4 ms·

I slightly lament the rise of MIT or BSD licensed middleware like this. It's undoubtedly great for the developers and organisations in question, but there's und

I slightly lament the rise of MIT or BSD licensed middleware like this. It's undoubtedly great for the developers and organisations in question, but there's undoubtedly some societal good from having GPL or LGPL licensed products encouraging organisations to release their code under a similar license. This already exists for Go and Qt, and the competing library is "soon" to release a commercial license that would be available for those who do not wish to use the LGPL. Nevertheless, huge props to the author(s) for what undoubtedly is a vast amount of work.

dokyun 2y ago
There's a whole handful of permissively-licensed, feature-matched alternatives to GNU Readline that I suspect only exist due to political aversions to its license. It saddens me that these people would rather waste time treading over the same paths others have just to increase the potential for nonfree software, rather than using that time to write free and useful things.
- rty32 2y ago
  That's your definition of "useful", not mine. "political aversion"? We are talking about money and business here. If a commercial company wants to ship a product without reinventing all the wheels, they are going to use code with permissive licenses, and skip projects with GPL license or similar in a heartbeat. You could even argue quite the contrary -- when you make your project GPL/AGPL etc, and if it is big/impactful enough, people will inevitably create alternative projects with permissive licenses that tried to match the feature set, and it is you that is the cause of all this "waste of time". Not necessarily a good argument, but there is some truth there. And thank god a lot of goodness actually comes out of it other than just reinventing the wheels. Apple "bought" LLVM due to gcc's copyleft license, and now we have a family new compilers based on LLVM for different languages and targets. Kudos to Apple.
  - arp242 2y ago
    Apple literally offered the clang/LLVM copyright to the FSF to be released under the GPL. This was basically just ignored. https://gcc.gnu.org/legacy-ml/gcc/2005-11/msg00888.html https://gcc.gnu.org/legacy-ml/gcc/2005-11/msg00888.html Furthermore there were real technical problems with gcc, certainly at the time. There were good reasons to start a new compiler project. The license was always more of a detail, rather than the main thing.
    - rty32 2y ago
      I doubt licensing is a "detail" -- various comments say it matters a lot, e.g. https://stackoverflow.com/a/14488011/3831197 https://stackoverflow.com/a/14488011/3831197 > The GPLv3 was the final straw that ended Apple's interest in contributing to GCC which is the reason Apple ended it at GCC 4.2.x. I guess GPLv2 is still GPL, but here we end up talking about copyleft licenses (GPLv3) affecting business decisions anyway.
  - dokyun 2y ago
    > If a commercial company wants to ship a product without reinventing all the wheels, they are going to use code with permissive licenses, and skip projects with GPL license or similar in a heartbeat. Did you know that there's no rule against commercializing or selling free software? The only reason that companies skip projects with copyleft licenses that's relevant in this discussion is because they intend to incorporate them into proprietary software, and this is because they are, by some deeply corporatistic scruple, incapable of conceiving of the idea of delivering free software (even if 90% of the heavy lifting in their services is done by free programs). > You could even argue quite the contrary -- when you make your project GPL/AGPL etc, and if it is big/impactful enough, people will inevitably create alternative projects with permissive licenses that tried to match the feature set, and it is you that is the cause of all this "waste of time". Not necessarily a good argument, but there is some truth there. Yes, it's not a good argument. The truth there is that if I develop a free program or library under (L)GPL or similar then I have made that thing free. If people want to write an alternative for technical reasons, then that's neither here nor there, but if people want to write an alternative because they don't like the license, then that's their own time they are wasting, because they would have no other reason to do it other than wanting to incorporate it into nonfree software.
rob74 2y ago
Well yeah, that's the old "open source" vs "free software" schism: Go itself being permissively licensed, there's a lot of interest in having libraries that also come with "no strings attached".
- jenadine 2y ago
  This is not about "open source" vs "free software". This is about "permissive" vs "copyleft"
  - rob74 2y ago
    I'm probably oversimplifying things, but for me "permissive license" (MIT, BSD) is equivalent to the term "open source", and "copyleft license" ((L)GPL) <=> "free software". I know that the term "open source" also includes (L)GPL-licensed software, but the "free software" advocates resist being lumped together with software that they perceive to be less free, so they very much prefer "free software".
    - ikari_pl 2y ago
      so less permissive = more free. gives me something to think about.
      - dagw 2y ago
        All freedom is relative to the perspective you judge it. "Free" in this case is measured from the perspective of the software (and more specifically the source code), not the developer. The basic philosophy is that the easier it is lock up the source code and its development behind closed proprietary walls, the less free it is. From the FSF perspective, your freedom to make the source code less free stands in direct opposition to the freedom of the source code.
      - ForHackernews 2y ago
        The freedom prioritized is that of the user, not the developer working at a for-profit company. Copyleft software prioritizes users' freedom by attempting to prevent companies/developers from taking away their rights. (See also GPLv3's anti-Tivoization clauses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tivoization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tivoization that restrict companies to empower users)
mappu 2y ago
> the competing library is "soon" to release a commercial license No, after many years this never became available, and the maintainer went missing, taking the copyright with them. If it was really possible to buy a commercial license it's possible I might not have bothered to make the binding. My hope is that by choosing the MIT license for my bindings, one commercial app in the world will choose to use Qt Widgets instead of Electron, that does in small part something for the climate.
- ForHackernews 2y ago
  Isn't Qt still proprietary or semi-proprietary?
  - jenadine 2y ago
    No. (There might be side projects like the squish test framework or the MCU port that are proprietary, but Qt itself is fully free software)
  - jonathanstrange 2y ago
    This discussion is about the Qt binding library for Go, not Qt. The existing Qt binding they're talking about is LGPL and cannot be bound dynamically, and therefore makes the distribution of proprietary software impossible even with a full Qt license. This new binding alleviates this problem because it's MIT licensed. You still need to adhere to Qt's licensing, i.e., buy a commercial Qt license or bind Qt dynamically like most people do. Qt has a commercial and a LGPL licensed version.
  - zerr 2y ago
    No. Just Qt Company hides this as much as they can.
    - prmoustache 2y ago
      It is only proprietary if you are building proprietary code AND statically link to it but open source/free (LGPL) if you are building software with a compatible license or are linking dynamically. I think it is fair.
loeg 2y ago
> there's undoubtedly some societal good from having GPL or LGPL licensed products encouraging organisations to release their code under a similar license. Undoubtedly is probably not the right words, since reasonable people disagree about this. Not everyone agrees with you that the GPL is an unalloyed good.
- Timon3 2y ago
  I honestly can't imagine any reasonable person arguing that GPL/LGPL have brought absolutely no societal good. Are you thinking of anybody in particular?
  - airstrike 2y ago
    "no societal good" != "more societal good than alternatives"
    - Timon3 2y ago
      The opposite of "some societal good" isn't "less societal good than other alternatives", it's "no societal good". The original statement didn't contain any comparisons. Even the worst alternative can still have some societal good.
      - loeg 2y ago
        The original statement is comparing against non-copyleft licenses like MIT. It is clearly stating the author's preference for the GPL.
        Timon3 2y ago
        It's not stating a preference - it's stating that, no matter what your preference is, there is some societal good from GPL/LGPL. Preferences don't change the existence of that good.
      - airstrike 2y ago
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
greyman 2y ago
> there's undoubtedly some societal good from having GPL or LGPL licensed products encouraging organisations to release their code under a similar license How often does this happen, though? I remember at my previous employer, there was a rule to never use GPL code in our projects.

