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It should be forbidden to forbid. That's what I don't like. Most of us have employers who are afraid of copyleft. That has made us afraid of copyleft, because

It should be forbidden to forbid. That's what I don't like. Most of us have employers who are afraid of copyleft. That has made us afraid of copyleft, because we feel like our job is threatened by copyleft. But the erosion of copyleft over the decades has produced phones that track us, websites that control our dating lives, our food, the entertainment we consume, social media that manipulates our emotions and our friendships, and countless other things without us having any recourse or control. For a while, copyleft was good. It gave us Linux on laptops, where we have the source code for nearly every part of the stack. Without copyleft, we have locked phones, tablets, game consoles, e-readers, refrigerators, cars, pacemakers, and many other devices that are difficult to really call our own because they have software that ultimately obeys the manufacturer, not the consumer.

graphe 4y ago
You can have it be open source and locked down. Most of those devices you mention run Linux, BSD, or RTOS.
- jordigh 4y ago
  Open source, yes. Copyleft, no. GPLv3 forbids what many of these devices do. It is why GPLv3 is so feared by many companies, like Apple, why the GPL was gradually purged from macOS.
  - ludocode 4y ago
    Apple doesn't "fear" the GPLv3. The GPLv3 is simply incompatible with their walled garden. They would not be able to lock down their devices to the extent that they do if they used GPLv3 code, and they care a lot more about their digital locks than they do about any GPLv3 software. Painting it as some kind of irrational fear is misleading and counter-productive. It is perfectly logical for Apple to forbid GPLv3 code. Quite frankly, GCC committed suicide by switching to the GPLv3. Both Apple and Google have entirely abandoned it. Apple invested tens of millions of dollars into building Clang as a direct result of the license change. And now even the BSDs and many embedded Linux platforms have switched to Clang, leaving desktop Linux and a few esoteric systems as the only remaining use cases for GCC. Yes, GCC is still around, but no serious company will invest in GCC for anything new ever again.
    - johnny22 4y ago
      except for C++ where it seems that it is advancing faster than clang is.
burntsushi 4y ago
Nice. Recasting "prefer MIT" to "afraid of copyleft." I'm pretty sure we've had this discussion before on lobste.rs, yet you continue to mischaracterize and lump all opposition of copyleft into some irrational position based on fear, or that we somehow can't think for ourselves because our employers don't like copyleft. My full position: https://github.com/BurntSushi/notes/blob/master/2020-10-29_licensing-and-copyleft.md https://github.com/BurntSushi/notes/blob/master/2020-10-29_l...
arp242 4y ago
"Anyone who dislikes copyleft is a simple-minded fool brainwashed by their employer to hate GPL" is quite the take. I also don't really think most of the examples you cite are all that strongly related to "erosion of copyleft" (if such a thing has happened in the first place; I'm not so sure it has – I'd have to check license counts of packages but BSD licenses and MIT license have been popular for many decades).
roarcher 4y ago
Nobody is "afraid" of copyleft, that's a rhetorical device you're using to discredit those who disagree with you. People make informed decisions that copyleft requirements don't work for them, and they have every right to do so. I won't buy a house in an HOA. I'm not afraid of HOAs, I just have better things to do with my time than keep up with their demands.
- msla 4y ago
  Some entities are afraid copyleft would lock them out of profitable business models, and forbid them from using libre software developers as unpaid labor. I don't want to be unpaid labor, I don't want people to recast being unpaid labor in terms of promoting freedom, and I damned well don't want people calling the licenses that keep me from being unpaid labor "fascist" as linked to down-thread from here in this very discussion. I just had a back-and-forth with someone who outright lied about the legal enforceability of the GPL and it's all beginning to leave a nasty taste in my mouth. The BSD/MIT world is good, but some of its boosters are beginning to look like thugs for companies that profit off of unpaid labor. Edit since I can't add new replies for some reason: The anti-copyleft FUD I'm talking about is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34756580 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34756580
  - roarcher 4y ago
    > Some entities are afraid copyleft would lock them out of profitable business models It would lock them out of profitable business models, so they make a perfectly rational decision, as a business, to not use it. You can call that fear if you like, and I can call that "abuse of semantics" :) > I don't want to be unpaid labor, I don't want people to recast being unpaid labor in terms of promoting freedom, and I damned well don't want people calling the licenses that keep me from being unpaid labor "fascist" as they did down-thread from here in this very discussion. That's completely fair. If you develop open source code and you want to license it as copyleft, go ahead. It's your code. The flip side is that if I develop an open source project, I'm free to make it MIT or whatever because I think the contributions of large companies to my project are valuable. Yes, they can make enhancements and not share them with me. But in practice, they will often merge them into my project because maintaining their own fork is expensive. On the other hand, if I have to make my code copyleft because it uses your code, they will almost certainly not use or contribute to my code at all, because that would require theirs to be copyleft as well. Therefore I don't use or contribute to your code. My decision not to use copyleft code isn't based on fear. It's because I know it will take my project in a direction I don't want it to go, and make it unusable for people who I would like to use it. As for being unpaid labor, that's a personal choice as well. I don't care about it, personally. I'm working on my project either way, because I want to. It's no skin off my nose if somebody else finds a way to make money from it. The minute working on it becomes a burden, I'm free to stop.
josephg 4y ago
> It should be forbidden to forbid. Well, the GPL forbids me from sharing opensource code between work and hobby projects. Especially GPL3. Thats the worst! I think its remarkable how proponents of GPLed code insist that GPL is about freedom. The GPL is a list of quite restrictive, opinionated, and frankly ambiguous terms that together make me less free to use opensource code to build software, including other opensource code. The fantasy of the GPL hopes that all opensource code was GPLed. And then we would collectively create such a large moat that companies have no choice but to GPL their software too. And it essentially requires every single scrap of opensource software out there uses the GPL, so we can make a monopolistic straight jacket for software. This is a suffocating, and impossible dream because (spoilers): Not all programmers want that! Companies hate it. And opensource programmers like me hate it. I want to work on software that I can use both at work and for fun. So (of course), we make other implementations which aren't GPLed. And now companies can choose if they want the GPL version or the MIT version and - gosh - they choose and invest in the MIT version. MacOS gets built on top of FreeBSD. LLVM gets massive financial support from companies and it becomes excellent. Microsoft has a competing software stack for just about everything and increasingly thats all opensource too. And React. And Chromium. And so on. The moat is broken. GPL has failed in what it was trying to do. The GPL probably needs 90%+ of opensource code out there to be GPL licensed to achieve its mission, and yet according to a random google search[1], its actually used in about 5% of actual projects. Nobody is forced to GPL anything these days. The GPL hasn't put effective pressure on companies to opensource their code for decades. Yet another MIT licensed coreutils implementation changes nothing. [1] https://gustavopinto.medium.com/why-the-mit-license-is-much-more-used-then-gpl-3-2b3fa4271d6b https://gustavopinto.medium.com/why-the-mit-license-is-much-...
- saurik 4y ago
  The point of GPL is that it preserves the freedoms of users, not developers. You are a developer. The GPL in no uncertain terms takes freedom away from developers so users can have freedom. The only freedom taken is the "freedom" to build closed source software--and presumably support closed and locked down hardware, given the context of this discussion--and then profit off of restricting the freedom of your users. That is the only cost. FWIW, I do appreciate the part of your argument whereby copyleft lost; I just don't agree about why: my best guess is that the lack of GPL3 back when copyleft has power was the critical lack of foresight that has led to companies like Apple and Google to have the 15-20 years required to build empires on top of the work of open source developers and then use the resources they accumulated to rebuild--part by part--the entire stack until they simply didn't need to rely on the open source community anymore.
tmtvl 4y ago
> It should be forbidden to forbid. That sounds a bit extreme, do you feel that way in all things (murder, theft, slavery,...) or only in terms of limiting the harm entities can cause through distribution of closed-source software? Personally I feel like forbidding things is fine. It won't prevent bad things from happening, but it can protect us humans from our own psychological weaknesses. I think of antitrust legislation as an example.

