6 ms·

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-sou

by 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
  But GPLv2-licensed Linux is also everywhere?
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    Moreso than all BSD combined, enjoying their contributions from Apple and Sony, among others. Also regarding GPL versus MIT compilers, guess whose column wins out in red squares, https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/compiler_support/20 https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/compiler_support/20
    - mhandley 4y ago
      Minix is BSD licensed and is present in Intel CPUs[0]. So I think it would be a toss-up as to whether BSD or GPL-licenses OSes are more widely used overall. To be clear, I'm making no comment on whether Intel using Minix is a good thing for their customers, but it's likely that the BSD license was what Intel wanted and caused it to become the most widely used OS few people know about. [0] https://www.zdnet.com/article/minix-intels-hidden-in-chip-operating-system/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/minix-intels-hidden-in-chip-op...
      - pjmlp 4y ago
        Indeed, and where are Intel's contributions?
    - vore 4y ago
      My bad, your sarcasm translated badly in text ;-)
    - tsimionescu 4y ago
      I know that was not your main point at all, but fascinating to see that MSVC is the only compiler to be fully 100% standards compliant (with only GCC being really really close).
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
fractalb 4y ago
> Who really cares if someone makes a closed-source fork of the code? Weren't Amazon and ElasticSearch on news a few years back about some license changes?
- josephcsible 4y ago
  This went in the opposite direction you'd expect. The original ElasticSearch is proprietary now, and Amazon's fork of the last FOSS version is itself FOSS.
- forty 4y ago
  My understanding is that Amazon was not even making a closed source fork of ES, they were merely offering managed hosting of the open source version of ES. As Elastic is making money by selling hosting, they did not like the (admittedly unfair) competition from AWS, they decided to stop doing Open Source. And actually now, AWS is maintaining an open source fork of ES...
  - fractalb 4y ago
    > Amazon was not even making a closed source fork of ES, they were merely offering managed hosting of the open source version of ES. That sounds even worse. Whatever happened, ES didn't gain anything by having an open business friendly license (as it appears from the events). > As Elastic is making money by selling hosting, they did not like the (admittedly unfair) competition from AWS, they decided to stop doing Open Source. That's sad. ES went from "business friendly opensource license" to "closed source". Now there's no open-source code at all (from ES). Some restrictive open-source code is better than closed source. Always. > And actually now, AWS is maintaining an open source fork of ES... I think, it's not out of generosity. It has customers.
    - Xylakant 4y ago
      Elastic has never been doing open source for generosity - they have customers. They're admittedly much smaller than AWS, but they're venture backed and have money. They're not a small open source project, even though they sometimes portrayed themselves as such. They did profit from being open source, being based on apache lucene. They profited from the work that the community did for them - I used to be part of the folks running one of the user groups. I was on their IRC channel, helping other folks adopt ES, for free, because it was open source. And they did flip those folks a finger and went and made it closed source because they ended up having a spat between businesses. It's their code, I get it and they get to do whatever they decide. But Elastic is very much not a paragon of open source virtue in shining armor. They, too, have placed business interest before community interest.
chrismsimpson 4y ago
Every bit this. How about the freedom to ship something without having an ideological position on when/how it links against other code.
- vore 4y ago
  The ideological position is the whole point of the GPL, after all. If you're using someone else's labor, it's only fair they're allowed to dictate the terms of how you're allowed to use it.
  - heleninboodler 4y ago
    However, it turns out the ideological position is not the whole point of writing open source software, to a lot of people.
    - vore 4y ago
      Then don't use GPL code? If you don't agree with the terms, don't use it.
      - heleninboodler 4y ago
        A: "This is why I don't use GPL" B: "Yes, you shouldn't have to take an ideological position just to publish some code" C: "But the ideological position is the whole point of GPL" D: "but the ideological position is not the whole point of writing code." C: "Then don't use GPL code?" D: ".... exactly?"
      - bentley 4y ago
        This whole thread came about from a project writing its own non‐GPL code from scratch, and GPL fans subsequently complaining about it.
      - tsimionescu 4y ago
