8 ms·

I used to prefer permissive licenses and now favor copyleft

134 points by bpierre 1y ago

JohnKemeny 1y ago
Crypto bros rediscovering RMS 50 years later.
cat_plus_plus 1y ago
I primarily care about individual users and developers of my stuff, not "the society" and as such make it easy for them to use my code in any project, even closed source commercial one. The exception is 3D models where I don't anticipate commercial uses and if there are I want them to talk to me and maybe pay me some money, so sharealike it is.
Liftyee 1y ago
Interesting arguments in favour of technology transfer/diffusion that I really needed. However, I wonder if letting greater economies of scale form would accelerate progress overall when those economies of scale are applied to research. Fundamentally, I think the best companies have a symbiotic (or at least respectful) relationship with their customers and not an adversarial one.
- fsflover 1y ago
  > I think the best companies have a symbiotic (or at least respectful) relationship with their customers and not an adversarial one. What are examples of large companies like this?
  - vladms 1y ago
    Tech companies that I use and (more importantly) I pay for and I think there is a "respectful" relationship: Google (via Android), Microsoft (via office365), OVH (via servers), Proton (via email). And there are others, but tried to select known ones. Do I like all that they do? Definitely not. But the services for which I ended up paying are reasonable. I would not like to build my one OS for a mobile, install the 10s applications required in an enterprise or manage my own data center/mail server. Of course there are some that I find adversarial, but that is more a personal feeling - like Apple which asked X times more in price for minor (in my view) better quality for their devices.
    - JonChesterfield 1y ago
      It might help you to consider that pricing in direct proportion to bill of materials means the base model must increase in cost to balance the lost revenue from the higher spec devices. That is, people paying "over the odds" for the larger ssd and so forth subsidise the base model.
    - fsflover 1y ago
      > I think there is a "respectful" relationship: Google (via Android) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26639261 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26639261
      - vladms 1y ago
        There are so many actors out there that collect data (ex: GSM companies, utility companies, CCTV, states, etc.) but nowhere near as much discussions as mobile phones. Regarding Google, I’m consistently disappointed by the ads they suggests to me. I’d prefer relevant recommendations, but what I get is irrelevant. My favorite example: couple of years ago they kept showing me ads for a household appliance like 6-10 months after I already bought one, even if I had lots of emails regarding the buying process in gmail. I can't think "oh, they are evil masterminds" if they fail at their most basic stuff. So they can record how many times per day I unlock the phone or open an app or the location if the GPS is on, good luck using that for something useful. I do have limits to what I think they should collect in bulk (ex: video or audio), but I did not see allegations that they do that so far, and I think sometimes it's healthy anyhow to behave "as if they do it", just in case.
    - achenet 1y ago
      I'm a dev (and also a client) at OVH, just wanted to thank you for using our product <3 <3 <3
o11c 1y ago
> we are not able to opt out of diffusion of progress. People move between companies and between countries and take their ideas and talents with them. Never forget that Industry itself came to America by way of direct theft. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Slater https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Slater ===== If you care about your users, you should always prefer some copyleft license. Prefer permissive licenses only if you want to subsidize big business. Hopefully you have a plan for when they decide to take it closed-source and outcompete you. You probably don't, though, since that's not mentioned in the aggressive "use permissive licenses" marketing campaign they've been running for the last decade or two. Permissive licenses can fit in a niche for software that has already been implemented many times. But the downsides remain, and why aren't you just using the existing code directly? The main occasion on which I will consider it is when everybody else is doing it wrong (and content to do so), and I as a user keep getting annoyed at hitting those limitations. The second-worst reason to use permissive licensing is arguably "I don't understand how to dynamic linking".
- jjcob 1y ago
  Permissive licenses enable small or individual developers (like myself) to sell software based on them. With copyleft licenses, developers always have to sell stuff adjacent to the software (support, individual development, software-as-a-service). With permissive licenses, developers can just sell a license to the software itself. Much easier, much more direct. It's the reason why there is much more tooling around permissive licensed projects vs. projects with a GPL style license. Permissive licenses are win-win: Proprietory developers win because they get to sell licenses, users win because they have more tools they can use.
  - o11c 1y ago
    That does not follow. You might as well make it "source available" and sell proprietary licenses.
    - jjcob 1y ago
      I think you misunderstood. My software is not permissive. My software is closed source, but based on a big open source project with a permissive license. It's a tool that helps users of the big open source solution. I can sell licenses to my tool because it is closed source. If the big open source project was licensed under a copyleft license, I would have to make my tool open source as well. Then I would have a hard time selling licenses. I couldn't have spent the last 10 years building a tool for the open source software, and users of the open source software would have had fewer tools available.
Animats 1y ago
This is the Ethereum guy. Was something forked and made proprietary that he needs to be open source?
- kwar13 1y ago
  This comment makes no sense. Can you give a single precedent for him to have behaved that way?
