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GNU sort of lost its way around GPLv3 (it gives cloud services a free pass, but not locally run software, which is the opposite of letting users control what th

by hedora 2y ago

GNU sort of lost its way around GPLv3 (it gives cloud services a free pass, but not locally run software, which is the opposite of letting users control what their computer does). That killed most of the “user freedom” enthusiasm of the early days. These days, there’s the AGPL, but that’s mostly used like the BSL (“if you want to use AGPL in production, pay us”), than for bootstrapping freedom-respecting compute environments. If you disagree, show me an AGPL userland that’s appropriate for daily-driving. I’m slowly migrating off Linux to the BSDs these days. The politics seem less destructive to the user experience with them.

Dylan16807 2y ago
What kind of free pass would you want to give to locally run software? Can't you already do anything you want to GPL code locally?
- hedora 2y ago
  GPLv2 was fine. AGPL is fine. V3 is incompatible with selling bootloader locked software stacks (pretty much all consumer hardware these days). Concretely, I can’t do this local thing: Take GPLv3 software, build a board, link the software to vendor blob firmware (~ all current hardware requires this step), flash it to a ROM on the board and sell it to you with a copy of the GPLv3 software’s source code. I can take the same vendor blob, add a TCP stack, and have your device shell into a copy of GPLv3 software with closed source modifications running in my data center. This has massive negative consequences for users of GPLv3-reliant IoT crap and cloud services.
  - rbanffy 2y ago
    > V3 is incompatible with selling bootloader locked software stacks (pretty much all consumer hardware these days). Which is great. It prevents enshitification of consumer devices.
    - Dylan16807 2y ago
      If you look just at consumer devices, it's great. But their argument is that blocking that loophole, while not blocking an even worse loophole, caused more harm than good. In other words we should have moved as much as possible directly to AGPL, and left the rest on GPLv2.
- josefx 2y ago
  I think it is not that local code does not get a free pass by itself but the combination. By letting cloud services that use GPL software stay closed source it actively encourages development of cloud based tooling in a commercial context and users end up getting forced to sign up with and connect to a closed source cloud service they have even less control over than traditional locally running closed source software. I think Stallmans motivation for the FSF includes a story about modifying a driver for a printer to support new features. Now imagine if that printer had a cloud based interface and imagine how the GPL would help Stallman add features for a new printer to it. It doesn't, if he wanted to fix the interface he would have to reverse engineer it from scratch. 40 years of FSF and it lets a decades old trend run circles around its goals.
  - rbanffy 2y ago
    > By letting cloud services that use GPL software stay closed source it actively encourages development of cloud based tooling This is why AGPL was invented. You might use my AGPL code in your cloud service, but you need to provide the source code you are running to your clients. You are not allowed to keep any secret sauce secret from your users. MIT and BSD (and plain GPL) don’t protect users again abuses like this.

by hedora 2y ago

Dylan16807 2y ago

What kind of free pass would you want to give to locally run software? Can't you already do anything you want to GPL code locally?

hedora 2y ago
GPLv2 was fine. AGPL is fine. V3 is incompatible with selling bootloader locked software stacks (pretty much all consumer hardware these days). Concretely, I can’t do this local thing: Take GPLv3 software, build a board, link the software to vendor blob firmware (~ all current hardware requires this step), flash it to a ROM on the board and sell it to you with a copy of the GPLv3 software’s source code. I can take the same vendor blob, add a TCP stack, and have your device shell into a copy of GPLv3 software with closed source modifications running in my data center. This has massive negative consequences for users of GPLv3-reliant IoT crap and cloud services.
- rbanffy 2y ago
  > V3 is incompatible with selling bootloader locked software stacks (pretty much all consumer hardware these days). Which is great. It prevents enshitification of consumer devices.
  - Dylan16807 2y ago
    If you look just at consumer devices, it's great. But their argument is that blocking that loophole, while not blocking an even worse loophole, caused more harm than good. In other words we should have moved as much as possible directly to AGPL, and left the rest on GPLv2.
josefx 2y ago
I think it is not that local code does not get a free pass by itself but the combination. By letting cloud services that use GPL software stay closed source it actively encourages development of cloud based tooling in a commercial context and users end up getting forced to sign up with and connect to a closed source cloud service they have even less control over than traditional locally running closed source software. I think Stallmans motivation for the FSF includes a story about modifying a driver for a printer to support new features. Now imagine if that printer had a cloud based interface and imagine how the GPL would help Stallman add features for a new printer to it. It doesn't, if he wanted to fix the interface he would have to reverse engineer it from scratch. 40 years of FSF and it lets a decades old trend run circles around its goals.
- rbanffy 2y ago
  > By letting cloud services that use GPL software stay closed source it actively encourages development of cloud based tooling This is why AGPL was invented. You might use my AGPL code in your cloud service, but you need to provide the source code you are running to your clients. You are not allowed to keep any secret sauce secret from your users. MIT and BSD (and plain GPL) don’t protect users again abuses like this.