4 ms·

This FUD always comes up from people who support the GPL and it's so annoying. Let's say that Maestro takes off and gains popularity, and then someone decides t

by bigstrat2003 3y ago

This FUD always comes up from people who support the GPL and it's so annoying. Let's say that Maestro takes off and gains popularity, and then someone decides to turn it into a commercial OS. What, exactly, is supposed to be so bad about that? Nobody loses a damn thing - if you want to use the MIT licensed original project, it hasn't gone anywhere. And for those who find that there's value in the commercial version, they have that available to them too. Everyone wins in that scenario. There's no loss of freedom with permissive licenses.

yoyohello13 3y ago
Copy left protects against embrace extend extinguish techniques. It ensures everyone benefits from improvements, not just users who are willing to pay bigco.
- yazaddaruvala 3y ago
  But... in fairness its not feasible to extinguish rando person's school / hobby project. Even if it "takes off", how can a commercial entity extinguish a person's motivation to keep building something they want?
F3nd0 3y ago
> What, exactly, is supposed to be so bad about that? The eventual users of the hypothetical commercial OS lose their freedom. (Or don't get their freedom, depending on your point of view.) Permissive licences grant users freedom, but don't preserve those freedoms in derivative works, so the original work can end up helping derived software disrespect users' freedom. For those who believe that users' freedom should always be respected, this is a very bad thing that needs to be avoided.
- PrimeMcFly 3y ago
  Freedom includes allowing users to choose a less free alternative because they derive benefits in doing so.
  - F3nd0 3y ago
    Copyleft in no way prevents users from choosing to use alternative software. It merely prevents them from stripping away the associated freedoms for other users.
    - PrimeMcFly 3y ago
      > Copyleft in no way prevents users from choosing to use alternative software. No, but you arguing every FOSS project should be GPL3 does. You're arguing against alternative licenses here, meaning you're arguing against freedom of people to release software under a license they prefer.
      - F3nd0 3y ago
        Me arguing for copyleft does not prevent users from choosing to use alternative software, either. It does encourage them, though (which I can only assume is your point). I also didn’t write that every ‘FOSS’ project should use GPLv3. The freedom I care about (because I think it’s very impactful and extremely important to preserve) is the freedom to use, know, share and modify software. Licensing is a useful tool to help ascertain that freedom, but beyond that, I consider the freedom to choose a licence nowhere near as important.
        PrimeMcFly 3y ago
        > Me arguing for copyleft does not prevent users from choosing to use alternative software, either. It does encourage them, though (which I can only assume is your point). I also didn’t write that every ‘FOSS’ project should use GPLv3. You were arguing the project should not be MIT but GPL3 though. Why can't this project use whatever license they like? If not all FOSS project need be GPL3 but this one should, what are some examples of ones that you would be fine with being MIT?
        F3nd0 3y ago