jandrewrogers 1y ago
I just want anyone to be able to use my code. It isn’t ideological for me, I don’t care what people do with it. No one is harmed by a permissive license and I explicitly want to minimize the obligations of anyone using my code. I’d probably make most of it public domain if it wasn’t for the fact that some jurisdictions don’t recognize that concept. I’ve written thousands of lines of copyleft code. I don’t see a practical benefit if you don’t want to obligate users of that code.
- cess11 1y ago
  "I just want anyone to be able to use my code." Some would argue that if you want that, then you need to license it in a way that protects anyone's freedoms and disallows other ones from stepping on them.
  - rerdavies 1y ago
    Why would anyone serious argue that?
  - D13Fd 1y ago
    This is ridiculous. He said he just wants anyone to be able to use his code. Licensing it copyleft will just restrict the user base.
    - cess11 1y ago
      No, it won't. It restricts how you modify and distribute, which isn't a user thing to do, it's more of a developer thing. And whether it works or not is mostly untested in the legal sense but the idea with copyleft licensing is that big money shouldn't be able to ratfuck a free software embrace/extinguish-style, or some other way. I.e. it is supposed to protect the rights of the users to enjoy free software.
- indeyets 1y ago
  It’s usually a question of “who are your users?” As long as you consider developers of derived software to be your users — permissive makes most sense. But if you consider end-users of software it’s definitely copyleft.
kwar13 1y ago
I might not always agree with Vitalik but he's always a joy to read.
qalmakka 1y ago
My favourite licence has always been the MPLv2. It's basically the best of both worlds, it's copyleft for your code while keeping the ability to statically link (crucial for Rust, Go and other languages that do that by default).
- Sander_Marechal 1y ago
  So, LGPL?
  - qalmakka 1y ago
    Well, no, as someone else already stated forcing people to ship object files is a PITA and it's really not feasible with languages that do codegen, templates, ... because you inevitably end up injecting copylefted code inside of your files. I like copyleft as a way to protect my code from freeloaders, but I don't think that imposing the same view on other people is fair TBH. I want people to be able to use my code without being forced to "convert" to my creed first
    - jenadine 1y ago
      You can obfuscate your code.
      - qalmakka 1y ago
        what for? I'd rather just use the MPL2 instead
        jenadine 1y ago
        So you can use someone elses rust (or other languages with templates, that really need to be re-compiled) LGPL library, without publishing your proprietary code.
- wolvesechoes 1y ago
  You can link LGPL statically as well, though it puts more obligations (shipping object files) than MPL. I am always amazed how many myths were created around FOSS licensing.
bgwalter 1y ago
Copyleft of course is of limited use since the FSF slept through the desktop to Internet service transition and now sleeps through the "AI" transition. GPLv4 should be AGPL+no-AI if it is supposed to have any effect.
- zorked 1y ago
  It is copyright as a whole that is sleeping through the "AI" transition/robbery.
  - netbsdusers 1y ago
    Usually when I hear "robbery" it brings to mind someone stealing your phone or wallet at knife-point. Certainly not training some model on some code that involves neither violence nor depriving anyone of anything. The concept of copyright is the fiction that information - something that can be freely modified, copied, or transmitted - is of the commodity-form, that information should be treated as if it were a single real object that were inherently scarce. It is a fiction that exists to serve of some of the most hateful, mafia-like firms - your Disneys, UMGs, Getty Images, and the like. So if the AI interests are powerful enough to deal that whole rotten system a serious blow, then I'm all for them.
    - xigoi 1y ago
      Server bandwidth is a commodity. If a site gets DDOSed by LLM training, then actual humans won’t be able to access the information.
- tobias3 1y ago
  Since AI use is based on "fair-use" how can you add a no-AI clause? Only protection I see is to not publish the code.
  - Diti 1y ago
    “Fair use” is a notion related to copyright. The authors in Europe who won in cases of free software licensing violations did it on the grounds of breach of contract law.
INGELRII 1y ago
>Third, Glen Weyl-style economic arguments have convinced me that, in the presence of superlinear returns to scale, the optimal policy is actually NOT Rothbard/Mises-style strict property rights. Rather, the optimal policy does involve some nonzero amount of more actively pushing projects to be more open than they otherwise would be. (read the rest of his reasoning for this philosophical shift).
enriquto 1y ago
The very name "permissive" licenses is problematic, because it steers the discussion towards the point of view of software middlemen, not of users. From the point of view of a user, a copylefted software allows the user to do more things: the license grants them permission to see and change the source code of the software, no matter how they got it. With so-called permissive software, the user may be stripped of this permission by third parties.
- immibis 1y ago
  Another name for "permissive license" is "cuck license". Hopefully I don't have to explain the analogy.
sellmesoap 1y ago
I've taken Rob Landrey to heart on this subject. His argument for use of permissive licences to avoid the power struggle that crops up around bigger copyleft projects.
jmclnx 1y ago
I think it depends on what you do/did. Things I wrote is using the ISC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISC_license https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISC_license But anyone and their brother can develop those old utilities I created decades ago and enhanced over the years. But if you create something very complex and provides a real benefit, then I can agree with this point. You may be better off to using the copyleft. In anycase, you need to really need to think about the License you choose, not just use one because it is trendy now.