graphe 4y ago

You can have it be open source and locked down. Most of those devices you mention run Linux, BSD, or RTOS.

jordigh 4y ago
Open source, yes. Copyleft, no. GPLv3 forbids what many of these devices do. It is why GPLv3 is so feared by many companies, like Apple, why the GPL was gradually purged from macOS.
- ludocode 4y ago
  Apple doesn't "fear" the GPLv3. The GPLv3 is simply incompatible with their walled garden. They would not be able to lock down their devices to the extent that they do if they used GPLv3 code, and they care a lot more about their digital locks than they do about any GPLv3 software. Painting it as some kind of irrational fear is misleading and counter-productive. It is perfectly logical for Apple to forbid GPLv3 code. Quite frankly, GCC committed suicide by switching to the GPLv3. Both Apple and Google have entirely abandoned it. Apple invested tens of millions of dollars into building Clang as a direct result of the license change. And now even the BSDs and many embedded Linux platforms have switched to Clang, leaving desktop Linux and a few esoteric systems as the only remaining use cases for GCC. Yes, GCC is still around, but no serious company will invest in GCC for anything new ever again.
  - johnny22 4y ago
    except for C++ where it seems that it is advancing faster than clang is.

burntsushi 4y ago

Nice. Recasting "prefer MIT" to "afraid of copyleft." I'm pretty sure we've had this discussion before on lobste.rs, yet you continue to mischaracterize and lump all opposition of copyleft into some irrational position based on fear, or that we somehow can't think for ourselves because our employers don't like copyleft. My full position: https://github.com/BurntSushi/notes/blob/master/2020-10-29_licensing-and-copyleft.md https://github.com/BurntSushi/notes/blob/master/2020-10-29_l...

arp242 4y ago

"Anyone who dislikes copyleft is a simple-minded fool brainwashed by their employer to hate GPL" is quite the take. I also don't really think most of the examples you cite are all that strongly related to "erosion of copyleft" (if such a thing has happened in the first place; I'm not so sure it has – I'd have to check license counts of packages but BSD licenses and MIT license have been popular for many decades).

