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>Also, the JRE became Free Software under the GPL several years ago. :) No it didn't. The official JRE and JDK are both still proprietary software. That's the

>Also, the JRE became Free Software under the GPL several years ago. :) No it didn't. The official JRE and JDK are both still proprietary software. That's the whole point of OpenJDK. People can distribute modified and unmodified versions within a pool of licensees under my suggested license. That's the primary difference: instead of allowing wide and clear redistribution by any recipient to anyone else, you may only redistribute to persons with licenses. Dual-licensing under the GPL is not really relevant here. There are good reasons not to dual-license. While it may work for id's case, it doesn't work in every case, and it's not the same thing: under my proposal no one would be entitled to a copy of the software until they satisfied conditions sufficient to obtain a license from the vendor. Under the dual-license scheme anyone content with GPL can use GPL without obtaining a specific license from the vendor.

JoshTriplett 15y ago
OpenJDK has become the official JDK/JRE at this point (see http://blogs.oracle.com/henrik/entry/moving_to_openjdk_as_the http://blogs.oracle.com/henrik/entry/moving_to_openjdk_as_th... for an official statement to that effect from an Oracle developer). The proprietary JDK/JRE represents legacy software. As for the rest: you keep re-explaining what you want, but thankfully that won't make it happen. You can try to build a community around such restricted code, but FOSS has progressed more than far enough that restrictions of the form you suggest simply can't gain enough traction to take hold; you'd have to build a community from scratch, in the face of an openly hostile immune reaction from the FOSS community. More importantly, by adding such restrictions you remove several of the mechanisms the FOSS community has to protect itself from various critical failure modes, which makes such a scheme inherently doomed to fail in the first place. In a way, the reaction you'd get from the FOSS community comes from that community knowing that such a scheme can't work, and wanting it to fail quickly before it causes more of a distraction. Among many other reasons, FOSS can't succeed when tied to a single privileged upstream vendor. Development of good ideas requires a community that can make changes the upstream vendor never thought of and doesn't immediately approve of, and any scheme that requires a license from the upstream vendor can't support a community like that. Such a scheme would also create a fragile community that the vendor could destroy at any time. Ironically, the possibility of forking a project and running with it in a different direction helps avoid fragmentation and prevent a variety of standard failure modes for a development community. The FOSS community has numerous examples of successful forks, where the project just moved entirely to the fork and ignored the now-irrelevant original, and would otherwise have just died or stagnated indefinitely. A very short list of examples: Jenkins (forked from Hudson by the people actually working on it), LibreOffice (forked from OpenOffice.org by the people actually working on it), Xorg (forked from XFree86 by the people actually working on it), cdrkit (forked from the last FOSS version of cdrecord before the maintainer became even more visibly insane than previously demonstrated), EGCS (forked from GCC at a time when GCC had utterly stagnated due to excessive centralized control, and became the new GCC because all the development moved there; we could use a repeat of that right about now). Take a look at https://lwn.net/Articles/282261/ https://lwn.net/Articles/282261/ , https://lwn.net/Articles/246381/ https://lwn.net/Articles/246381/ , and the various things Linus has written about "commit access" as a broken model. You can't have independent development when everone needs a license from one vendor, and you can't have FOSS without independent development. You certainly couldn't have a world where numerous companies, even competitors, can all cooperate in the same community and produce something useful.
- LearnYouALisp 15y ago
  It looks like you are having a relatively in-depth discussion and your earlier exchange reminded me of a recurring question I have. I've posted the question but no one seemed to have interacted with it. Would you be so kind as to take a look? Here it is: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3536700 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3536700
  - JoshTriplett 15y ago
    Sure, I've replied there with a comment.
    - LearnYouALisp 15y ago
      Thank you very much!
- cookiecaper 15y ago
  I keep rephrasing myself because you seem not to understand. I am not suggesting that this model should replace the GPL or more permissive licenses entirely. I am not suggesting it will crush or destroy all free software and all extant models of free software licensing or development. I am merely suggesting a middle ground that would get source in the hands of licensed users instead of leaving them with nothing and promoting the idea that distributing source is the same as ruining your investment. I understand that this would be more restrictive because it wouldn't allow you to share with certain people. The details, of course, are dependent on the final language of this hypothetical license, but as I said I would like most of the burden of compliance to rest on the individual consumer and not the publisher, i.e., "Do not use this if you do not have a valid license". This is not any different than what we have now -- commercial vendors put out closed-source software that says "You promise not to use this unless you are supposed to" in the EULA and this is blatantly violated by those who choose to pirate the software. I don't see how or why releasing the source would make this any worse, and I think it stands to improve profitability from specific games significantly. You seem to believe that under this license forks would be impossible. I don't understand why you think that. Forks are by definition derivative works ("modified code") and as long as you comply with the license restrictions on distribution you can continue to release and host forks on GitHub et al.
LearnYouALisp 15y ago
Would you mind taking a look at this question of mine? Your exchange has caused me to wonder about the differences between all the licenses again. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3536700 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3536700