134 points by bpierre 1y ago

Crypto bros rediscovering RMS 50 years later.

I primarily care about individual users and developers of my stuff, not "the society" and as such make it easy for them to use my code in any project, even closed source commercial one. The exception is 3D models where I don't anticipate commercial uses and if there are I want them to talk to me and maybe pay me some money, so sharealike it is.

Liftyee 1y ago

Interesting arguments in favour of technology transfer/diffusion that I really needed. However, I wonder if letting greater economies of scale form would accelerate progress overall when those economies of scale are applied to research. Fundamentally, I think the best companies have a symbiotic (or at least respectful) relationship with their customers and not an adversarial one.

fsflover 1y ago
> I think the best companies have a symbiotic (or at least respectful) relationship with their customers and not an adversarial one. What are examples of large companies like this?
- vladms 1y ago
  Tech companies that I use and (more importantly) I pay for and I think there is a "respectful" relationship: Google (via Android), Microsoft (via office365), OVH (via servers), Proton (via email). And there are others, but tried to select known ones. Do I like all that they do? Definitely not. But the services for which I ended up paying are reasonable. I would not like to build my one OS for a mobile, install the 10s applications required in an enterprise or manage my own data center/mail server. Of course there are some that I find adversarial, but that is more a personal feeling - like Apple which asked X times more in price for minor (in my view) better quality for their devices.
  - JonChesterfield 1y ago
    It might help you to consider that pricing in direct proportion to bill of materials means the base model must increase in cost to balance the lost revenue from the higher spec devices. That is, people paying "over the odds" for the larger ssd and so forth subsidise the base model.
  - fsflover 1y ago
    > I think there is a "respectful" relationship: Google (via Android) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26639261 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26639261
    - vladms 1y ago
      There are so many actors out there that collect data (ex: GSM companies, utility companies, CCTV, states, etc.) but nowhere near as much discussions as mobile phones. Regarding Google, I’m consistently disappointed by the ads they suggests to me. I’d prefer relevant recommendations, but what I get is irrelevant. My favorite example: couple of years ago they kept showing me ads for a household appliance like 6-10 months after I already bought one, even if I had lots of emails regarding the buying process in gmail. I can't think "oh, they are evil masterminds" if they fail at their most basic stuff. So they can record how many times per day I unlock the phone or open an app or the location if the GPS is on, good luck using that for something useful. I do have limits to what I think they should collect in bulk (ex: video or audio), but I did not see allegations that they do that so far, and I think sometimes it's healthy anyhow to behave "as if they do it", just in case.
  - achenet 1y ago
    I'm a dev (and also a client) at OVH, just wanted to thank you for using our product <3 <3 <3

