9 ms·

I just wish it was copyleft like the real coreutils instead of being pushover-licensed. Now the corporations are all going to start making proprietary forks of

• jeff_carr 4y ago
  > I just wish it was copyleft Yes, the GPL is very important. The BSD license _is_ a problem. Those of you that were around when FreeBSD was maybe going to 'win' remember why Linux(GPL) ended up capturing everyone's attention. You can not count on your code staying free if it's under a BSD license. If there is a way to make money on it, someone will fork it privately and force you to pay for it. If they don't succeed, you will still be under continual threats that you will have to pay for it.
  • rocqua 4y ago
    Why did Linux end up capturing everyone's attention? I wasn't around back then.
• mustache_kimono 4y ago
  FSF/GPL advocate: "I don't like that someone else is reimplementing this code." Jesus, you think s/he ever wondered how AT&T felt about Linux and the BSDs literally reimplementing all of Unix? Oh, that's right. This is the FSF/GPL conundrum -- you're likely to end up on both sides of every issue. You will literally be both a copyright maximalist re Linux and a copyright minimalist re proprietary code, music and film.
• BirAdam 4y ago
  Corporations use copyleft stuff all the time too. FOSS subsidizes mega corporations, which sucks. Thing is, it’s also a subsidy for all of us.
• mouse_ 4y ago
  > pushover-licensed Huh, never heard the polite form of that term.
  • INTPenis 4y ago
    What's the opposite of a pushover-license? A bully-license? ;)
    • __d 4y ago
      A steadfast-license.
• bschwindHN 4y ago
  In practice, what are the worst case scenarios for a corporation making a fork of the "mv" or other commands?
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • chomp 4y ago
    In practice, there's no disaster scenario. The issue is the potential for leaving effort and hard work on the table, because a company could improve upon your code and never release it. For example, we have Rocky and Alma Linux because so much of RedHat is based on GPL-licensed GNU/Linux. They technically don't have to release any of the MIT components, they do it because they are nice stewards of open source. Same with Ubuntu. And SUSE. Other companies could be not so nice. For instance, note that Google Chrome is not technically open source. Only Chromium is, which Chrome is built from. In reality, MIT binaries without the source code are rare.
    • jasone 4y ago
      There are often situations in which the rational approach is to upstream enhancements, if only because it reduces ongoing maintenance of a derivative product. This is especially true of foundational infrastructure. BSD/MIT-like licensing works well for such software (perhaps less well in general).
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  • jacooper 4y ago
    And feature creep for each jloud providers distro starts happening, till they are now totallt different behaviors and features for each provider.
    • jacooper 4y ago
      Cloud*, totally
• snvzz 4y ago
  It's their project, and they're free to use whatever license they want. MIT is a good choice for maximizing adoption, which possibly is their intent. >Now the corporations are all going to start making proprietary forks of this. I have a hard time coming up with a scenario where a company would do this. There's literally nothing to gain from doing so.
  • riffraff 4y ago
    > There's literally nothing to gain from doing so. And yet KHTML was forked into WebKit which was forked into Blink, just to name one. OSX has forked BSD code, as did windows. This things happen all the time. MIT is a fine license, so is GPL, but we can't just say "oh nobody is going to fork this, it's dumb!" because it happens all the time.
    • nivenkos 4y ago
      WINE is the best example, they switched after TransGaming's Cedega just released a commercial fork and contributed nothing back.
      • snvzz 4y ago
        Why do you think this could happen to coreutils? What could you possibly add to coreutils that would make a proprietary fork sustainable?
    • raybb 4y ago
      Do you know of any place someone is maintaining a list of forks like this?
      • bayindirh 4y ago
        How can you maintain a list of private, closed source forks?
        • harry8 4y ago
• dhosek 4y ago
  There’s nothing more annoying than GPL absolutists. Who really cares if someone makes a closed-source fork of the code? On the other hand, given that closed-source code is going to exist, isn’t it better if it’s able to use the best code available rather than forcing developers to either ignore the existence of something because it’s GPL’d or just ignore the license in the first place? There’s a reason I choose MIT over GPL. It’s a freer license.
  • alwayslikethis 4y ago
    GPL protects the software itself against becoming proprietary. Developers are forced to ignore GPL'd code only if they are unwilling to distribute their code under GPL, because the company is unwilling to make a pledge to respect the freedom of the users. Writing more GPL'd code gives advantage to those who are willing to respect the user's freedom.
    • mustache_kimono 4y ago
      > Developers are forced to ignore GPL'd code only if they are unwilling to distribute their code under GPL If the choice is "you only have one choice", that's not really a choice at all? I have complete freedom to choose the licenses for my personal projects and I stay away from GPL and its variants (still love copyleft and the MPL2!), because devs are users too, and I (and they) see the GPL as very dev unfriendly. The GPL treats "users" and "devs" as abstractions, when in a very real sense, the devs are the ones most likely to use the code, and they are more likely to use it when it's more permissively licensed. And many are very pleased/want to use copyleft, if it isn't the GPL, and the FSF's ridiculous interpretations thereof.
  • pjmlp 4y ago
    That is why FreeBSD is everywhere, with nice contributions from all its commercial users, and clang is ISO C++20 compliant thanks to all those nice compiler vendors thinking of upstream.
