7 ms·

Which freedoms are being attacked?

endgame 2y ago
Remember when Red Hat tried to lock away the source code to subscribers only? I think they would have preferred not to provide source at all, but the enormous base of GPL code entangled with everything make that impractical. I think we're really going to miss having the fundamental parts of the system available under strong copyleft, and it will be very hard to go back.
- stouset 2y ago
  Everything in uutils is under the MIT license. The only thing you're missing is the "viral" nature of the GPL. Nobody in the BSD world seems to be particularly suffering under the thumb of unreleased forks of `chown` and `mkdir`.
  - desumeku 2y ago
    Yes, and if BSD was what everyone used for servers instead of Linux, then there would be nothing stopping Oracle from selling you Oracle BSD for a nice subscription price. Of course, they and red hat are already doing this in their own way that gets around the GPL, but a more permissive license would just allow them to do it even more.
    - CamouflagedKiwi 2y ago
      There's nothing stopping Oracle from selling us Oracle Linux for a nice subscription price either. The GPL is explicitly not meant to prevent commercialisation of software.
    - jzb 2y ago
      Of all the things that constitute a value ad that might allow Oracle or any other company to sell a premium operating system and do away with reciprocal licensing, the core utilities aren’t it. There are already permissively, licensed versions of most of those tools. If people want to champion the GPL and so forth, this is not the hill to die on it’s not really even a hill. It’s a mole hill. That’s not to say that I undervalue the worth of these utilities, but they are not something that people are going to pay premium prices for.
    - stouset 2y ago
      You don’t need to imagine. Apple ships macOS with a BSD user space. The sky has not fallen.
      - immibis 2y ago
        If Linux was the way macOS is, nobody would use it. They'd use macOS, to Apple's great benefit.
        stouset 2y ago
        I genuinely don't follow your point.
        superb_dev 2y ago
        I already prefer macOS over Linux for my desktop, to Apple’s great benefit
  - WD-42 2y ago
    What exactly is this BSD world that you speak of? The one that was mined by corporations for years and whom never gave back anything (except value to Apple shareholders). Compare with Linux which was adopted by corporations and were legally forced to give back. Which made more progress?
    - IshKebab 2y ago
      > never gave back anything Apart from Clang/LLVM and WebKit you mean? Ok in fairness the LGPL license of KHTML was a huge reason the WebKit source was available (for ages it was just reluctant tarball dumps) but I don't think that's the case for LLVM. I don't think the GPL has really meant corporation's have given back significantly to Linux. There are still plenty of closed source drivers. The main motivation to give back is the extremely high cost of maintaining out-of-tree modifications (e.g. Android's binder).
      - bfrog 2y ago
        LLVM has spawned probably a dozen vendor supplied toolchains that you never see the source for, best of luck figuring out why your program didn't compile correctly, or adding support for something other than the tools/languages provided. The compiler and toolchain really are going the wrong direction with LLVM in terms of open source.
        cozzyd 2y ago
        Yes Apple's clang weird ass versioning causes all sorts of problems too
        dzaima 2y ago
        Some proprietary-friendly compiler would've appeared in one way or another at some point. I'd rather such at least have some amount of openness. Better than many crappy from-scratch completely-proprietary vendor compilers at least. And hey some of the work does get upstreamed, which is probably a good choice for the vendor anyway if the target in question isn't intended to be immediately thrown in the thrash and forgotten.
- ddulaney 2y ago
  The last 2 paragraphs of this interview with David Chisnall really made me think differently about that: https://lobste.rs/s/ttr8op/lobsters_interview_with_david_chisnall https://lobste.rs/s/ttr8op/lobsters_interview_with_david_chi... In particular: > I think the GPL has led to fairly noticeable increase in the amount of proprietary software in the world as companies that would happily adopt a BSDL component decide to create an in-house proprietary version rather than adopt a GPL’d component. It also aligns with my experience: my company couldn’t find an LZO compression library that wasn’t GPL’d, so the decision was between implementing one in-house or cutting the feature. We ended up restricting use of the feature to in-house use only, but opening up our core source code was never an option. If there had been a permissive license option available, we would’ve likely donated (as we do to several other dependencies), and would’ve contributed any fixes back (because that’s easier to explain to customers than “here’s our patched version”).
  - spankalee 2y ago
    I've seen this personally. Google does not allow GPL code to imported into the massive monorepo. If I needed a library and the only good OSS option was GPL, I'd write it from scratch instead. I'd also usually not open source those things if this wasn't part of an already open source project, because it wasn't worth the effort.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
    So, the company wants us to trust them - trust that they will not take advantage off the BSDL to do things the GPL would prohibit them from doing. And we're supposed to trust them because doing so means that there would be more "hands on deck" (e.g. working on the now-canonical LZO compression library that everyone uses because it is BSDL). Sorry, trust has been broken too often in these scenarios, and the benefits of lots more people working on the same library are not entirely clear. I understand that many companies don't want to be a part of the pool of software licensed under the GPL - that is their right. But don't try to spin this "if only BSDL was the common one, there'd be a much bigger utilization of a different pool of software". That might even be true, but it would come with the caveat that tivoization would always be an option, which for some of us is something more significant.
