6 ms·

Better(?) title: The rise of permissive licenses.

mjn 14y ago
That would require more data to conclude. The GPL is declining as a percentage of open-source licenses, but is that because more people are BSD/MIT-licensing their code, or because people who previously GPL'd their code (perhaps as part of a GPL/proprietary dual-licensing strategy) are just keeping it proprietary now?
Silhouette 14y ago
I miss when I was a kid. If you made something cool and wanted to share it you'd just give it away as freeware on a BBS or magazine cover disk or something. You might include the source as well in case anyone wanted to hack on it. As comms technology evolved and two-way comms became more viable, a lot of people would publish an e-mail address, and if someone was interested enough to ask about how the author had achieved a certain effect or what sort of tools they used then they were often happy to start a discussion or share their code. No-one gave a damn about "licences" and "copyleft" or "freedom", we just hacked on code because it was fun and we shared it with fellow hackers because it felt good and we liked the healthy karma. The graphics/audio demo scene worked this way. Game modding communities worked this way. All kinds of useful little tools that helped the guy who wrote them and later helped other people as well got discovered and used this way. I view the rise of EULAs and "terms and conditions" pages and all that junk to be one of the biggest retrograde steps in technological history, because most of the things in these documents are legal weasel words that don't have much to do with technology at all, or even with regular users who just want to use the software in a normal way for that matter. By playing the legal game, unfortunately the FSF has essential stolen the old embrace/extend/extinguish model from big business and applied it to hobbyist software development, legalificationalising it so that lots of people who just want to hack on code and share their results with anyone interested are now divided among fragmented communities and might not even know what they can and can't do any more. Way more time and effort gets spent worrying about licence agreements and how stuff can be used than anyone used to care about, and are we really any better off for it? I don't think we are. It never seems to occur to anyone today that the reason things used to work well wasn't that hackers shared code because someone forced them to. It was that they shared code because they enjoyed it and other people often shared their own code in return for the same reason, without any formal obligation or having legalese bullshit plastered all over the top of every source file. I suspect if the only two licence agreements supported by law were "no copying without payment/permission" and "copy freely but give fair credit" no great harm would be done and a lot of people would waste a lot less time worrying about things other than building cool stuff with code. (Edit: Of course this is a simplification, but you get the idea.)
- icebraining 14y ago
  Without a license, someone who copied the code into their application could then be sued by the original developer. This was fine in the demo scene, but if you want to expand FOSS to businesses and paid applications, you need licenses. It wasn't the FSF who introduced that - it's how copyright works. Maybe using permissive licenses would've been better than introducing the GPL, but you'd still need some license. EULAs and TOS are completely different issues.
  - Silhouette 14y ago
    That may all be true, but we used to get by on the most basic and plain English of agreements and a healthy dose of common sense, all of which is just as valid in court. The world is not a better place because ordinary people with no legal training and better things to do with their time are subject to multi-page formal agreements, which most of them have never actually read, never mind understood. I don't care whether it's a software licence agreement or the terms for a network service, it's still the same basic problem.
    - icebraining 14y ago
      we used to get by on the most basic and plain English of agreements and a healthy dose of common sense, all of which is just as valid in court. Yes, but who's "we"? Did that include the thousands of business that nowadays use and contribute to OSS and also have lawyers to worry about those things? The world is not a better place because ordinary people with no legal training and better things to do with their time are subject to multi-page formal agreements, which most of them have never actually read, never mind understood. But it was copyright that created that, by prohibiting any redistribution and derivation by default. FOSS licenses are a way to counter-act that and give you rights. And while the GPL is not as short as we would like, the reality is that it created a standard; you just have to read it once to know the license of more than 50% of the FOSS projects out there. That seems a time saver, not killer.
      - Silhouette 14y ago
sparkie 14y ago
One of the big misunderstanding of copyleft licenses is who they are aimed at. The allegedly "more permissive" licenses are only more permissive to the developer, but they say nothing about how permissive the software is to the end user. Such "permissive license" may manifest as very restricted or even malicious software, so it's really incorrect to call it such. The GPL is permissive for the intended audience of software licenses - the end users.
- npsimons 14y ago
  The GPL is permissive for the intended audience of software licenses - the end users. Yes, precisely! And one of the ideals that Free software is designed around is that there are no end users - everyone can be a developer (or farm it out to anyone willing to work the job - ultimate free market capitalism). Unfortunately, there are still bills to be paid, and people are raised in the mindset of "I've got mine; who cares about anyone else?" and always grasping for more. So they think they can't make any money with GPL software, or it will expose them to legal worries, or they'll be forced to open source all their code. In the case of the first, this is categorically not true. In the latter two cases, no one has been able to bring up a credible example of when this has ever happened in the 20+ years the GPL has been in existence. One last thing: the data used in the article is from a very well known Microsoft front company: http://techrights.org/wiki/index.php/Black_Duck http://techrights.org/wiki/index.php/Black_Duck

mjn 14y ago

That would require more data to conclude. The GPL is declining as a percentage of open-source licenses, but is that because more people are BSD/MIT-licensing their code, or because people who previously GPL'd their code (perhaps as part of a GPL/proprietary dual-licensing strategy) are just keeping it proprietary now?

