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Rewriting GPL software under the MIT license is a terrible thing to do. The GPL is meant to protect and preserve what should be basic human rights. So-called "p

by tmtvl 2y ago

Rewriting GPL software under the MIT license is a terrible thing to do. The GPL is meant to protect and preserve what should be basic human rights. So-called "permissive" licenses are meant to provide big tech with free labour.

grg0 2y ago
Yup, and one doesn't need to look further than FreeBSD to see what the end result is. I wonder, to what extent is the Linux Rust effort "generously subsidized" by corporations? > He is thinking about ""what we are going to leave to the next generation"". Developers starting out don't want to use COBOL, Fortran, or C, he said. They want to work with fancy stuff like Rust, Swift, Go, or Kotlin. Oh, think about the children! The wolf in sheep's clothing.
- jmclnx 2y ago
  I did not see these posts before I posted similar. I fully believe this is a direction Corporations are pushing. Almost wonder when spyware will be added and restrictive DRM.
  - surajrmal 2y ago
    This is FUD. The folks funding this generally believe in the benefits. Not everything is 4D chess. There are plenty of not more of examples of rewrites where licenses do not change.
    - bayindirh 2y ago
      If that's no 4D chess, and if the license is not that important, why not relicense uutils to GPLv3 then?
      - surajrmal 2y ago
        I don't mind GPL, but if I were to start a new project it would be MIT licensed. There is no hidden agenda in my decision to do that and it's certainly not some grand scheme by my employer to make me do that. I simply find gpl less free because it has obligations attached to it. I don't think I'm alone in feeling this way. In fact I think this may very well be the way the majority of folks feel at this point.
        grg0 2y ago
        Corporations have been attacking the GPL for decades. Your employer would likely not allow you to license something with the GPL even if you wanted to. Many employer's employee handbook comes with specific clauses against not using, let alone contributing to, GPL software. So your take on the corporate part is rather disingenuous and ignores much of recent history. Yes, some people do believe liberal licenses are free-er. Corporations certainly like the freedom to not contribute back.
        mustache_kimono 2y ago
        > Corporations have been attacking the GPL for decades... So your take on the corporate part is rather disingenuous and ignores much of recent history. Corporations do not like the GPL on its merits, but it's also worth remembering that the GPL is also not that popular compared to MIT among developers. Developers have not been choosing the GPL for new projects. See: https://github.blog/open-source/open-source-license-usage-on-github-com/ https://github.blog/open-source/open-source-license-usage-on...
        conor- 2y ago
        Isn't it likely that newer projects licensing under GPL are also unlikely to be using GitHub and instead be using a platform like GitLab or Forgejo (or previously Gitea or something)?
        mustache_kimono 2y ago
        > Isn't it likely that newer projects licensing under GPL are also unlikely to be using GitHub and instead be using a platform like GitLab or Forgejo (or previously Gitea or something)? Why? But let's assume you're correct. What better metric do we have about which license OSS projects are using?
- woodruffw 2y ago
  > I wonder, to what extent is the Linux Rust effort "generously subsidized" by corporations? I would hazard that extent is strictly less than Linux itself.
- bendhoefs 2y ago
  What does Rust have to do with it? You can write MIT or GPL licensed code in any language.
  - bayindirh 2y ago
    It's not the language selection, but the license selection what bothers many.
- Gud 2y ago
  What’s the problem with FreeBSD? It’s been my daily driver for 20 years. That it has an open license is a good thing.
  - grg0 2y ago
    That it's irrelevant outside of the server space and has terrible hardware support. FreeBSD folks themselves use Macs. Don't get me wrong, I very much like FreeBSD, but I believe a liberal licence on critical infrastructure like an OS is detrimental. Of course, FreeBSD folks will argue the opposite.
rerdavies 2y ago
Perhaps, but MIT licensed code is Free like Air and Sunshine.
- bayindirh 2y ago
  ...and can be closed anytime, if the author wants to. Which will happen with these tools, anyway.
  - mrighele 2y ago
    What is released under MIT (or BSD) will stay under that license forever, so it cannot "be closed anytime". The owner can change the license, but that will affect only future developments.
    - bayindirh 2y ago
      Permissive licenses sometimes allow sublicensing, which allows changing of the license, and does not require source code be made available when changes made. IOW, this is de-facto closed source distribution. What happens when a company decides to add their own secret sauce and release that version only, or what happens tons of slightly incompatible, closed source variants pop-up, what happens upstream decides to not release future versions' source code. We have seen it all, and we'll see all of them again.