- LeFantome 2y ago
  Red Hat is probably the biggest single provider of GPL software in the world. They consistently choose the GPL for software they author and release. They founded and fund the Fedora Project themselves explicitly to be a community driven distro independent of their commercial efforts. They provide the full source to their products even though a huge percentage of the code is MIT, BSD, or Apache and does not require them to. They provide everything required to produce the "aggregate" full product even though the GPL does not require them to. I will go on record now with the prediction that, if uutils catches on, Red Hat will be one of the last companies to move away from GNU. They are probably the largest contributor to glibc and GCC. What evidence do you have that they would have "preferred not to provide source at all"? Because their is a mountain of evidence otherwise. As an individual user, Red Hat will give you a free license to their flagship product. Then they will tell you how to download every line of code for it. I don't have a license. I do not use Red Hat (other than occasionally using the also totally free RHEL9 container). "Remember when Red Hat tried to lock away the source code to subscribers only?" I do not remember them changing the policy you are talking about. If you think they did, it highlights how overblown the response was at the time. The biggest impact of the Red Hat change is that Alma Linux is now a better project that can actually innovate and contribute.
  - mixmastamyk 2y ago
    You defended Red Hat, but it's Blue Hat now. They may not have damaged their legacy yet, but we're on the lookout.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - yawaramin 2y ago
      IBM is one of the biggest open source contributors in the world. What are you looking out for exactly?
      - mixmastamyk 2y ago
        Did you miss this one? https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/06/red-hats-new-source-code-policy-and-the-intense-pushback-explained/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/06/red-h... Again, be careful not to attribute past RH actions with IBM. Yes, IBM was very helpful in the 90s and later, but you can't fully trust a corporation past the next financial statement, and certainly not past a leadership change or three.
- bigstrat2003 2y ago
  That isn't something Canonical could do just because the software has a permissive license instead of a copyleft license. They can do that if they own the copyright (which I can't imagine they do), but if they own the copyright they can do anything they want and nobody has a say in it. So again it has nothing to do with license. The absolute most that Canonical can do is start making a fork of the software where they don't distribute the source code. But in that case, the original code is still right there. No freedom is lost at any point.
  - Brian_K_White 2y ago
    The original code does not matter. What matters is the code for the binaries you are running. That is the entire point, and that specific garantee has far reaching consequences, even if you apparently can't imagine them.
- zifpanachr23 2y ago
  Red Hat has been more consistently pro GPL and pro open source and invests more money into it than any other company. Them putting the downloads of their enterprise OS behind a login screen (student and solo developer licenses can STILL be got for free) is something I 100% understand and am kind of sympathetic about. I know that's out of like with how some people define free software, but I've always had ethical issues with the way people would redistribute Red Hats work for free. Just because it's legal doesn't make it ethical.
Kbelicius 2y ago
User freedoms. Those don't exist under the so called "more permissive" licenses.
globular-toast 2y ago
The GPL ensures the software will always be free. "Permissive" licences don't. Permissive licences permit anyone to create a derivative version that isn't free. No source code, and it will be under copyright. If there's one thing people need to understand it's that corporations will always strive to take as much as they can and give back as little as they can. It's incredibly naive to think they won't do it again after that's exactly what every corporation has done for the past several centuries. Give an inch and they'll take a mile. You can't seriously think companies like Microsoft and Oracle aren't already salivating at the thought of the community rewriting GNU/Linux in a permissive licence? It's not that this particular case is "freedoms being attacked". It's that freedoms are constantly and relentlessly under attack and we can't let our guard down for one moment. GPL is our protection and voluntarily stepping out of it would be suicide.
- viraptor 2y ago
  You mean the Microsoft which not that long ago releases the proprietary .Net code under mit? It's not all going one way, even in large corps. Windows also ships with wsl now - what would they even gain now from non-gnu Linux?
  - WD-42 2y ago
    They did both those things because it’s the only way they can compete. You really think they would open source any of that stuff if developers weren’t leaving their platform in droves? WSL is them just exploiting foss to make up for their own shortcomings.
  - neonsunset 2y ago
    .NET case was mostly a rewrite, many components were rewritten from scratch (sooner or later). Roslyn was a compiler-rewrite to make C# self-hosted with, what I understand, intention to make it OSS from the beginning. .NET (then Core) started with RyuJIT. AFAIK RyuJIT also mainly exists for .NET only, where-as .NET Framework uses older, different compiler codebase. But yes, there were additional licensing assurances provided so as to not create problems for Novell/Mono - it was always treated positively.