Silhouette 14y ago

I miss when I was a kid. If you made something cool and wanted to share it you'd just give it away as freeware on a BBS or magazine cover disk or something. You might include the source as well in case anyone wanted to hack on it. As comms technology evolved and two-way comms became more viable, a lot of people would publish an e-mail address, and if someone was interested enough to ask about how the author had achieved a certain effect or what sort of tools they used then they were often happy to start a discussion or share their code. No-one gave a damn about "licences" and "copyleft" or "freedom", we just hacked on code because it was fun and we shared it with fellow hackers because it felt good and we liked the healthy karma. The graphics/audio demo scene worked this way. Game modding communities worked this way. All kinds of useful little tools that helped the guy who wrote them and later helped other people as well got discovered and used this way. I view the rise of EULAs and "terms and conditions" pages and all that junk to be one of the biggest retrograde steps in technological history, because most of the things in these documents are legal weasel words that don't have much to do with technology at all, or even with regular users who just want to use the software in a normal way for that matter. By playing the legal game, unfortunately the FSF has essential stolen the old embrace/extend/extinguish model from big business and applied it to hobbyist software development, legalificationalising it so that lots of people who just want to hack on code and share their results with anyone interested are now divided among fragmented communities and might not even know what they can and can't do any more. Way more time and effort gets spent worrying about licence agreements and how stuff can be used than anyone used to care about, and are we really any better off for it? I don't think we are. It never seems to occur to anyone today that the reason things used to work well wasn't that hackers shared code because someone forced them to. It was that they shared code because they enjoyed it and other people often shared their own code in return for the same reason, without any formal obligation or having legalese bullshit plastered all over the top of every source file. I suspect if the only two licence agreements supported by law were "no copying without payment/permission" and "copy freely but give fair credit" no great harm would be done and a lot of people would waste a lot less time worrying about things other than building cool stuff with code. (Edit: Of course this is a simplification, but you get the idea.)

icebraining 14y ago
Without a license, someone who copied the code into their application could then be sued by the original developer. This was fine in the demo scene, but if you want to expand FOSS to businesses and paid applications, you need licenses. It wasn't the FSF who introduced that - it's how copyright works. Maybe using permissive licenses would've been better than introducing the GPL, but you'd still need some license. EULAs and TOS are completely different issues.
- Silhouette 14y ago
  That may all be true, but we used to get by on the most basic and plain English of agreements and a healthy dose of common sense, all of which is just as valid in court. The world is not a better place because ordinary people with no legal training and better things to do with their time are subject to multi-page formal agreements, which most of them have never actually read, never mind understood. I don't care whether it's a software licence agreement or the terms for a network service, it's still the same basic problem.
  - icebraining 14y ago
    we used to get by on the most basic and plain English of agreements and a healthy dose of common sense, all of which is just as valid in court. Yes, but who's "we"? Did that include the thousands of business that nowadays use and contribute to OSS and also have lawyers to worry about those things? The world is not a better place because ordinary people with no legal training and better things to do with their time are subject to multi-page formal agreements, which most of them have never actually read, never mind understood. But it was copyright that created that, by prohibiting any redistribution and derivation by default. FOSS licenses are a way to counter-act that and give you rights. And while the GPL is not as short as we would like, the reality is that it created a standard; you just have to read it once to know the license of more than 50% of the FOSS projects out there. That seems a time saver, not killer.
    - Silhouette 14y ago

sparkie 14y ago

One of the big misunderstanding of copyleft licenses is who they are aimed at. The allegedly "more permissive" licenses are only more permissive to the developer, but they say nothing about how permissive the software is to the end user. Such "permissive license" may manifest as very restricted or even malicious software, so it's really incorrect to call it such. The GPL is permissive for the intended audience of software licenses - the end users.

npsimons 14y ago
The GPL is permissive for the intended audience of software licenses - the end users. Yes, precisely! And one of the ideals that Free software is designed around is that there are no end users - everyone can be a developer (or farm it out to anyone willing to work the job - ultimate free market capitalism). Unfortunately, there are still bills to be paid, and people are raised in the mindset of "I've got mine; who cares about anyone else?" and always grasping for more. So they think they can't make any money with GPL software, or it will expose them to legal worries, or they'll be forced to open source all their code. In the case of the first, this is categorically not true. In the latter two cases, no one has been able to bring up a credible example of when this has ever happened in the 20+ years the GPL has been in existence. One last thing: the data used in the article is from a very well known Microsoft front company: http://techrights.org/wiki/index.php/Black_Duck http://techrights.org/wiki/index.php/Black_Duck