      - Gud 2y ago
        Yes, obviously the license can change by the author. The same can be done with GPL software. But what has once been licensed under a permissive license, will remain free forever. Only the changes will be affected.
      - Tomte 2y ago
        > Permissive licenses sometimes allow sublicensing, which allows changing of the license No! Sublicensing simply means that there can be a chain of licensing, e.g. author —— Linux distribution —— end user. Not that the middleman can change the license. (It's actually irrelevant in Germany, because consensus in our legal community seems to be that there is a direct licensing relationship between author and end user, even if they don't know each other and never interact)
loufe 2y ago
Thanks for sharing this thought, it hadn't occured to me that this could be an issue. Would the choice of AGPL or MPL for a licence have satisfied your concerns?
- bayindirh 2y ago
  As a person who shares OPs concerns, (A)GPL is acceptable, in v2 or v3 form. Anything permissive is not, because allows a closed fork, which everybody wants to do to rob free software ecosystem to undo what has been done over these years. Because "monies".
  - switchbak 2y ago
    Personally I haven’t seen this motive across any of the organizations I’ve worked at. They usually seem more interested in minimizing maintenance costs, which means they try to upstream changes where possible or practical. What would motivate a company to fork and keep private changes to a core GNU utility like chmod?
    - bayindirh 2y ago
      Any hardware company which would want to block 3rd party firmware from loading or executing on their systems. They can add a small handshake code to every binary on that system to authenticate via TPM or the processor's embedded secure element on start. They don't need to make extensive changes. Pull the latest, patch, compile, burn to FW. TaDa! IOW, TiVoization 2.0. GPL2 makes it very hard already, but GPL3 makes it impossible. With permissive licenses, it's very possible. ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tivoization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tivoization
    - trelane 2y ago
      > What would motivate a company to fork and keep private changes to a core GNU utility like chmod? Maybe ask these folks: https://www.busybox.net/license.html https://www.busybox.net/license.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BusyBox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BusyBox
- 2y ago
carra 2y ago
It would depend on what the end goal of the rewritten project is. If they pursue widespread adoption GPL licenses can definitely hinder it in many cases.
- nine_k 2y ago
  AGPL? I can understand. Pure GPL 2 or even GPL 3? Never heard of that.
  - mubou 2y ago
    You've never heard that GPL can hinder adoption? Most codebases simply cannot use GPL code because if they do, they'd be forced to relicense under GPL (obviously). Not everyone wants to do that, even setting companies aside. Even people who nominally agree with the concept of Free Software might not want to be forced to use GPL. The freedom to choose how to license one's work is also an important freedom, after all. GPL can be confusing, so you can't fault anyone from not wanting to use it even if they agree with the spirit of the license. (For the record, I use GPL on some of my projects. I don't hate it, but I also like to use MIT on some projects, too.)
    - nine_k 2y ago
      Libraries are normally released under LGPL, which allows the use inside your differently licensed code. A ton of commercial services and products somehow use Linux, the poster child of GPL2, while also running tons of their proprietary code. Python is GPL, and it's all over the place in the computing world. If you just want to take some code someone else wrote, for free, and alter and meld it into your commercial product, well, yes, GPL does not allow that. I don't think it's a huge impediment for legitimate use. I'd say that all open-source approaches have their own use cases. Certain things are easier to release under BSD / MIT license, some makes sense to release under GPL, some have to resort to AGPL, to the detriment of commercial adoption. A dual restrictive open-source + paid commercial license can be the best in many cases.
    - yellowbat 2y ago
      [dead]
surajrmal 2y ago
You say that like big tech doesn't use these tools when they are gpl. The primary advantage here is big tech employees can safely read and contribute to these tools without fear of upsetting some internal lawyers or getting explicit permission. No one is arbitrarily forking, extending, and keeping that new source hidden despite placing it in some commercial product. Working upstream is far less costly for long term maintenance and everyone knows that. Sure there are exceptions but far from the common case
- blueflow 2y ago