Remember when Red Hat tried to lock away the source code to subscribers only? I think they would have preferred not to provide source at all, but the enormous base of GPL code entangled with everything make that impractical. I think we're really going to miss having the fundamental parts of the system available under strong copyleft, and it will be very hard to go back.

stouset 2y ago
Everything in uutils is under the MIT license. The only thing you're missing is the "viral" nature of the GPL. Nobody in the BSD world seems to be particularly suffering under the thumb of unreleased forks of `chown` and `mkdir`.
- desumeku 2y ago
  Yes, and if BSD was what everyone used for servers instead of Linux, then there would be nothing stopping Oracle from selling you Oracle BSD for a nice subscription price. Of course, they and red hat are already doing this in their own way that gets around the GPL, but a more permissive license would just allow them to do it even more.
  - CamouflagedKiwi 2y ago
    There's nothing stopping Oracle from selling us Oracle Linux for a nice subscription price either. The GPL is explicitly not meant to prevent commercialisation of software.
  - jzb 2y ago
    Of all the things that constitute a value ad that might allow Oracle or any other company to sell a premium operating system and do away with reciprocal licensing, the core utilities aren’t it. There are already permissively, licensed versions of most of those tools. If people want to champion the GPL and so forth, this is not the hill to die on it’s not really even a hill. It’s a mole hill. That’s not to say that I undervalue the worth of these utilities, but they are not something that people are going to pay premium prices for.
  - stouset 2y ago
    You don’t need to imagine. Apple ships macOS with a BSD user space. The sky has not fallen.
    - immibis 2y ago
      If Linux was the way macOS is, nobody would use it. They'd use macOS, to Apple's great benefit.
      - stouset 2y ago
        I genuinely don't follow your point.
      - superb_dev 2y ago
        I already prefer macOS over Linux for my desktop, to Apple’s great benefit
- WD-42 2y ago
  What exactly is this BSD world that you speak of? The one that was mined by corporations for years and whom never gave back anything (except value to Apple shareholders). Compare with Linux which was adopted by corporations and were legally forced to give back. Which made more progress?
  - IshKebab 2y ago
    > never gave back anything Apart from Clang/LLVM and WebKit you mean? Ok in fairness the LGPL license of KHTML was a huge reason the WebKit source was available (for ages it was just reluctant tarball dumps) but I don't think that's the case for LLVM. I don't think the GPL has really meant corporation's have given back significantly to Linux. There are still plenty of closed source drivers. The main motivation to give back is the extremely high cost of maintaining out-of-tree modifications (e.g. Android's binder).
    - bfrog 2y ago
      LLVM has spawned probably a dozen vendor supplied toolchains that you never see the source for, best of luck figuring out why your program didn't compile correctly, or adding support for something other than the tools/languages provided. The compiler and toolchain really are going the wrong direction with LLVM in terms of open source.
      - cozzyd 2y ago
        Yes Apple's clang weird ass versioning causes all sorts of problems too
      - dzaima 2y ago
        Some proprietary-friendly compiler would've appeared in one way or another at some point. I'd rather such at least have some amount of openness. Better than many crappy from-scratch completely-proprietary vendor compilers at least. And hey some of the work does get upstreamed, which is probably a good choice for the vendor anyway if the target in question isn't intended to be immediately thrown in the thrash and forgotten.
ddulaney 2y ago
The last 2 paragraphs of this interview with David Chisnall really made me think differently about that: https://lobste.rs/s/ttr8op/lobsters_interview_with_david_chisnall https://lobste.rs/s/ttr8op/lobsters_interview_with_david_chi... In particular: > I think the GPL has led to fairly noticeable increase in the amount of proprietary software in the world as companies that would happily adopt a BSDL component decide to create an in-house proprietary version rather than adopt a GPL’d component. It also aligns with my experience: my company couldn’t find an LZO compression library that wasn’t GPL’d, so the decision was between implementing one in-house or cutting the feature. We ended up restricting use of the feature to in-house use only, but opening up our core source code was never an option. If there had been a permissive license option available, we would’ve likely donated (as we do to several other dependencies), and would’ve contributed any fixes back (because that’s easier to explain to customers than “here’s our patched version”).
- spankalee 2y ago
  I've seen this personally. Google does not allow GPL code to imported into the massive monorepo. If I needed a library and the only good OSS option was GPL, I'd write it from scratch instead. I'd also usually not open source those things if this wasn't part of an already open source project, because it wasn't worth the effort.
- PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
  So, the company wants us to trust them - trust that they will not take advantage off the BSDL to do things the GPL would prohibit them from doing. And we're supposed to trust them because doing so means that there would be more "hands on deck" (e.g. working on the now-canonical LZO compression library that everyone uses because it is BSDL). Sorry, trust has been broken too often in these scenarios, and the benefits of lots more people working on the same library are not entirely clear. I understand that many companies don't want to be a part of the pool of software licensed under the GPL - that is their right. But don't try to spin this "if only BSDL was the common one, there'd be a much bigger utilization of a different pool of software". That might even be true, but it would come with the caveat that tivoization would always be an option, which for some of us is something more significant.
LeFantome 2y ago
Red Hat is probably the biggest single provider of GPL software in the world. They consistently choose the GPL for software they author and release. They founded and fund the Fedora Project themselves explicitly to be a community driven distro independent of their commercial efforts. They provide the full source to their products even though a huge percentage of the code is MIT, BSD, or Apache and does not require them to. They provide everything required to produce the "aggregate" full product even though the GPL does not require them to. I will go on record now with the prediction that, if uutils catches on, Red Hat will be one of the last companies to move away from GNU. They are probably the largest contributor to glibc and GCC. What evidence do you have that they would have "preferred not to provide source at all"? Because their is a mountain of evidence otherwise. As an individual user, Red Hat will give you a free license to their flagship product. Then they will tell you how to download every line of code for it. I don't have a license. I do not use Red Hat (other than occasionally using the also totally free RHEL9 container). "Remember when Red Hat tried to lock away the source code to subscribers only?" I do not remember them changing the policy you are talking about. If you think they did, it highlights how overblown the response was at the time. The biggest impact of the Red Hat change is that Alma Linux is now a better project that can actually innovate and contribute.
- mixmastamyk 2y ago
  You defended Red Hat, but it's Blue Hat now. They may not have damaged their legacy yet, but we're on the lookout.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - yawaramin 2y ago
    IBM is one of the biggest open source contributors in the world. What are you looking out for exactly?
    - mixmastamyk 2y ago
      Did you miss this one? https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/06/red-hats-new-source-code-policy-and-the-intense-pushback-explained/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/06/red-h... Again, be careful not to attribute past RH actions with IBM. Yes, IBM was very helpful in the 90s and later, but you can't fully trust a corporation past the next financial statement, and certainly not past a leadership change or three.
bigstrat2003 2y ago
That isn't something Canonical could do just because the software has a permissive license instead of a copyleft license. They can do that if they own the copyright (which I can't imagine they do), but if they own the copyright they can do anything they want and nobody has a say in it. So again it has nothing to do with license. The absolute most that Canonical can do is start making a fork of the software where they don't distribute the source code. But in that case, the original code is still right there. No freedom is lost at any point.
- Brian_K_White 2y ago
  The original code does not matter. What matters is the code for the binaries you are running. That is the entire point, and that specific garantee has far reaching consequences, even if you apparently can't imagine them.
zifpanachr23 2y ago
Red Hat has been more consistently pro GPL and pro open source and invests more money into it than any other company. Them putting the downloads of their enterprise OS behind a login screen (student and solo developer licenses can STILL be got for free) is something I 100% understand and am kind of sympathetic about. I know that's out of like with how some people define free software, but I've always had ethical issues with the way people would redistribute Red Hats work for free. Just because it's legal doesn't make it ethical.

