5 ms·

My honest opinion is that the prevalence of licenses like GPLv3 and AGPLv3 end up indirectly leading to people recreating the wheel, rather than using the wheel

by winocm 2y ago

My honest opinion is that the prevalence of licenses like GPLv3 and AGPLv3 end up indirectly leading to people recreating the wheel, rather than using the wheel that exists already.

talldayo 2y ago
I think wheel-reinvention is the perfect punishment for people that want to be stingy with their wheel development. Copyleft infringement deserves no more empathy than copyright infringement.
karmakaze 2y ago
Working as intended. If they don't want to share, then they can't benefit.
- winocm 2y ago
  It's not so much that as there is the net-negative side effect of having people redo the same work over and over again at their day job or whatever. It horrifies me when I think about the number of hours of people's lives wasted on things like that. It applies to both sides of the argument, with organizations keeping things to themselves or others avoiding codebases for the inverse reason.
  - fjkdlsjflkds 2y ago
    > It's not so much that as there is the net-negative side effect of having people redo the same work over and over again at their day job or whatever. It horrifies me when I think about the number of hours of people's lives wasted on things like that. Given that this issue applies to all proprietary/non-opensource software, which is the overwhelming majority of software out there, you can hardly blame GPL3 for this fact of life.
  - Brian_K_White 2y ago
    But who cares if someone chooses to redo work they didn't have to? I don't care about that at all. Self inflicted wound. They presumably can salve that horrible wound with all the money they get (not make or earn, just get) from their chosen modus operundi.
  - 0x0203 2y ago
    I would argue that in many ways (that vary from project to project) the duplicated efforts are a good thing overall. Now, instead of having one single group or person working on a particular topic, there are many and the knowledge, learning, experience, and expertise that comes from that isn't locked up with only a select few. That can be applied in more areas, used for more things, or carried into other endeavors. It also hedges against all that expertise being lost if the few experts of the original project abandon it for whatever reason. I don't see all the efforts that go into *BSD, Windows, macOS, etc... as being wasted just because Linux is available, nor would I consider the effort to try something completely new in os/kernel design that starts from a clean slate a waste, even if it doesn't end up becoming wildly popular. Not everyone who has the capacity to work on a duplicate effort would be able to contribute to the original, and the original will never be able to perfectly meet the goals/needs of everyone.
- mikepurvis 2y ago
  Absolutely. LLVM exists because GCC is GPL; that's a feature not a bug.
  - badsectoracula 2y ago
    LLVM exists because its original developers wanted to do research, not because of GPL and at the time there wasn't even a C compiler for it, not to mention that GCC wasn't designed at all to do what LLVM did. The license angle with Apple did happen because of GCC's switch to GPLv3 but that came years later - and GCC still wasn't (and AFAIK still isn't) designed to be used like LLVM or (later) Clang, like using it as a backend for IDEs, analyzers, language servers, etc. The two projects aren't interchangeable with only the license being the thing that differentiates them.
    - f1shy 2y ago
      They could have very well used lots or reusable parts of GCC. It was possible, and were many projects trying to change GCC.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      - baq 2y ago
        gcc was specifically designed to not have many reusable parts to avoid people ripping them out. modularity only happened after LLVM and clang specifically started eating its lunch.
        Y_Y 2y ago
        > LLVM and clang specifically started eating its lunch I don't know how you can eat GCC's lunch. I feel like in this analogy GCC eats from a communal trough and is very happy to share. A company that sells licenses can lose customers, the GNU project just wants the world to benefit. GCC is still ubiquitous and has plenty of developers and mindshare, what more could they want?

by winocm 2y ago

My honest opinion is that the prevalence of licenses like GPLv3 and AGPLv3 end up indirectly leading to people recreating the wheel, rather than using the wheel that exists already.

talldayo 2y ago

I think wheel-reinvention is the perfect punishment for people that want to be stingy with their wheel development. Copyleft infringement deserves no more empathy than copyright infringement.

karmakaze 2y ago

Working as intended. If they don't want to share, then they can't benefit.

winocm 2y ago
It's not so much that as there is the net-negative side effect of having people redo the same work over and over again at their day job or whatever. It horrifies me when I think about the number of hours of people's lives wasted on things like that. It applies to both sides of the argument, with organizations keeping things to themselves or others avoiding codebases for the inverse reason.
- fjkdlsjflkds 2y ago
  > It's not so much that as there is the net-negative side effect of having people redo the same work over and over again at their day job or whatever. It horrifies me when I think about the number of hours of people's lives wasted on things like that. Given that this issue applies to all proprietary/non-opensource software, which is the overwhelming majority of software out there, you can hardly blame GPL3 for this fact of life.
- Brian_K_White 2y ago
  But who cares if someone chooses to redo work they didn't have to? I don't care about that at all. Self inflicted wound. They presumably can salve that horrible wound with all the money they get (not make or earn, just get) from their chosen modus operundi.
- 0x0203 2y ago
  I would argue that in many ways (that vary from project to project) the duplicated efforts are a good thing overall. Now, instead of having one single group or person working on a particular topic, there are many and the knowledge, learning, experience, and expertise that comes from that isn't locked up with only a select few. That can be applied in more areas, used for more things, or carried into other endeavors. It also hedges against all that expertise being lost if the few experts of the original project abandon it for whatever reason. I don't see all the efforts that go into *BSD, Windows, macOS, etc... as being wasted just because Linux is available, nor would I consider the effort to try something completely new in os/kernel design that starts from a clean slate a waste, even if it doesn't end up becoming wildly popular. Not everyone who has the capacity to work on a duplicate effort would be able to contribute to the original, and the original will never be able to perfectly meet the goals/needs of everyone.
mikepurvis 2y ago
Absolutely. LLVM exists because GCC is GPL; that's a feature not a bug.
- badsectoracula 2y ago
  LLVM exists because its original developers wanted to do research, not because of GPL and at the time there wasn't even a C compiler for it, not to mention that GCC wasn't designed at all to do what LLVM did. The license angle with Apple did happen because of GCC's switch to GPLv3 but that came years later - and GCC still wasn't (and AFAIK still isn't) designed to be used like LLVM or (later) Clang, like using it as a backend for IDEs, analyzers, language servers, etc. The two projects aren't interchangeable with only the license being the thing that differentiates them.
  - f1shy 2y ago
    They could have very well used lots or reusable parts of GCC. It was possible, and were many projects trying to change GCC.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - baq 2y ago
      gcc was specifically designed to not have many reusable parts to avoid people ripping them out. modularity only happened after LLVM and clang specifically started eating its lunch.
      - Y_Y 2y ago
        > LLVM and clang specifically started eating its lunch I don't know how you can eat GCC's lunch. I feel like in this analogy GCC eats from a communal trough and is very happy to share. A company that sells licenses can lose customers, the GNU project just wants the world to benefit. GCC is still ubiquitous and has plenty of developers and mindshare, what more could they want?