  > The primary advantage here is big tech employees can safely [...] contribute to these tools without fear of upsetting some internal lawyers Doesn't GPL do that better by mandating that changes must be accessible to the public? Like, if an employee worked out some patch, it would be a violation of the license to not make it accessible to the public.
  - surajrmal 2y ago
    No, because the fear of possibly not complying is enough to stop folks from even getting near it. I would argue that's worse for the ecosystem.
silon42 2y ago
+1 also, it is much less interesting if this is not sent upstream (even if upstream is not interested at this point)
yellowbat 2y ago
[dead]
alwayslikethis 2y ago
I would have said this in the past, but at this point I don't think it matters that much anymore. 1. Code copyright has devalued a lot in general, as you can code significantly faster with LLMs and use them to launder GPL'd code into whatever you want. 2. Big tech seems to be getting away with most other forms of abuses these days, GPL wouldn't really stop them from doing anything important. To the extent that code is being devalued, I would say that these LLMs are a benefit to open source overall, as devaluing of code also reduces the opportunity cost of open sourcing software. They also somewhat level the playing field between single-contributor open source projects and companies with teams of developers, because an individual is almost always limited by the rate at which he/she can write or architecture code, whereas teams have significant non-code overheads (meetings, reviews, bureaucracy).
- mustache_kimono 2y ago
  > 1. Code copyright has devalued a lot in general, as you can code significantly faster with LLMs and use them to launder GPL'd code into whatever you want. I see no real evidence this is the case. Can you provide examples? For instance -- do you see many Linux clones right now? Ask yourself: why might you not? Perhaps it's because it's almost impossible for an AI to rewrite Linux.
  - alwayslikethis 2y ago
    It is specifically with these smaller projects, not something like Linux or Chromium, that AI can accelerate. In particular, companies would probably not bother using an (A)GPL'd library, and would instead recreate them from scratch with help from AI. I don't have specific evidence for this, though.
    - mustache_kimono 2y ago
      What small A/GPL projects are we talking about?
kazinator 2y ago
The problem with your argument is that the GPL has not only provided the corporate world with free labor, but with a licensing model that big corporations now like for their own stuff, because it lets them license the code to other parties while retaining important advantages over those parties. GNU and Linux are the engine that powers practically every form of online harm. The best licenses are BSD and MIT and others of that sort; they have no naive pretense of not helping corporations: everyone can do almost whatever they want, be they a large business or an individual. These licenses also don't encourage unlevel playing fields where the copyright proprietor enjoys dominance in the ecosystem. For instance, if you are licensee under the BSD2, the only thing you cannot do, in comparison with the copyright holder, is remove copyright notices from the documentation or other materials accompanying the compiled code. This is really a minor thing which only stands in the way of those who want to be outright plagiarists. With the GPL, it's extremely important to be the copyright holder, so that you can litigate. That's why the Free Software Foundation and GNU Project require copyright assignment for all non-trivial contributions to every project. If your program is a patchwork of files, each copyright someone else, you can't litigate infringement cases easily.
- wakawaka28 2y ago
  >The best licenses are BSD and MIT and others of that sort; they have no naive pretense of not helping corporations: everyone can do almost whatever they want, be they a large business or an individual. These licenses also don't encourage unlevel playing fields where the copyright proprietor enjoys dominance in the ecosystem. The project owner ALWAYS has dominance in the ecosystem. At least with GPL the owner is protected from someone else scooping up the project to make a closed version. How would you feel if you made an awesome open project only for someone to copy it and close the source, make minor changes, and sell it without even giving you the changes? That crap is not possible with GPL.
  - kazinator 2y ago
    The GPL does not prevent closed versions because of Tivoization, and SaaS. For instance, Facebook is closed, in spite of running on a mountain of GPLed stuff. A locked device may prevent the user from running a kernel image that is not signed with a certain private key, even though the vendor of the device complies with the GPL and provides the matching kernel sources and the correct toolchain to reproduce the build without a signature. I would almost go as far as to say that, in this day and age, someone ripping off free source code in order to create a nice, local-only application, is practically a hero. :)