Kbelicius 2y ago

User freedoms. Those don't exist under the so called "more permissive" licenses.

globular-toast 2y ago

The GPL ensures the software will always be free. "Permissive" licences don't. Permissive licences permit anyone to create a derivative version that isn't free. No source code, and it will be under copyright. If there's one thing people need to understand it's that corporations will always strive to take as much as they can and give back as little as they can. It's incredibly naive to think they won't do it again after that's exactly what every corporation has done for the past several centuries. Give an inch and they'll take a mile. You can't seriously think companies like Microsoft and Oracle aren't already salivating at the thought of the community rewriting GNU/Linux in a permissive licence? It's not that this particular case is "freedoms being attacked". It's that freedoms are constantly and relentlessly under attack and we can't let our guard down for one moment. GPL is our protection and voluntarily stepping out of it would be suicide.

viraptor 2y ago
You mean the Microsoft which not that long ago releases the proprietary .Net code under mit? It's not all going one way, even in large corps. Windows also ships with wsl now - what would they even gain now from non-gnu Linux?
- WD-42 2y ago
  They did both those things because it’s the only way they can compete. You really think they would open source any of that stuff if developers weren’t leaving their platform in droves? WSL is them just exploiting foss to make up for their own shortcomings.
- neonsunset 2y ago
  .NET case was mostly a rewrite, many components were rewritten from scratch (sooner or later). Roslyn was a compiler-rewrite to make C# self-hosted with, what I understand, intention to make it OSS from the beginning. .NET (then Core) started with RyuJIT. AFAIK RyuJIT also mainly exists for .NET only, where-as .NET Framework uses older, different compiler codebase. But yes, there were additional licensing assurances provided so as to not create problems for Novell/Mono - it was always treated positively.