        Plenty of GPL fans try to convince others to choose the same license, almost always implying that the GPL is the only moral/ethical choice (Stallman himself being the most ardent believer of this stance). They often even insist that the GPLv2 is not actually a moral choice anymore, given the evils of TiVoization. This whole thread is about complaining/supporting this attitude - not about criticizing those who simply chose the GPL as their license.
forty 4y ago
Consider the Linux kernel. First it would probably have never been successful with a liberal license in the first place, but let's ignore that for a second and assume it got successful anyway. If you look at the current situation where each SoC supports only one (generally very old and very vulnerable) kernel, I think we have an the reasons to be happy that they at least have to release the sources so hopefully someone can extract the patch and have it work on recent kernel. It's not very hard to imagine the situation where we'd only have the binary kernels if we did not have the GPL.
- mschuster91 4y ago
  > If you look at the current situation where each SoC supports only one (generally very old and very vulnerable) kernel, I think we have an the reasons to be happy that they at least have to release the sources so hopefully someone can extract the patch and have it work on recent kernel. The problem is, many vendors don't release their kernel sources at all - particularly Chinese pseudo-brands based on some knock-off of Mediatek reference designs come to my mind - and those that do release their code often show horrible code quality that would take many man-months of work to clean up enough to be included into the kernel, not to mention the lack of documentation and the tendency for these forks to fix undocumented hardware quirks for specific SoC revisions in kernel code. And Google, the only entity in town that could push for better behaviour at least in mobile, doesn't do anything to help out on that front as well - there is not a single mention in the CDD [1] (the requirements if you wish to call a device Android compatible and use the Google ecosystem) mentioning licenses outside of a warning that implementers have to take care about software patents for multimedia codecs. Non-phone/tablet embedded applications are even worse. I admit my knowledge is dated, but I came across a lot of devices over the years where their source code dump had u-boot versions that were half a decade outdated and so many changes done compared to even the version of u-boot that it claimed to be that it was completely infeasible to even attempt and migrate the changes to a modern u-boot version. And to make it even worse: Modern "device integrity" crap makes the situation completely impossible to resolve - even if you had a decent-quality code dumps not deviating too much from upstream, you can't deploy your code to the actual device in question to test if the device still works because the device doesn't allow flashing unsigned/self-signed images, test points (e.g. JTAG) are fused-off in hardware, and even if memory chips can be flashed with a programmer (which isn't a given, since if you power the flash chip using a clip probe, often you power the rest of the board with it!) the flash chip content itself is signature validated. Oh, and it still can get worse than that given the rise of "secure element" co-processors that can be used to decrypt flash chip content on the fly - you don't even have a chance to read the firmware content without first having a code execution exploit on the device and then achieving code execution in the "secure element". The people able to do this are short in supply and most of them work in jailbreaking gaming consoles, not a 30 dollar Chromecast or similar appliance. We need laws and regulations against that crap, but politicians don't even have that on their radar - how would they, given that a lot of politicians are fucking gerontocrats and of those that aren't, no one outside the various European Pirate Parties and affiliates has a tech background to even push for such regulation. [1] https://source.android.com/docs/compatibility/12/android-12-cdd https://source.android.com/docs/compatibility/12/android-12-...
xorcist 4y ago
"More" or "less" free is a word definition game that is mostly a chimera. It depends on what the purpose of the software is and which business model is the most fit. Copyleft software has several vendors compete around the same product. Every economic actor has to compete to add business value and consulting, with the knowledge that any extension to the software is made available to everyone else. Free and non-copyleft software leaves vendors free to compete with different products built from a common base. Extensions to the software has commercial value and every vendor seeks their local maxima. So the situations are different. GPL and BSD software do not often compete in the same space, with a few exceptions. There used to be a commercial variants of BSD, but they are all gone, outcompeted by a common Linux platform. FreeBSD was technically superior for a long time but couldn't compete with a multi vendor product in the long run. Products that represent a common platform shared by several products however are more successful non-copylefted. Formats such as gzip and jpeg are completely dominant due to their multi product usage, and any GPLd codecs that competed with them are mostly forgotten.