by tmtvl 2y ago

grg0 2y ago

Yup, and one doesn't need to look further than FreeBSD to see what the end result is. I wonder, to what extent is the Linux Rust effort "generously subsidized" by corporations? > He is thinking about ""what we are going to leave to the next generation"". Developers starting out don't want to use COBOL, Fortran, or C, he said. They want to work with fancy stuff like Rust, Swift, Go, or Kotlin. Oh, think about the children! The wolf in sheep's clothing.

jmclnx 2y ago
I did not see these posts before I posted similar. I fully believe this is a direction Corporations are pushing. Almost wonder when spyware will be added and restrictive DRM.
- surajrmal 2y ago
  This is FUD. The folks funding this generally believe in the benefits. Not everything is 4D chess. There are plenty of not more of examples of rewrites where licenses do not change.
  - bayindirh 2y ago
    If that's no 4D chess, and if the license is not that important, why not relicense uutils to GPLv3 then?
    - surajrmal 2y ago
      I don't mind GPL, but if I were to start a new project it would be MIT licensed. There is no hidden agenda in my decision to do that and it's certainly not some grand scheme by my employer to make me do that. I simply find gpl less free because it has obligations attached to it. I don't think I'm alone in feeling this way. In fact I think this may very well be the way the majority of folks feel at this point.
      - grg0 2y ago
        Corporations have been attacking the GPL for decades. Your employer would likely not allow you to license something with the GPL even if you wanted to. Many employer's employee handbook comes with specific clauses against not using, let alone contributing to, GPL software. So your take on the corporate part is rather disingenuous and ignores much of recent history. Yes, some people do believe liberal licenses are free-er. Corporations certainly like the freedom to not contribute back.
        mustache_kimono 2y ago
        > Corporations have been attacking the GPL for decades... So your take on the corporate part is rather disingenuous and ignores much of recent history. Corporations do not like the GPL on its merits, but it's also worth remembering that the GPL is also not that popular compared to MIT among developers. Developers have not been choosing the GPL for new projects. See: https://github.blog/open-source/open-source-license-usage-on-github-com/ https://github.blog/open-source/open-source-license-usage-on...
        conor- 2y ago
        Isn't it likely that newer projects licensing under GPL are also unlikely to be using GitHub and instead be using a platform like GitLab or Forgejo (or previously Gitea or something)?
        mustache_kimono 2y ago
        > Isn't it likely that newer projects licensing under GPL are also unlikely to be using GitHub and instead be using a platform like GitLab or Forgejo (or previously Gitea or something)? Why? But let's assume you're correct. What better metric do we have about which license OSS projects are using?
woodruffw 2y ago
> I wonder, to what extent is the Linux Rust effort "generously subsidized" by corporations? I would hazard that extent is strictly less than Linux itself.
bendhoefs 2y ago
What does Rust have to do with it? You can write MIT or GPL licensed code in any language.
- bayindirh 2y ago
  It's not the language selection, but the license selection what bothers many.
Gud 2y ago
What’s the problem with FreeBSD? It’s been my daily driver for 20 years. That it has an open license is a good thing.
- grg0 2y ago
  That it's irrelevant outside of the server space and has terrible hardware support. FreeBSD folks themselves use Macs. Don't get me wrong, I very much like FreeBSD, but I believe a liberal licence on critical infrastructure like an OS is detrimental. Of course, FreeBSD folks will argue the opposite.

rerdavies 2y ago

Perhaps, but MIT licensed code is Free like Air and Sunshine.

