13 ms·

In the long run, GPL code becomes irrelevant (2015)

44 points by Expurple 1y ago

NewsaHackO 1y ago
>But think of the multi-trillion dollar companies!! If companies want to use manpower to reimplement GPL code, then fine. It’s always funny how accommodating people are for these companies.
- Expurple 1y ago
  The point of the article is that: 1. In most areas, they eventually will! 2. If there is a permissively-licensed project in that area, at least there's a decent chance that the "reimplementation" will be a fork of that project. At that fork has a decent chance of staying open or even being merged back into the upstream. That benefits the community more than a proprietary from-scratch rewrite (which would follow from a GPL-only open-source scene)
  - lc9er 1y ago
    So if we're nice to the billionaires, they may return that kindness with table scraps - if we're lucky? Sounds like the tech version of trickle-down economics.
    - rglullis 1y ago
      Yeah, I don't get that argument. "Apple is funding LLVM, therefore it is getting better than GCC!". They are only funding it because it advances their goals. The moment they get what they want they will drop it or look for ways to keep the advantage all to themselves.
      - Expurple 1y ago
        The same could be said about non-corporate contributions. "People only contribute as long as they have a personal itch to scratch. The moment they get what they want, you're on your own again". That's always been the deal. Open source is not a guarantee of free support forever! It's a guarantee that you can always fork and keep using the project (or even developing it further)
        lanstin 1y ago
        It’s just the academic method of sharing your work so the collective knowledge and state of the art increases monotonically. People seem to like to productive it, but even just publishing your source code so I or my llm can read it and modify it is useful. Very useful.
        rglullis 1y ago
        I'm less concerned about "free support" and more about "commons-oriented R&D". There are some projects/people that I donate a small monthly amount. I don't do it because I'm expecting a specific feature to be developed, but simply because I think it's important to have support developers and let them work on something without being concerned about how to make a living out of their work.
        Expurple 1y ago
        Indeed, that's a very important thing to foster! In fact, I published a post about this just two days ago: https://home.expurple.me/posts/non-profit-foss-solves-the-conflict-of-interest/ https://home.expurple.me/posts/non-profit-foss-solves-the-co...
      - School-Cotton 1y ago
        Everyone only does anything if it advances their goals. Luckily Apple's goals w.r.t. LLVM are the same as everyone else's: have a high-quality compiler backend.
        rglullis 1y ago
        Beware of sweeping generalizations. Most people only do things when it advances it goals, but there certainly are people that do things simply because they think is the right thing to do.
        Expurple 1y ago
        "Doing the right thing" (whatever that means for a person specifically) can be considered a goal too. Goals don't have to be selfish.
        rglullis 1y ago
        A goal implies a clear objective. "Doing the right thing" is a guiding principle.
        Expurple 1y ago
        "Following my inner guiding principles without compromising" seems clear enough. I don't think that you have to fully verbalize and rationalize your principles in order to commit to a clear goal of following them. You clearly feel when you do the wrong thing.
        rglullis 1y ago
        > Following my inner guiding principles without compromising" seems clear enough. To me, it's not. What are the outcomes that we are talking about here? > You clearly feel when you do the wrong thing. Do you think that the developers of, e.g, KHTML felt they were doing the wrong thing when they started working on a browser engine for Konqueror under LGPL? Would they continue working on it had they known that Apple would take their work to build what is arguably the most freedom-restricting web browser out there?
    - Expurple 1y ago
      Yes, but what's the better alternative? The article makes the point that you're not even getting table scraps back into your GPL project. In most cases, the companies prefer a proprietary rewrite. Now you're just stuck with a less-developed project, while the world around you uses more-developed proprietary alternatives and pushes you to do the same. But I guess, that somehow makes you feel better because you don't let the corporations "feed off your work" and instead just waste everyone's time on infinite rewrites?
  - elsjaako 1y ago
    I don't see why a company that refuses to add to a GPL project has a "decent change" of releasing their code under a more permissive license. If you're going to talk about theoretical behavior from big companies, you can make stories any way you want. Let's say a big company selling computers wants to include a PCB editing software by default. If KiCAD was Apache licensed they may be tempted to make a special version for their customers, as a unique selling point. But it's GPL, so they have to choose between rewriting completely (a huge process), or just publishing the changes and being happy to include a good program. Or a company makes modifications to a GPL program for internal use, and decides they want to share it with partners/customers later. I have no reason to think these stories are more or less likely than the story of a company completely rejecting the GPL option but still deciding to upstream their changes.
    - m4rtink 1y ago
      Didn't Sony gobble up a whole bunch of stuff from FReeBSD for the last few Playstation release without hardly contributing anything back at all ? IIRC the might have sent some patches to improve SMP or sponsored a conference. Same with Microsoft and the Windows TCP stack lifted from BSD as well. Compare with GPL licensed projects, like the Linux Kernel & its license making many projects possible, like the OpenWRT project for example.