by dhosek 4y ago

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
But GPLv2-licensed Linux is also everywhere?
- pjmlp 4y ago
  Moreso than all BSD combined, enjoying their contributions from Apple and Sony, among others. Also regarding GPL versus MIT compilers, guess whose column wins out in red squares, https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/compiler_support/20 https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/compiler_support/20
  - mhandley 4y ago
    Minix is BSD licensed and is present in Intel CPUs[0]. So I think it would be a toss-up as to whether BSD or GPL-licenses OSes are more widely used overall. To be clear, I'm making no comment on whether Intel using Minix is a good thing for their customers, but it's likely that the BSD license was what Intel wanted and caused it to become the most widely used OS few people know about. [0] https://www.zdnet.com/article/minix-intels-hidden-in-chip-operating-system/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/minix-intels-hidden-in-chip-op...
    - pjmlp 4y ago
      Indeed, and where are Intel's contributions?
  - vore 4y ago
    My bad, your sarcasm translated badly in text ;-)
  - tsimionescu 4y ago
    I know that was not your main point at all, but fascinating to see that MSVC is the only compiler to be fully 100% standards compliant (with only GCC being really really close).
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

fractalb 4y ago

> Who really cares if someone makes a closed-source fork of the code? Weren't Amazon and ElasticSearch on news a few years back about some license changes?

josephcsible 4y ago
This went in the opposite direction you'd expect. The original ElasticSearch is proprietary now, and Amazon's fork of the last FOSS version is itself FOSS.
forty 4y ago
My understanding is that Amazon was not even making a closed source fork of ES, they were merely offering managed hosting of the open source version of ES. As Elastic is making money by selling hosting, they did not like the (admittedly unfair) competition from AWS, they decided to stop doing Open Source. And actually now, AWS is maintaining an open source fork of ES...
- fractalb 4y ago
  > Amazon was not even making a closed source fork of ES, they were merely offering managed hosting of the open source version of ES. That sounds even worse. Whatever happened, ES didn't gain anything by having an open business friendly license (as it appears from the events). > As Elastic is making money by selling hosting, they did not like the (admittedly unfair) competition from AWS, they decided to stop doing Open Source. That's sad. ES went from "business friendly opensource license" to "closed source". Now there's no open-source code at all (from ES). Some restrictive open-source code is better than closed source. Always. > And actually now, AWS is maintaining an open source fork of ES... I think, it's not out of generosity. It has customers.
  - Xylakant 4y ago
    Elastic has never been doing open source for generosity - they have customers. They're admittedly much smaller than AWS, but they're venture backed and have money. They're not a small open source project, even though they sometimes portrayed themselves as such. They did profit from being open source, being based on apache lucene. They profited from the work that the community did for them - I used to be part of the folks running one of the user groups. I was on their IRC channel, helping other folks adopt ES, for free, because it was open source. And they did flip those folks a finger and went and made it closed source because they ended up having a spat between businesses. It's their code, I get it and they get to do whatever they decide. But Elastic is very much not a paragon of open source virtue in shining armor. They, too, have placed business interest before community interest.

chrismsimpson 4y ago

Every bit this. How about the freedom to ship something without having an ideological position on when/how it links against other code.

vore 4y ago
The ideological position is the whole point of the GPL, after all. If you're using someone else's labor, it's only fair they're allowed to dictate the terms of how you're allowed to use it.
- heleninboodler 4y ago
  However, it turns out the ideological position is not the whole point of writing open source software, to a lot of people.
  - vore 4y ago
    Then don't use GPL code? If you don't agree with the terms, don't use it.
    - heleninboodler 4y ago
      A: "This is why I don't use GPL" B: "Yes, you shouldn't have to take an ideological position just to publish some code" C: "But the ideological position is the whole point of GPL" D: "but the ideological position is not the whole point of writing code." C: "Then don't use GPL code?" D: ".... exactly?"
    - bentley 4y ago
      This whole thread came about from a project writing its own non‐GPL code from scratch, and GPL fans subsequently complaining about it.
    - tsimionescu 4y ago
      Plenty of GPL fans try to convince others to choose the same license, almost always implying that the GPL is the only moral/ethical choice (Stallman himself being the most ardent believer of this stance). They often even insist that the GPLv2 is not actually a moral choice anymore, given the evils of TiVoization. This whole thread is about complaining/supporting this attitude - not about criticizing those who simply chose the GPL as their license.