roarcher 4y ago

Nobody is "afraid" of copyleft, that's a rhetorical device you're using to discredit those who disagree with you. People make informed decisions that copyleft requirements don't work for them, and they have every right to do so. I won't buy a house in an HOA. I'm not afraid of HOAs, I just have better things to do with my time than keep up with their demands.

msla 4y ago
Some entities are afraid copyleft would lock them out of profitable business models, and forbid them from using libre software developers as unpaid labor. I don't want to be unpaid labor, I don't want people to recast being unpaid labor in terms of promoting freedom, and I damned well don't want people calling the licenses that keep me from being unpaid labor "fascist" as linked to down-thread from here in this very discussion. I just had a back-and-forth with someone who outright lied about the legal enforceability of the GPL and it's all beginning to leave a nasty taste in my mouth. The BSD/MIT world is good, but some of its boosters are beginning to look like thugs for companies that profit off of unpaid labor. Edit since I can't add new replies for some reason: The anti-copyleft FUD I'm talking about is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34756580 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34756580
- roarcher 4y ago
  > Some entities are afraid copyleft would lock them out of profitable business models It would lock them out of profitable business models, so they make a perfectly rational decision, as a business, to not use it. You can call that fear if you like, and I can call that "abuse of semantics" :) > I don't want to be unpaid labor, I don't want people to recast being unpaid labor in terms of promoting freedom, and I damned well don't want people calling the licenses that keep me from being unpaid labor "fascist" as they did down-thread from here in this very discussion. That's completely fair. If you develop open source code and you want to license it as copyleft, go ahead. It's your code. The flip side is that if I develop an open source project, I'm free to make it MIT or whatever because I think the contributions of large companies to my project are valuable. Yes, they can make enhancements and not share them with me. But in practice, they will often merge them into my project because maintaining their own fork is expensive. On the other hand, if I have to make my code copyleft because it uses your code, they will almost certainly not use or contribute to my code at all, because that would require theirs to be copyleft as well. Therefore I don't use or contribute to your code. My decision not to use copyleft code isn't based on fear. It's because I know it will take my project in a direction I don't want it to go, and make it unusable for people who I would like to use it. As for being unpaid labor, that's a personal choice as well. I don't care about it, personally. I'm working on my project either way, because I want to. It's no skin off my nose if somebody else finds a way to make money from it. The minute working on it becomes a burden, I'm free to stop.

josephg 4y ago

> It should be forbidden to forbid. Well, the GPL forbids me from sharing opensource code between work and hobby projects. Especially GPL3. Thats the worst! I think its remarkable how proponents of GPLed code insist that GPL is about freedom. The GPL is a list of quite restrictive, opinionated, and frankly ambiguous terms that together make me less free to use opensource code to build software, including other opensource code. The fantasy of the GPL hopes that all opensource code was GPLed. And then we would collectively create such a large moat that companies have no choice but to GPL their software too. And it essentially requires every single scrap of opensource software out there uses the GPL, so we can make a monopolistic straight jacket for software. This is a suffocating, and impossible dream because (spoilers): Not all programmers want that! Companies hate it. And opensource programmers like me hate it. I want to work on software that I can use both at work and for fun. So (of course), we make other implementations which aren't GPLed. And now companies can choose if they want the GPL version or the MIT version and - gosh - they choose and invest in the MIT version. MacOS gets built on top of FreeBSD. LLVM gets massive financial support from companies and it becomes excellent. Microsoft has a competing software stack for just about everything and increasingly thats all opensource too. And React. And Chromium. And so on. The moat is broken. GPL has failed in what it was trying to do. The GPL probably needs 90%+ of opensource code out there to be GPL licensed to achieve its mission, and yet according to a random google search[1], its actually used in about 5% of actual projects. Nobody is forced to GPL anything these days. The GPL hasn't put effective pressure on companies to opensource their code for decades. Yet another MIT licensed coreutils implementation changes nothing. [1] https://gustavopinto.medium.com/why-the-mit-license-is-much-more-used-then-gpl-3-2b3fa4271d6b https://gustavopinto.medium.com/why-the-mit-license-is-much-...

saurik 4y ago
The point of GPL is that it preserves the freedoms of users, not developers. You are a developer. The GPL in no uncertain terms takes freedom away from developers so users can have freedom. The only freedom taken is the "freedom" to build closed source software--and presumably support closed and locked down hardware, given the context of this discussion--and then profit off of restricting the freedom of your users. That is the only cost. FWIW, I do appreciate the part of your argument whereby copyleft lost; I just don't agree about why: my best guess is that the lack of GPL3 back when copyleft has power was the critical lack of foresight that has led to companies like Apple and Google to have the 15-20 years required to build empires on top of the work of open source developers and then use the resources they accumulated to rebuild--part by part--the entire stack until they simply didn't need to rely on the open source community anymore.

tmtvl 4y ago

> It should be forbidden to forbid. That sounds a bit extreme, do you feel that way in all things (murder, theft, slavery,...) or only in terms of limiting the harm entities can cause through distribution of closed-source software? Personally I feel like forbidding things is fine. It won't prevent bad things from happening, but it can protect us humans from our own psychological weaknesses. I think of antitrust legislation as an example.