dokyun 2y ago

There's a whole handful of permissively-licensed, feature-matched alternatives to GNU Readline that I suspect only exist due to political aversions to its license. It saddens me that these people would rather waste time treading over the same paths others have just to increase the potential for nonfree software, rather than using that time to write free and useful things.

rty32 2y ago
That's your definition of "useful", not mine. "political aversion"? We are talking about money and business here. If a commercial company wants to ship a product without reinventing all the wheels, they are going to use code with permissive licenses, and skip projects with GPL license or similar in a heartbeat. You could even argue quite the contrary -- when you make your project GPL/AGPL etc, and if it is big/impactful enough, people will inevitably create alternative projects with permissive licenses that tried to match the feature set, and it is you that is the cause of all this "waste of time". Not necessarily a good argument, but there is some truth there. And thank god a lot of goodness actually comes out of it other than just reinventing the wheels. Apple "bought" LLVM due to gcc's copyleft license, and now we have a family new compilers based on LLVM for different languages and targets. Kudos to Apple.
- arp242 2y ago
  Apple literally offered the clang/LLVM copyright to the FSF to be released under the GPL. This was basically just ignored. https://gcc.gnu.org/legacy-ml/gcc/2005-11/msg00888.html https://gcc.gnu.org/legacy-ml/gcc/2005-11/msg00888.html Furthermore there were real technical problems with gcc, certainly at the time. There were good reasons to start a new compiler project. The license was always more of a detail, rather than the main thing.
  - rty32 2y ago
    I doubt licensing is a "detail" -- various comments say it matters a lot, e.g. https://stackoverflow.com/a/14488011/3831197 https://stackoverflow.com/a/14488011/3831197 > The GPLv3 was the final straw that ended Apple's interest in contributing to GCC which is the reason Apple ended it at GCC 4.2.x. I guess GPLv2 is still GPL, but here we end up talking about copyleft licenses (GPLv3) affecting business decisions anyway.
- dokyun 2y ago
  > If a commercial company wants to ship a product without reinventing all the wheels, they are going to use code with permissive licenses, and skip projects with GPL license or similar in a heartbeat. Did you know that there's no rule against commercializing or selling free software? The only reason that companies skip projects with copyleft licenses that's relevant in this discussion is because they intend to incorporate them into proprietary software, and this is because they are, by some deeply corporatistic scruple, incapable of conceiving of the idea of delivering free software (even if 90% of the heavy lifting in their services is done by free programs). > You could even argue quite the contrary -- when you make your project GPL/AGPL etc, and if it is big/impactful enough, people will inevitably create alternative projects with permissive licenses that tried to match the feature set, and it is you that is the cause of all this "waste of time". Not necessarily a good argument, but there is some truth there. Yes, it's not a good argument. The truth there is that if I develop a free program or library under (L)GPL or similar then I have made that thing free. If people want to write an alternative for technical reasons, then that's neither here nor there, but if people want to write an alternative because they don't like the license, then that's their own time they are wasting, because they would have no other reason to do it other than wanting to incorporate it into nonfree software.