forty 4y ago

Consider the Linux kernel. First it would probably have never been successful with a liberal license in the first place, but let's ignore that for a second and assume it got successful anyway. If you look at the current situation where each SoC supports only one (generally very old and very vulnerable) kernel, I think we have an the reasons to be happy that they at least have to release the sources so hopefully someone can extract the patch and have it work on recent kernel. It's not very hard to imagine the situation where we'd only have the binary kernels if we did not have the GPL.

mschuster91 4y ago
> If you look at the current situation where each SoC supports only one (generally very old and very vulnerable) kernel, I think we have an the reasons to be happy that they at least have to release the sources so hopefully someone can extract the patch and have it work on recent kernel. The problem is, many vendors don't release their kernel sources at all - particularly Chinese pseudo-brands based on some knock-off of Mediatek reference designs come to my mind - and those that do release their code often show horrible code quality that would take many man-months of work to clean up enough to be included into the kernel, not to mention the lack of documentation and the tendency for these forks to fix undocumented hardware quirks for specific SoC revisions in kernel code. And Google, the only entity in town that could push for better behaviour at least in mobile, doesn't do anything to help out on that front as well - there is not a single mention in the CDD [1] (the requirements if you wish to call a device Android compatible and use the Google ecosystem) mentioning licenses outside of a warning that implementers have to take care about software patents for multimedia codecs. Non-phone/tablet embedded applications are even worse. I admit my knowledge is dated, but I came across a lot of devices over the years where their source code dump had u-boot versions that were half a decade outdated and so many changes done compared to even the version of u-boot that it claimed to be that it was completely infeasible to even attempt and migrate the changes to a modern u-boot version. And to make it even worse: Modern "device integrity" crap makes the situation completely impossible to resolve - even if you had a decent-quality code dumps not deviating too much from upstream, you can't deploy your code to the actual device in question to test if the device still works because the device doesn't allow flashing unsigned/self-signed images, test points (e.g. JTAG) are fused-off in hardware, and even if memory chips can be flashed with a programmer (which isn't a given, since if you power the flash chip using a clip probe, often you power the rest of the board with it!) the flash chip content itself is signature validated. Oh, and it still can get worse than that given the rise of "secure element" co-processors that can be used to decrypt flash chip content on the fly - you don't even have a chance to read the firmware content without first having a code execution exploit on the device and then achieving code execution in the "secure element". The people able to do this are short in supply and most of them work in jailbreaking gaming consoles, not a 30 dollar Chromecast or similar appliance. We need laws and regulations against that crap, but politicians don't even have that on their radar - how would they, given that a lot of politicians are fucking gerontocrats and of those that aren't, no one outside the various European Pirate Parties and affiliates has a tech background to even push for such regulation. [1] https://source.android.com/docs/compatibility/12/android-12-cdd https://source.android.com/docs/compatibility/12/android-12-...

xorcist 4y ago

"More" or "less" free is a word definition game that is mostly a chimera. It depends on what the purpose of the software is and which business model is the most fit. Copyleft software has several vendors compete around the same product. Every economic actor has to compete to add business value and consulting, with the knowledge that any extension to the software is made available to everyone else. Free and non-copyleft software leaves vendors free to compete with different products built from a common base. Extensions to the software has commercial value and every vendor seeks their local maxima. So the situations are different. GPL and BSD software do not often compete in the same space, with a few exceptions. There used to be a commercial variants of BSD, but they are all gone, outcompeted by a common Linux platform. FreeBSD was technically superior for a long time but couldn't compete with a multi vendor product in the long run. Products that represent a common platform shared by several products however are more successful non-copylefted. Formats such as gzip and jpeg are completely dominant due to their multi product usage, and any GPLd codecs that competed with them are mostly forgotten.