bayindirh 2y ago
...and can be closed anytime, if the author wants to. Which will happen with these tools, anyway.
- mrighele 2y ago
  What is released under MIT (or BSD) will stay under that license forever, so it cannot "be closed anytime". The owner can change the license, but that will affect only future developments.
  - bayindirh 2y ago
    Permissive licenses sometimes allow sublicensing, which allows changing of the license, and does not require source code be made available when changes made. IOW, this is de-facto closed source distribution. What happens when a company decides to add their own secret sauce and release that version only, or what happens tons of slightly incompatible, closed source variants pop-up, what happens upstream decides to not release future versions' source code. We have seen it all, and we'll see all of them again.
    - Gud 2y ago
      Yes, obviously the license can change by the author. The same can be done with GPL software. But what has once been licensed under a permissive license, will remain free forever. Only the changes will be affected.
    - Tomte 2y ago
      > Permissive licenses sometimes allow sublicensing, which allows changing of the license No! Sublicensing simply means that there can be a chain of licensing, e.g. author —— Linux distribution —— end user. Not that the middleman can change the license. (It's actually irrelevant in Germany, because consensus in our legal community seems to be that there is a direct licensing relationship between author and end user, even if they don't know each other and never interact)

loufe 2y ago

Thanks for sharing this thought, it hadn't occured to me that this could be an issue. Would the choice of AGPL or MPL for a licence have satisfied your concerns?

bayindirh 2y ago
As a person who shares OPs concerns, (A)GPL is acceptable, in v2 or v3 form. Anything permissive is not, because allows a closed fork, which everybody wants to do to rob free software ecosystem to undo what has been done over these years. Because "monies".
- switchbak 2y ago
  Personally I haven’t seen this motive across any of the organizations I’ve worked at. They usually seem more interested in minimizing maintenance costs, which means they try to upstream changes where possible or practical. What would motivate a company to fork and keep private changes to a core GNU utility like chmod?
  - bayindirh 2y ago
    Any hardware company which would want to block 3rd party firmware from loading or executing on their systems. They can add a small handshake code to every binary on that system to authenticate via TPM or the processor's embedded secure element on start. They don't need to make extensive changes. Pull the latest, patch, compile, burn to FW. TaDa! IOW, TiVoization 2.0. GPL2 makes it very hard already, but GPL3 makes it impossible. With permissive licenses, it's very possible. ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tivoization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tivoization
  - trelane 2y ago
    > What would motivate a company to fork and keep private changes to a core GNU utility like chmod? Maybe ask these folks: https://www.busybox.net/license.html https://www.busybox.net/license.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BusyBox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BusyBox
2y ago

carra 2y ago

It would depend on what the end goal of the rewritten project is. If they pursue widespread adoption GPL licenses can definitely hinder it in many cases.

nine_k 2y ago
AGPL? I can understand. Pure GPL 2 or even GPL 3? Never heard of that.
- mubou 2y ago
  You've never heard that GPL can hinder adoption? Most codebases simply cannot use GPL code because if they do, they'd be forced to relicense under GPL (obviously). Not everyone wants to do that, even setting companies aside. Even people who nominally agree with the concept of Free Software might not want to be forced to use GPL. The freedom to choose how to license one's work is also an important freedom, after all. GPL can be confusing, so you can't fault anyone from not wanting to use it even if they agree with the spirit of the license. (For the record, I use GPL on some of my projects. I don't hate it, but I also like to use MIT on some projects, too.)
  - nine_k 2y ago
    Libraries are normally released under LGPL, which allows the use inside your differently licensed code. A ton of commercial services and products somehow use Linux, the poster child of GPL2, while also running tons of their proprietary code. Python is GPL, and it's all over the place in the computing world. If you just want to take some code someone else wrote, for free, and alter and meld it into your commercial product, well, yes, GPL does not allow that. I don't think it's a huge impediment for legitimate use. I'd say that all open-source approaches have their own use cases. Certain things are easier to release under BSD / MIT license, some makes sense to release under GPL, some have to resort to AGPL, to the detriment of commercial adoption. A dual restrictive open-source + paid commercial license can be the best in many cases.
  - yellowbat 2y ago
    [dead]

surajrmal 2y ago

You say that like big tech doesn't use these tools when they are gpl. The primary advantage here is big tech employees can safely read and contribute to these tools without fear of upsetting some internal lawyers or getting explicit permission. No one is arbitrarily forking, extending, and keeping that new source hidden despite placing it in some commercial product. Working upstream is far less costly for long term maintenance and everyone knows that. Sure there are exceptions but far from the common case

blueflow 2y ago
> The primary advantage here is big tech employees can safely [...] contribute to these tools without fear of upsetting some internal lawyers Doesn't GPL do that better by mandating that changes must be accessible to the public? Like, if an employee worked out some patch, it would be a violation of the license to not make it accessible to the public.
- surajrmal 2y ago
  No, because the fear of possibly not complying is enough to stop folks from even getting near it. I would argue that's worse for the ecosystem.