        > You were arguing the project should not be MIT but GPL3 though. I was arguing generally against permissive licences and in favour of copyleft, without pointing out a specific one, but as a matter of fact I do think that GPLv3 would be a much better choice for this project. (The thread’s OP did name specific licences, though.) > Why can't this project use whatever license they like? Why they can’t or why I argue they shouldn’t? Technically they’re able to choose any licence they like, and I argue it should be a copyleft one because I think preserving the four user freedoms is important and not accomplished with permissive licences. > If not all FOSS project need be GPL3 but this one should, what are some examples of ones that you would be fine with being MIT? All of the various MIT licences are similarly permissive, right? In that case, I think they make a decent choice for small and relatively simple programs which do not present a great amount of work and could be replicated or imitated without much effort. Programs like True, Hangman, Cowsay or short userscripts. But if you have a relatively large program, or a project where a great number of such smaller programs work together, I think they ought to be released under a copyleft licence. A new kernel is a good example of such a program, as are core utilities, terminal emulators, media players, web extensions, complex games, etc. So Maestro, seL4, Redox, GNU, Terminology, VLC, mpv, uBlock, Minetest and so on. I think weak copyleft licences (such as the MPL or the LGPL) can make a great option for programs with a good ethical reason to maximise their usage (including by non-free software). In my opinion, there's seldom a good reason to abandon copyleft altogether. (And as that may imply, it is my view that copyleft should be the default choice. When in doubt, protect your users’ four essential freedoms.)
phkahler 3y ago
Linux has a LOT of paid commercial developers. Imagine those companies closed source and produced a commercial kernel that's way ahead of the open one - because they could and would if the license allowed. The public code couldn't keep up and would be kind of useless. On the other hand, the scenario you describe where everybody wins is already proven to work with the GPL since that is the Linux story. That is the point of it - when everyone cooperates we all win.
- yencabulator 3y ago
  I just don't think this is a huge threat. If there's a viable open source community, detaching your proprietary kernel from it just causes your company to be stuck with an old version, not able to benefit from the larger development community. There are already plenty of de facto proprietary forks of Linux. Practically every embedded SDK comes with one. Yes they have to publish the source because of the GPL, but they never bother doing that in a form that helps getting any of the work merged into upstream Linux. All those vendor-specific forks end up stuck at some random old kernel with dozens of known issues, effectively abandoned. This has effectively ruined the ARM landscape, and of the end-user visible SBC choices only RPi has a decent reputation for working well enough with upstream Linux devs. Submitting your changes to upstream Linux is a competitive advantage. (With the trade-off that you can't hide your sooper sekrit hardware designs as well.) Google/Android has put in a huge amount of effort to drag the hardware vendors out of this pit where they get stuck on old kernel versions...
- hnfong 3y ago
  Interesting you mentioned GPL proven to work in the Linux story. It was specifically GPLv2. I feel the GPL lost a lot of momentum with FSF's GPLv3 push. Linus was publicly against it. Not only for Linux, but generally and philosophically against it. I presume a lot of others felt the same too. In theory you could continue using GPLv2 for new projects, but given that FSF had basically deprecated v2 in favor of v3, it seems that the momentum for v2 just slowly died out, and v3 was too controversial to gain widespread acceptance. Without a GPL default, the developers who didn't want to get too deeply involved in ideological questions probably just adopted MIT as the new default.

