Korea is a very free country. Everything is gratuit, but it's not a free country at all, no libre
- MaxBarraclough 5y ago

b20000 5y ago

one problem i have with licenses like the GPL is that the effort spent integrating and fixing open source code such that it achieves commercial usability or quality, cannot be protected. competitors can take the 10 lines of code you spent years on and which make all the difference, and they don’t need to pay you. it unfairly serves the interests of large companies where this cost is negligible.

cupofpython 5y ago
>competitors can take the 10 lines of code you spent years on and which make all the difference, and they don’t need to pay you Isnt that the point? Your contribution is freely accessible to the community. If your work gets used, then you contributed If you want to get paid for your work, set up a contract beforehand. Get paid to work on GPL code upfront - dont try to get paid for how it is used after. How it is used is heavily effected by not needing to pay for it in the first place. Otherwise you are like the guy at the gas station who randomly cleans your windshield and then asks for a tip. Like yes, my windshield was dirty and you deserve to be paid for your work, but no one asked
- b20000 5y ago
  let's say it costs you $100K to fix an open source issue. you are a self funded bootstrapped startup. that 100K is serious money. the same 100K, for a FAANG, is lunch money. the FAANG can take your contribution and compete with you, and put its marketing dollars to work, which you don't have. "get paid" for open source work typically means become a contractor, paid per hour. that doesn't scale, I'm interested in getting paid repeatedly without any additional effort on my part, rather than getting paid per hour. it would be interesting if there was a model where a contribution would cost $0.001 to use in a product. if I am a small business selling a product with that contribution in it, and I sell 1,000 products, I pay $1. if I am a FAANG and sell 20 million products, I pay 20K. that sounds like a much more fair situation. perhaps blockchain can enable this. now let's say I am a regular contributor and FAANGs use my software. I can now make let's say ~100K per year from my few contributors from FAANGs without any additional work. that would be pretty awesome.

CogitoCogito 5y ago

No one is required to use GPL software. You're free to implement your clever idea in a way that doesn't make use of GPL software.

chrisfinazzo 5y ago
Stallman views sharing of source code as imperative, so the idea that you wouldn't use the GPL is anathema to him. He claims that it protects users, but this leaves out the people who spend the time and effort to develop that software product. At that point, you're back to traditional copyright and other less restrictive schemes.
- Macha 5y ago
  Sure, Stallman's preferred option is that you use free software and release yours as such accordingly, but I think he'd still prefer you to write your own and release that as proprietary than take free software and bundle it up in a way that takes away the user's freedoms. > He claims that it protects users, but this leaves out the people who spend the time and effort to develop that software product. Some things really aren't all positives for everyone. The free software movement prioritises users first. Sometimes this is a negative for the developer's goals. But clearly by the existence of a large amount of free software, there are enough developer's sympathetic to this goal to make it work, and by eliminating those restrictions, I don't see how that's preferable (or even different) to the all rights reserved world.

cupofpython 5y ago

>you've found a clever way to do something Dont use GPL licensing if you want to turn a trade secret into profit.

jrm4 5y ago

Yes; but it's a fair price to pay. What you're saying is simply a part of the big question of "intellectual property," though I think perhaps one thing we forget is that the protection is the ARTIFICIAL part; IP is the thing we made up out of nowhere. Probably one of the reasons I find the GPL to be so brilliant and clever -- one could whinge about the problems with overbearing copyright, or one can use some clever judo and just roll with it.

imtringued 5y ago

It puts a damper on conventional business models. It doesn't put a damper on societal progress because you benefit from the existence of GPL software so it is only fair to let others benefit.

Spooky23 5y ago

For a few years, I had a consulting practice that implemented stuff written by Microsoft, IBM and others, mostly using scripts and little applications that were posted on the web for free. It was the only way to make the business work, as work for hire would be owned by the customer, and we didn't have the money to waste arguing with massive corporations. It's like anything else tools + labor = work product.

okprod 5y ago

The reason most devs have told me is basically security by obscurity, or they "don't care" about monetary gain/competitive advantage of their package/product.