silon42 2y ago

+1 also, it is much less interesting if this is not sent upstream (even if upstream is not interested at this point)

yellowbat 2y ago

[dead]

alwayslikethis 2y ago

I would have said this in the past, but at this point I don't think it matters that much anymore. 1. Code copyright has devalued a lot in general, as you can code significantly faster with LLMs and use them to launder GPL'd code into whatever you want. 2. Big tech seems to be getting away with most other forms of abuses these days, GPL wouldn't really stop them from doing anything important. To the extent that code is being devalued, I would say that these LLMs are a benefit to open source overall, as devaluing of code also reduces the opportunity cost of open sourcing software. They also somewhat level the playing field between single-contributor open source projects and companies with teams of developers, because an individual is almost always limited by the rate at which he/she can write or architecture code, whereas teams have significant non-code overheads (meetings, reviews, bureaucracy).

mustache_kimono 2y ago
> 1. Code copyright has devalued a lot in general, as you can code significantly faster with LLMs and use them to launder GPL'd code into whatever you want. I see no real evidence this is the case. Can you provide examples? For instance -- do you see many Linux clones right now? Ask yourself: why might you not? Perhaps it's because it's almost impossible for an AI to rewrite Linux.
- alwayslikethis 2y ago
  It is specifically with these smaller projects, not something like Linux or Chromium, that AI can accelerate. In particular, companies would probably not bother using an (A)GPL'd library, and would instead recreate them from scratch with help from AI. I don't have specific evidence for this, though.
  - mustache_kimono 2y ago
    What small A/GPL projects are we talking about?

kazinator 2y ago

The problem with your argument is that the GPL has not only provided the corporate world with free labor, but with a licensing model that big corporations now like for their own stuff, because it lets them license the code to other parties while retaining important advantages over those parties. GNU and Linux are the engine that powers practically every form of online harm. The best licenses are BSD and MIT and others of that sort; they have no naive pretense of not helping corporations: everyone can do almost whatever they want, be they a large business or an individual. These licenses also don't encourage unlevel playing fields where the copyright proprietor enjoys dominance in the ecosystem. For instance, if you are licensee under the BSD2, the only thing you cannot do, in comparison with the copyright holder, is remove copyright notices from the documentation or other materials accompanying the compiled code. This is really a minor thing which only stands in the way of those who want to be outright plagiarists. With the GPL, it's extremely important to be the copyright holder, so that you can litigate. That's why the Free Software Foundation and GNU Project require copyright assignment for all non-trivial contributions to every project. If your program is a patchwork of files, each copyright someone else, you can't litigate infringement cases easily.

wakawaka28 2y ago
>The best licenses are BSD and MIT and others of that sort; they have no naive pretense of not helping corporations: everyone can do almost whatever they want, be they a large business or an individual. These licenses also don't encourage unlevel playing fields where the copyright proprietor enjoys dominance in the ecosystem. The project owner ALWAYS has dominance in the ecosystem. At least with GPL the owner is protected from someone else scooping up the project to make a closed version. How would you feel if you made an awesome open project only for someone to copy it and close the source, make minor changes, and sell it without even giving you the changes? That crap is not possible with GPL.
- kazinator 2y ago
  The GPL does not prevent closed versions because of Tivoization, and SaaS. For instance, Facebook is closed, in spite of running on a mountain of GPLed stuff. A locked device may prevent the user from running a kernel image that is not signed with a certain private key, even though the vendor of the device complies with the GPL and provides the matching kernel sources and the correct toolchain to reproduce the build without a signature. I would almost go as far as to say that, in this day and age, someone ripping off free source code in order to create a nice, local-only application, is practically a hero. :)