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GPL was always about fighting the system with its own tools. The end goal is not good licenses but free software as a baseline.

by tokai 1y ago

kelnos 1y ago
How else would you enforce Free Software, though? Without copyright, I cannot release the source to my software and require anything of any recipient. It would be nice of FOSS was the baseline, but I don't see that ever happening, especially in a world without an enforcement mechanism.
- Karliss 1y ago
  That's the thing you don't need to enforce anything if there is no law which forbids you from doing things. It's the copyright law which restricts you from doing most of the things that GPL license gives you permission. GPL gives you back the rights to copy, modify, create derivative works and redistribute any GPL licensed software you receive. Without copyright law you could copy, modify, create derivative works and redistribute any software you receive. Sure having source code would be nice, but then again half the software nowadays is using electron and written in javascript anyway. Also plenty of examples of hardware manufacturers using software/firmware copyright as excuse and making legal threats to people who have made their own software to control hardware they bought even though they didn't have access to original source code. There are probably more examples of people reverse engineering an reimplementing or decompiling large nontrivial software than there examples of companies making their whole software open source due to using a GPL licensed library (as opposed to avoiding the GPL licensed code or violating the GPL by not releasing the source code).
  - martin-t 1y ago
    > companies making their whole software open source due to using a GPL licensed library Does not mean that GPL is ineffective. IT forces them to reimplement the functionality, thus giving copyleft more time to compete with them. Imagine if they were to free to take all public code and just use it. They would always be ahead and open source products wouldn't stand a chance competing. Not to mention I feel like GPL being so strong is why big companies pretend to love open source but permissive licenses so much - to drown out the GPL competition they hate so much and to attract more developers to permissive rather than copyleft open source projects.
  - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
    > you don't need to enforce anything if there is no law which forbids you from doing things This is extend-and-extinguish on rails. Raise capital, hire a team to fork a public project, develop is closed and only release inscrutable blobs. Add a marketing budget and you get to piggyback on the open-source project while keeping the monetisation.
    - chgs 1y ago
      You release that blob what stops others just copying it?
      - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
        > You release that blob what stops others just copying it? Obfuscation techniques. Compatibility updates. Hell, hardware-enforced DRM.
        AnthonyMouse 1y ago
        Those things work against hobbyists, sometimes, temporarily, if the hobbyists are busy with other things or not very enterprising. Do they work against Red Hat or Intel or Google or Mozilla, once those organizations can openly distribute the reconstructed code they've assigned full-time people to decompile? For that matter, what stops any government from doing it to any foreign company? Which hardware company is going to build your DRM if there is no law you can use to stop the same company from also selling circumvention tools, or stopping anyone else (including major corporations) from extracting keys and selling them openly?
        JumpCrisscross 1y ago
        Oh, duh, just run it on your server for SaaS. > Which hardware company is going to build your DRM The ones that build the software. Apple. Oracle.
        AnthonyMouse 1y ago

GPL was always about fighting the system with its own tools. The end goal is not good licenses but free software as a baseline.

by tokai 1y ago

GPL was always about fighting the system with its own tools. The end goal is not good licenses but free software as a baseline.

kelnos 1y ago

How else would you enforce Free Software, though? Without copyright, I cannot release the source to my software and require anything of any recipient. It would be nice of FOSS was the baseline, but I don't see that ever happening, especially in a world without an enforcement mechanism.

Karliss 1y ago
That's the thing you don't need to enforce anything if there is no law which forbids you from doing things. It's the copyright law which restricts you from doing most of the things that GPL license gives you permission. GPL gives you back the rights to copy, modify, create derivative works and redistribute any GPL licensed software you receive. Without copyright law you could copy, modify, create derivative works and redistribute any software you receive. Sure having source code would be nice, but then again half the software nowadays is using electron and written in javascript anyway. Also plenty of examples of hardware manufacturers using software/firmware copyright as excuse and making legal threats to people who have made their own software to control hardware they bought even though they didn't have access to original source code. There are probably more examples of people reverse engineering an reimplementing or decompiling large nontrivial software than there examples of companies making their whole software open source due to using a GPL licensed library (as opposed to avoiding the GPL licensed code or violating the GPL by not releasing the source code).
- martin-t 1y ago
  > companies making their whole software open source due to using a GPL licensed library Does not mean that GPL is ineffective. IT forces them to reimplement the functionality, thus giving copyleft more time to compete with them. Imagine if they were to free to take all public code and just use it. They would always be ahead and open source products wouldn't stand a chance competing. Not to mention I feel like GPL being so strong is why big companies pretend to love open source but permissive licenses so much - to drown out the GPL competition they hate so much and to attract more developers to permissive rather than copyleft open source projects.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago
  > you don't need to enforce anything if there is no law which forbids you from doing things This is extend-and-extinguish on rails. Raise capital, hire a team to fork a public project, develop is closed and only release inscrutable blobs. Add a marketing budget and you get to piggyback on the open-source project while keeping the monetisation.
  - chgs 1y ago
    You release that blob what stops others just copying it?
    - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
      > You release that blob what stops others just copying it? Obfuscation techniques. Compatibility updates. Hell, hardware-enforced DRM.
      - AnthonyMouse 1y ago
        Those things work against hobbyists, sometimes, temporarily, if the hobbyists are busy with other things or not very enterprising. Do they work against Red Hat or Intel or Google or Mozilla, once those organizations can openly distribute the reconstructed code they've assigned full-time people to decompile? For that matter, what stops any government from doing it to any foreign company? Which hardware company is going to build your DRM if there is no law you can use to stop the same company from also selling circumvention tools, or stopping anyone else (including major corporations) from extracting keys and selling them openly?
        JumpCrisscross 1y ago
        Oh, duh, just run it on your server for SaaS. > Which hardware company is going to build your DRM The ones that build the software. Apple. Oracle.
        AnthonyMouse 1y ago