yoyohello13 3y ago

Copy left protects against embrace extend extinguish techniques. It ensures everyone benefits from improvements, not just users who are willing to pay bigco.

yazaddaruvala 3y ago
But... in fairness its not feasible to extinguish rando person's school / hobby project. Even if it "takes off", how can a commercial entity extinguish a person's motivation to keep building something they want?

F3nd0 3y ago

> What, exactly, is supposed to be so bad about that? The eventual users of the hypothetical commercial OS lose their freedom. (Or don't get their freedom, depending on your point of view.) Permissive licences grant users freedom, but don't preserve those freedoms in derivative works, so the original work can end up helping derived software disrespect users' freedom. For those who believe that users' freedom should always be respected, this is a very bad thing that needs to be avoided.

PrimeMcFly 3y ago
Freedom includes allowing users to choose a less free alternative because they derive benefits in doing so.
- F3nd0 3y ago
  Copyleft in no way prevents users from choosing to use alternative software. It merely prevents them from stripping away the associated freedoms for other users.
  - PrimeMcFly 3y ago
    > Copyleft in no way prevents users from choosing to use alternative software. No, but you arguing every FOSS project should be GPL3 does. You're arguing against alternative licenses here, meaning you're arguing against freedom of people to release software under a license they prefer.
    - F3nd0 3y ago
      Me arguing for copyleft does not prevent users from choosing to use alternative software, either. It does encourage them, though (which I can only assume is your point). I also didn’t write that every ‘FOSS’ project should use GPLv3. The freedom I care about (because I think it’s very impactful and extremely important to preserve) is the freedom to use, know, share and modify software. Licensing is a useful tool to help ascertain that freedom, but beyond that, I consider the freedom to choose a licence nowhere near as important.
      - PrimeMcFly 3y ago
        > Me arguing for copyleft does not prevent users from choosing to use alternative software, either. It does encourage them, though (which I can only assume is your point). I also didn’t write that every ‘FOSS’ project should use GPLv3. You were arguing the project should not be MIT but GPL3 though. Why can't this project use whatever license they like? If not all FOSS project need be GPL3 but this one should, what are some examples of ones that you would be fine with being MIT?
        F3nd0 3y ago
        > You were arguing the project should not be MIT but GPL3 though. I was arguing generally against permissive licences and in favour of copyleft, without pointing out a specific one, but as a matter of fact I do think that GPLv3 would be a much better choice for this project. (The thread’s OP did name specific licences, though.) > Why can't this project use whatever license they like? Why they can’t or why I argue they shouldn’t? Technically they’re able to choose any licence they like, and I argue it should be a copyleft one because I think preserving the four user freedoms is important and not accomplished with permissive licences. > If not all FOSS project need be GPL3 but this one should, what are some examples of ones that you would be fine with being MIT? All of the various MIT licences are similarly permissive, right? In that case, I think they make a decent choice for small and relatively simple programs which do not present a great amount of work and could be replicated or imitated without much effort. Programs like True, Hangman, Cowsay or short userscripts. But if you have a relatively large program, or a project where a great number of such smaller programs work together, I think they ought to be released under a copyleft licence. A new kernel is a good example of such a program, as are core utilities, terminal emulators, media players, web extensions, complex games, etc. So Maestro, seL4, Redox, GNU, Terminology, VLC, mpv, uBlock, Minetest and so on. I think weak copyleft licences (such as the MPL or the LGPL) can make a great option for programs with a good ethical reason to maximise their usage (including by non-free software). In my opinion, there's seldom a good reason to abandon copyleft altogether. (And as that may imply, it is my view that copyleft should be the default choice. When in doubt, protect your users’ four essential freedoms.)

phkahler 3y ago

Linux has a LOT of paid commercial developers. Imagine those companies closed source and produced a commercial kernel that's way ahead of the open one - because they could and would if the license allowed. The public code couldn't keep up and would be kind of useless. On the other hand, the scenario you describe where everybody wins is already proven to work with the GPL since that is the Linux story. That is the point of it - when everyone cooperates we all win.

yencabulator 3y ago
I just don't think this is a huge threat. If there's a viable open source community, detaching your proprietary kernel from it just causes your company to be stuck with an old version, not able to benefit from the larger development community. There are already plenty of de facto proprietary forks of Linux. Practically every embedded SDK comes with one. Yes they have to publish the source because of the GPL, but they never bother doing that in a form that helps getting any of the work merged into upstream Linux. All those vendor-specific forks end up stuck at some random old kernel with dozens of known issues, effectively abandoned. This has effectively ruined the ARM landscape, and of the end-user visible SBC choices only RPi has a decent reputation for working well enough with upstream Linux devs. Submitting your changes to upstream Linux is a competitive advantage. (With the trade-off that you can't hide your sooper sekrit hardware designs as well.) Google/Android has put in a huge amount of effort to drag the hardware vendors out of this pit where they get stuck on old kernel versions...
hnfong 3y ago
Interesting you mentioned GPL proven to work in the Linux story. It was specifically GPLv2. I feel the GPL lost a lot of momentum with FSF's GPLv3 push. Linus was publicly against it. Not only for Linux, but generally and philosophically against it. I presume a lot of others felt the same too. In theory you could continue using GPLv2 for new projects, but given that FSF had basically deprecated v2 in favor of v3, it seems that the momentum for v2 just slowly died out, and v3 was too controversial to gain widespread acceptance. Without a GPL default, the developers who didn't want to get too deeply involved in ideological questions probably just adopted MIT as the new default.