o11c 1y ago

> we are not able to opt out of diffusion of progress. People move between companies and between countries and take their ideas and talents with them. Never forget that Industry itself came to America by way of direct theft. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Slater https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Slater ===== If you care about your users, you should always prefer some copyleft license. Prefer permissive licenses only if you want to subsidize big business. Hopefully you have a plan for when they decide to take it closed-source and outcompete you. You probably don't, though, since that's not mentioned in the aggressive "use permissive licenses" marketing campaign they've been running for the last decade or two. Permissive licenses can fit in a niche for software that has already been implemented many times. But the downsides remain, and why aren't you just using the existing code directly? The main occasion on which I will consider it is when everybody else is doing it wrong (and content to do so), and I as a user keep getting annoyed at hitting those limitations. The second-worst reason to use permissive licensing is arguably "I don't understand how to dynamic linking".

jjcob 1y ago
Permissive licenses enable small or individual developers (like myself) to sell software based on them. With copyleft licenses, developers always have to sell stuff adjacent to the software (support, individual development, software-as-a-service). With permissive licenses, developers can just sell a license to the software itself. Much easier, much more direct. It's the reason why there is much more tooling around permissive licensed projects vs. projects with a GPL style license. Permissive licenses are win-win: Proprietory developers win because they get to sell licenses, users win because they have more tools they can use.
- o11c 1y ago
  That does not follow. You might as well make it "source available" and sell proprietary licenses.
  - jjcob 1y ago
    I think you misunderstood. My software is not permissive. My software is closed source, but based on a big open source project with a permissive license. It's a tool that helps users of the big open source solution. I can sell licenses to my tool because it is closed source. If the big open source project was licensed under a copyleft license, I would have to make my tool open source as well. Then I would have a hard time selling licenses. I couldn't have spent the last 10 years building a tool for the open source software, and users of the open source software would have had fewer tools available.

Animats 1y ago

This is the Ethereum guy. Was something forked and made proprietary that he needs to be open source?

kwar13 1y ago
This comment makes no sense. Can you give a single precedent for him to have behaved that way?

jandrewrogers 1y ago

I just want anyone to be able to use my code. It isn’t ideological for me, I don’t care what people do with it. No one is harmed by a permissive license and I explicitly want to minimize the obligations of anyone using my code. I’d probably make most of it public domain if it wasn’t for the fact that some jurisdictions don’t recognize that concept. I’ve written thousands of lines of copyleft code. I don’t see a practical benefit if you don’t want to obligate users of that code.

cess11 1y ago
"I just want anyone to be able to use my code." Some would argue that if you want that, then you need to license it in a way that protects anyone's freedoms and disallows other ones from stepping on them.
- rerdavies 1y ago
  Why would anyone serious argue that?
- D13Fd 1y ago
  This is ridiculous. He said he just wants anyone to be able to use his code. Licensing it copyleft will just restrict the user base.
  - cess11 1y ago
    No, it won't. It restricts how you modify and distribute, which isn't a user thing to do, it's more of a developer thing. And whether it works or not is mostly untested in the legal sense but the idea with copyleft licensing is that big money shouldn't be able to ratfuck a free software embrace/extinguish-style, or some other way. I.e. it is supposed to protect the rights of the users to enjoy free software.
indeyets 1y ago
It’s usually a question of “who are your users?” As long as you consider developers of derived software to be your users — permissive makes most sense. But if you consider end-users of software it’s definitely copyleft.

kwar13 1y ago

I might not always agree with Vitalik but he's always a joy to read.

qalmakka 1y ago

My favourite licence has always been the MPLv2. It's basically the best of both worlds, it's copyleft for your code while keeping the ability to statically link (crucial for Rust, Go and other languages that do that by default).