JoshTriplett 15y ago

OpenJDK has become the official JDK/JRE at this point (see http://blogs.oracle.com/henrik/entry/moving_to_openjdk_as_the http://blogs.oracle.com/henrik/entry/moving_to_openjdk_as_th... for an official statement to that effect from an Oracle developer). The proprietary JDK/JRE represents legacy software. As for the rest: you keep re-explaining what you want, but thankfully that won't make it happen. You can try to build a community around such restricted code, but FOSS has progressed more than far enough that restrictions of the form you suggest simply can't gain enough traction to take hold; you'd have to build a community from scratch, in the face of an openly hostile immune reaction from the FOSS community. More importantly, by adding such restrictions you remove several of the mechanisms the FOSS community has to protect itself from various critical failure modes, which makes such a scheme inherently doomed to fail in the first place. In a way, the reaction you'd get from the FOSS community comes from that community knowing that such a scheme can't work, and wanting it to fail quickly before it causes more of a distraction. Among many other reasons, FOSS can't succeed when tied to a single privileged upstream vendor. Development of good ideas requires a community that can make changes the upstream vendor never thought of and doesn't immediately approve of, and any scheme that requires a license from the upstream vendor can't support a community like that. Such a scheme would also create a fragile community that the vendor could destroy at any time. Ironically, the possibility of forking a project and running with it in a different direction helps avoid fragmentation and prevent a variety of standard failure modes for a development community. The FOSS community has numerous examples of successful forks, where the project just moved entirely to the fork and ignored the now-irrelevant original, and would otherwise have just died or stagnated indefinitely. A very short list of examples: Jenkins (forked from Hudson by the people actually working on it), LibreOffice (forked from OpenOffice.org by the people actually working on it), Xorg (forked from XFree86 by the people actually working on it), cdrkit (forked from the last FOSS version of cdrecord before the maintainer became even more visibly insane than previously demonstrated), EGCS (forked from GCC at a time when GCC had utterly stagnated due to excessive centralized control, and became the new GCC because all the development moved there; we could use a repeat of that right about now). Take a look at https://lwn.net/Articles/282261/ https://lwn.net/Articles/282261/ , https://lwn.net/Articles/246381/ https://lwn.net/Articles/246381/ , and the various things Linus has written about "commit access" as a broken model. You can't have independent development when everone needs a license from one vendor, and you can't have FOSS without independent development. You certainly couldn't have a world where numerous companies, even competitors, can all cooperate in the same community and produce something useful.

LearnYouALisp 15y ago
It looks like you are having a relatively in-depth discussion and your earlier exchange reminded me of a recurring question I have. I've posted the question but no one seemed to have interacted with it. Would you be so kind as to take a look? Here it is: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3536700 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3536700
- JoshTriplett 15y ago
  Sure, I've replied there with a comment.
  - LearnYouALisp 15y ago
    Thank you very much!
cookiecaper 15y ago
I keep rephrasing myself because you seem not to understand. I am not suggesting that this model should replace the GPL or more permissive licenses entirely. I am not suggesting it will crush or destroy all free software and all extant models of free software licensing or development. I am merely suggesting a middle ground that would get source in the hands of licensed users instead of leaving them with nothing and promoting the idea that distributing source is the same as ruining your investment. I understand that this would be more restrictive because it wouldn't allow you to share with certain people. The details, of course, are dependent on the final language of this hypothetical license, but as I said I would like most of the burden of compliance to rest on the individual consumer and not the publisher, i.e., "Do not use this if you do not have a valid license". This is not any different than what we have now -- commercial vendors put out closed-source software that says "You promise not to use this unless you are supposed to" in the EULA and this is blatantly violated by those who choose to pirate the software. I don't see how or why releasing the source would make this any worse, and I think it stands to improve profitability from specific games significantly. You seem to believe that under this license forks would be impossible. I don't understand why you think that. Forks are by definition derivative works ("modified code") and as long as you comply with the license restrictions on distribution you can continue to release and host forks on GitHub et al.

LearnYouALisp 15y ago

Would you mind taking a look at this question of mine? Your exchange has caused me to wonder about the differences between all the licenses again. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3536700 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3536700