    • vore 4y ago
• CobrastanJorji 4y ago
  This always seemed like a terrible idea to me, from the corporation's perspective. Sure, great, you spent a few thousand dev hours and found a clever way to significantly improve the performance of your mallocs. Awesome, you saved 5% on your hardware costs. Good deal. But now you've got a private fork to maintain. The guy who figured out the optimization was promoted and switched orgs, so the other guy on that team is in charge. There's not quite enough work for him to work on merging stuff in full time yet, so he'll do other stuff, but within a few years, keeping your private fork up to date with security patches is a full time job, then more than a full time job, and nobody wants to join that guy's effort because there's no glory and no promotions in it. But there's no getting off this ride anymore, and nobody's doing expensive performance testing anymore because the guy who knew how to do it is long gone, so I hope it's still making a difference. Ugh. Just share the fix.
  • regularfry 4y ago
    Or a proprietary fork to not maintain, and now nobody else is doing it either. This works for getting a product out of the door so if your planning horizon is the next three months it looks like a great idea.
  • camgunz 4y ago
    This makes sense from an engineering perspective, but misapprehends the purpose of most corporations, which is to funnel rent and laundered government money (subsidies, zero interest rates, contracts) into executive salaries and shareholder returns. This explains why most companies don't care about their products or the people who make them: they're perfunctory.
  • rurban 4y ago
    Maintaining private forks/patches is certainly not a full-time job with git rerere, it's rather trivial. I do maintain hundreds of forks/patches updated daily fully automatically, and I have to engage in manual fixups for maybe 10hrs a year. The fixes/extensions are shared, but don't expect them to be looked at. On some projects some PR will take years. And some, like OpenSSL or coreutils outright refuse to add new features, or fix code quality.
• alwayslikethis 4y ago
  That's the main thing I have against the Rust people. They seem to like pushover licenses instead of GPL, perhaps in the hopes of getting hired by one of the big tech corps at some point. If only they realized what made free software so resilient over years..
  • gpderetta 4y ago
    I'm a big fan of copyleft licenses, but when the objective is to push the industry toward a better standard, as opposed to a specific implementation, permissive OSS licenses make sense.
    • celeritascelery 4y ago
      I hadn’t considered this angle. Maybe using permissive licenses will improve business adoption.
  • pas 4y ago
    The intention behind GPL is great, but it's a technologist response to a social issue. If we want a software commons we have to say that upfront, not try to imply it via legalese, and then get offended when fractions emerge.
  • kzrdude 4y ago
    Not sure it's fair to generalize over all "Rust people" I've worked in the community and it's annoying that it's so against GPL in some corners, but most people are just pragmatic. They use whatever license is the norm for sharing with their community. Now that Rust is becoming less tight knit it might open up, hopefully, to more diversity in licenses.
    • alwayslikethis 4y ago
      It isn't. I don't intend to generalize to everyone using Rust. But there is a large overlap between Rust evangelists and anti-GPL activists, it seems. I don't want to believe this, but it almost looks like a corporate conspiracy to undermine free software.
• goodpoint 4y ago
  Same here. Reimplementing something with a weaker license is not a friendly behavior.
  • mustache_kimono 4y ago
    But reimplementing something with a "tougher" license is friendly? I think this is one of those "where you stand depends on where you sit" things.
• jillesvangurp 4y ago
  I think that's mostly not a thing. The problem is largely imaginary. Most MIT/Apache/BSD/etc. licensed stuff isn't commonly forked by big corporations. Why would they? It's mostly not that practical to maintain private forks of software. And so what if they do? These are still OSI endorsed licenses of course. So, bona-fide free and open source software as defined by the Open Source Initiative. Referring to them as push over licenses is not really that constructive. All sorts of respectable OSS software is licensed with these licenses. I'd go even further and state that if you remove all the OSS software that doesn't have a copyleft license, the whole landscape would get a lot less interesting. That gets rid of most popular libraries, lots of popular software packages, all kinds of critical could infrastructure components, development tooling, etc. The vast majority of OSS software I depend on is actually Apache 2.0 and MIT licensed. There's a fair bit of GPL v2 and MPL in my life as well. GPLv3 and AGPL are just much more of a fringe thing. I tend to actively avoid depending on any such software. Just too much hassle in terms of endless debates of what is and isn't allowed with such licenses and people getting upset if you actually try to use the software for something not endorsed by them. Mostly the venn diagram of such people and people producing useful things to me is pretty narrow anyway. I know legal departments in big corporations tend to have similar policies.
  • goodpoint 4y ago
    > The problem is largely imaginary. Ever heard of Android, cloud or SaaS? For example our phones and the cloud services they use are choke-full of FOSS, but we plenty of surveillance and very little freedom. Same for modern cars, TVs and many other things. There are plenty of user-hostile services that use FOSS internally. Weak licenses are huge enablers for this behavior.
    • paride5745 4y ago
      But Android is Linux, which last time I checked it's copyleft.
      • jillesvangurp 4y ago
        It is but it uses GPLv2, which has a few accidental loop holes that they tried to close with v3. The net result of this is that with some defensive strategies, you can pretty much do whatever you want with Linux and get away with such things as bundling proprietary drivers, firmware or running closed source software on it. Which is a reason things like Android can exist. To copyleft people that's a bug, for most Linux users, that's a key feature of the license. Without that, we'd all be using BSD (like most mac users are) or something else.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]