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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,

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...
  - chrisfinazzo 5y ago
    You are technically correct, the best kind of correct.
  - Macha 5y ago
    Should they then abandon that ideal and ensure there is no software that provides those benefits? In a world without copyleft, I don't think many of the ecosystems we have today would exist. The alternatives are that this software doesn't exist (because there's no economic incentive to build a business to sell it), or it's permissively licensed and some random other builds a business off it and with the extra resources outcompetes the original. I'd take a world with some free software over none, and I don't see any way to loosen the restrictions to make it more easily broadly commercially viable without causing its own extinction.
    - lostcolony 5y ago
      You don't need copyleft licenses to have free software. There is plenty of code that is written that is not a key differentiator, that people will still open source. Parent mentions Goldman Sachs; their trading platform is not something they want to sell, nor want to give away. Their build system, their UI component library, their numeric libraries, etc, could all be things they don't feel give them a material advantage over their competitors, and so it makes sense to open source ('many eyes make any bug shallow' style of thing). These libraries don't need to be copyleft. If someone else wants to extend them and turn them into their secret sauce, who cares? They lose the benefit of it being open source (those many eyes), but if keeping their modifications closed enables a business model that people want to pay them for, they're generating value. And that's something that copyleft -wouldn't- allow, but a permissive open source license (such as MIT) would.

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...
- chrisfinazzo 5y ago
  You are technically correct, the best kind of correct.
- Macha 5y ago
  Should they then abandon that ideal and ensure there is no software that provides those benefits? In a world without copyleft, I don't think many of the ecosystems we have today would exist. The alternatives are that this software doesn't exist (because there's no economic incentive to build a business to sell it), or it's permissively licensed and some random other builds a business off it and with the extra resources outcompetes the original. I'd take a world with some free software over none, and I don't see any way to loosen the restrictions to make it more easily broadly commercially viable without causing its own extinction.
  - lostcolony 5y ago
    You don't need copyleft licenses to have free software. There is plenty of code that is written that is not a key differentiator, that people will still open source. Parent mentions Goldman Sachs; their trading platform is not something they want to sell, nor want to give away. Their build system, their UI component library, their numeric libraries, etc, could all be things they don't feel give them a material advantage over their competitors, and so it makes sense to open source ('many eyes make any bug shallow' style of thing). These libraries don't need to be copyleft. If someone else wants to extend them and turn them into their secret sauce, who cares? They lose the benefit of it being open source (those many eyes), but if keeping their modifications closed enables a business model that people want to pay them for, they're generating value. And that's something that copyleft -wouldn't- allow, but a permissive open source license (such as MIT) would.