Sander_Marechal 1y ago
So, LGPL?
- qalmakka 1y ago
  Well, no, as someone else already stated forcing people to ship object files is a PITA and it's really not feasible with languages that do codegen, templates, ... because you inevitably end up injecting copylefted code inside of your files. I like copyleft as a way to protect my code from freeloaders, but I don't think that imposing the same view on other people is fair TBH. I want people to be able to use my code without being forced to "convert" to my creed first
  - jenadine 1y ago
    You can obfuscate your code.
    - qalmakka 1y ago
      what for? I'd rather just use the MPL2 instead
      - jenadine 1y ago
        So you can use someone elses rust (or other languages with templates, that really need to be re-compiled) LGPL library, without publishing your proprietary code.
wolvesechoes 1y ago
You can link LGPL statically as well, though it puts more obligations (shipping object files) than MPL. I am always amazed how many myths were created around FOSS licensing.

bgwalter 1y ago

Copyleft of course is of limited use since the FSF slept through the desktop to Internet service transition and now sleeps through the "AI" transition. GPLv4 should be AGPL+no-AI if it is supposed to have any effect.

zorked 1y ago
It is copyright as a whole that is sleeping through the "AI" transition/robbery.
- netbsdusers 1y ago
  Usually when I hear "robbery" it brings to mind someone stealing your phone or wallet at knife-point. Certainly not training some model on some code that involves neither violence nor depriving anyone of anything. The concept of copyright is the fiction that information - something that can be freely modified, copied, or transmitted - is of the commodity-form, that information should be treated as if it were a single real object that were inherently scarce. It is a fiction that exists to serve of some of the most hateful, mafia-like firms - your Disneys, UMGs, Getty Images, and the like. So if the AI interests are powerful enough to deal that whole rotten system a serious blow, then I'm all for them.
  - xigoi 1y ago
    Server bandwidth is a commodity. If a site gets DDOSed by LLM training, then actual humans won’t be able to access the information.
tobias3 1y ago
Since AI use is based on "fair-use" how can you add a no-AI clause? Only protection I see is to not publish the code.
- Diti 1y ago
  “Fair use” is a notion related to copyright. The authors in Europe who won in cases of free software licensing violations did it on the grounds of breach of contract law.

INGELRII 1y ago

>Third, Glen Weyl-style economic arguments have convinced me that, in the presence of superlinear returns to scale, the optimal policy is actually NOT Rothbard/Mises-style strict property rights. Rather, the optimal policy does involve some nonzero amount of more actively pushing projects to be more open than they otherwise would be. (read the rest of his reasoning for this philosophical shift).

enriquto 1y ago

The very name "permissive" licenses is problematic, because it steers the discussion towards the point of view of software middlemen, not of users. From the point of view of a user, a copylefted software allows the user to do more things: the license grants them permission to see and change the source code of the software, no matter how they got it. With so-called permissive software, the user may be stripped of this permission by third parties.

immibis 1y ago
Another name for "permissive license" is "cuck license". Hopefully I don't have to explain the analogy.

sellmesoap 1y ago

I've taken Rob Landrey to heart on this subject. His argument for use of permissive licences to avoid the power struggle that crops up around bigger copyleft projects.

jmclnx 1y ago

I think it depends on what you do/did. Things I wrote is using the ISC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISC_license https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISC_license But anyone and their brother can develop those old utilities I created decades ago and enhanced over the years. But if you create something very complex and provides a real benefit, then I can agree with this point. You may be better off to using the copyleft. In anycase, you need to really need to think about the License you choose, not just use one because it is trendy now.