rob74 2y ago

Well yeah, that's the old "open source" vs "free software" schism: Go itself being permissively licensed, there's a lot of interest in having libraries that also come with "no strings attached".

jenadine 2y ago
This is not about "open source" vs "free software". This is about "permissive" vs "copyleft"
- rob74 2y ago
  I'm probably oversimplifying things, but for me "permissive license" (MIT, BSD) is equivalent to the term "open source", and "copyleft license" ((L)GPL) <=> "free software". I know that the term "open source" also includes (L)GPL-licensed software, but the "free software" advocates resist being lumped together with software that they perceive to be less free, so they very much prefer "free software".
  - ikari_pl 2y ago
    so less permissive = more free. gives me something to think about.
    - dagw 2y ago
      All freedom is relative to the perspective you judge it. "Free" in this case is measured from the perspective of the software (and more specifically the source code), not the developer. The basic philosophy is that the easier it is lock up the source code and its development behind closed proprietary walls, the less free it is. From the FSF perspective, your freedom to make the source code less free stands in direct opposition to the freedom of the source code.
    - ForHackernews 2y ago
      The freedom prioritized is that of the user, not the developer working at a for-profit company. Copyleft software prioritizes users' freedom by attempting to prevent companies/developers from taking away their rights. (See also GPLv3's anti-Tivoization clauses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tivoization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tivoization that restrict companies to empower users)

mappu 2y ago

> the competing library is "soon" to release a commercial license No, after many years this never became available, and the maintainer went missing, taking the copyright with them. If it was really possible to buy a commercial license it's possible I might not have bothered to make the binding. My hope is that by choosing the MIT license for my bindings, one commercial app in the world will choose to use Qt Widgets instead of Electron, that does in small part something for the climate.

ForHackernews 2y ago
Isn't Qt still proprietary or semi-proprietary?
- jenadine 2y ago
  No. (There might be side projects like the squish test framework or the MCU port that are proprietary, but Qt itself is fully free software)
- jonathanstrange 2y ago
  This discussion is about the Qt binding library for Go, not Qt. The existing Qt binding they're talking about is LGPL and cannot be bound dynamically, and therefore makes the distribution of proprietary software impossible even with a full Qt license. This new binding alleviates this problem because it's MIT licensed. You still need to adhere to Qt's licensing, i.e., buy a commercial Qt license or bind Qt dynamically like most people do. Qt has a commercial and a LGPL licensed version.
- zerr 2y ago
  No. Just Qt Company hides this as much as they can.
  - prmoustache 2y ago
    It is only proprietary if you are building proprietary code AND statically link to it but open source/free (LGPL) if you are building software with a compatible license or are linking dynamically. I think it is fair.

loeg 2y ago

> there's undoubtedly some societal good from having GPL or LGPL licensed products encouraging organisations to release their code under a similar license. Undoubtedly is probably not the right words, since reasonable people disagree about this. Not everyone agrees with you that the GPL is an unalloyed good.

Timon3 2y ago
I honestly can't imagine any reasonable person arguing that GPL/LGPL have brought absolutely no societal good. Are you thinking of anybody in particular?
- airstrike 2y ago
  "no societal good" != "more societal good than alternatives"
  - Timon3 2y ago
    The opposite of "some societal good" isn't "less societal good than other alternatives", it's "no societal good". The original statement didn't contain any comparisons. Even the worst alternative can still have some societal good.
    - loeg 2y ago
      The original statement is comparing against non-copyleft licenses like MIT. It is clearly stating the author's preference for the GPL.
      - Timon3 2y ago
        It's not stating a preference - it's stating that, no matter what your preference is, there is some societal good from GPL/LGPL. Preferences don't change the existence of that good.
    - airstrike 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

greyman 2y ago

> there's undoubtedly some societal good from having GPL or LGPL licensed products encouraging organisations to release their code under a similar license How often does this happen, though? I remember at my previous employer, there was a rule to never use GPL code in our projects.