      - phkahler 1y ago
        Yeah I see a lot of corporate backing of Linux (GPL) and a bit of proprietarization of non GPL OSS. Meanwhile my employer also uses git and gcc, which are both GPL. Companies that use software like it Free. Companies that develop software like it permissive. There are more users than developers, especially for large more important programs.
    - School-Cotton 1y ago
      > I don't see why a company that refuses to add to a GPL project has a "decent change" of releasing their code under a more permissive license. It's simple in my experience. Many big companies have some set "A" of code that they want to keep private, and some set "B" that they don't care about keeping private. Lawyers are worried that at some point someone will accidentally include GPL code in something from "A" and force it to be made public. So they ban GPL entirely. They could in theory just ban GPL code from "A" and allow it in "B", but they can't trust that among thousands of employees none will make a mistake, so they just ban the GPL entirely.
- throw_m239339 1y ago
  Some people always forget that GPL is about the end user's rights, not developer's rights. If a fortune 500 re-implements some GPL library to make proprietary, then by all means. It changes nothing for the GPL code, it's still GPL and its license should guaranty user's rights.
  - Expurple 1y ago
    But a proprietary fork doesn't change anything for permissively-licenced projects either! The open original is still available, you can still use it and fork it. If it's a popular project, a community-maintained fork will always happen. As a user, permissive licences give me enough freedom.
    - ZoomZoomZoom 1y ago
      > But a proprietary fork doesn't change anything for permissively-licenced projects either! It just mostly makes them irrelevant by EEE. A permissive license is simply asking for it.
      - Expurple 1y ago
        This is true in the short-term. One of the points of the article is that, long-term, proprietary forks are prone to enshittification and/or abandonment, while the open fork just keeps chugging along, maturing, and changing maintainers
  - codeguro 1y ago
    Some people also forget that end users are also developers themselves. GPL helps everyone in this way.
bombcar 1y ago
It may be true, but the GPL is uniquely positioned to create a floor that ratchets upwards, whereas the other licenses are susceptible to being consumed and extended.
- conartist6 1y ago
  I thought the author made the case that because of complexity economics the ratchet still works either way, and in fact that in 2025 GPL is actually a less-strong ratchet compared to Apache and MIT. If GPL was the stronger Ratchet you wouldn't ever expect to see an existential risk to a GPL project posed by an Apache one right?
- Expurple 1y ago
  True, but the article makes a point that it's very hard and unlikely to maintain technological superiority over a coproration that's determined enough. A corporation simply has much more resources. See also: https://hypercritical.co/2013/04/12/code-hard-or-go-home https://hypercritical.co/2013/04/12/code-hard-or-go-home
  - ranger_danger 1y ago
    > maintain technological superiority Is this ever an actual goal for most GPL projects? Usually the ones I talk to are not even interested in gaining more users.
    - Expurple 1y ago
      From a developer/business point of view, there's no reason to use a more restrictive GPL dependency if it's not clearly "superior" to a permissively-licensed one. The article makes a case that this will eventually push GPL out of the mainstream. No one will use GPL because they "have to" (which is the whole premise of copyleft!). It will only be used by enthusiasts
      - singpolyma3 1y ago
        If the business wants to develop non open source software, then having them not use the GPLd project and thus profit off the free labour of others is a wonderful outcome.
mouse_ 1y ago
> The flaw is that in the long run, it keeps getting easier to write software. And people love reinventing the wheel. See: Bram's Law https://files.catbox.moe/qi5ha9.png https://files.catbox.moe/qi5ha9.png
- djmips 1y ago
  The most annoying part about reinventing the wheel might be renaming the wheel.
conartist6 1y ago
Great writeup! I couldn't agree more. I've been thinking about this a lot recently, because GPL was meant to ensure that vendors couldn't take OSS, turn it into closed source, and use it to extinguish the OSS. As JS-writing eng I live in an MIT-native offshoot of the OSS world and for us the ratchet that ensures we always get more and more free software is basically the fact that when your product is a script run in a scripting engine you can't ever truly hide anything. Since we have an alternate ratchet that has proven that it works to increase the amount and quality of OSS (over a 20-year time period), the GPL does seem as you say: a relic of times when we it seemed like software might only be a hobby. I'm writing a VCS kernel, basically, and its cost me the last 5 years of my life. My code is MIT. Do I have to think about the dangers of embrace-extend-extinguish? Yeah, but having the best product is a very strong defense, and building the widest coalition of supporters you can is how you get there.
- conartist6 1y ago
  To be more clear: my strategy is to eliminate the room that could be used to undercut me with more virulent technological or techno-social solutions. GPL would not be eliminating the room to undercut me with a slightly more viral clone of my product, but rather creating more room to undercut me. This is a real problem for a piece of software the value of which is in simplicity not complexity!
konstantinua00 1y ago
using BSD/MIT licences is like betting against black swan event sure, "contributing is cheaper than maintaining a fork" is true most of the time - but the moment new Microsoft comes in with "embrace, extend, extinguish" (or just copy and change), you're doomed and heck, we had that exact thing happen last autumn, iirc - making big news on this website
- elsjaako 1y ago
  Can you clarify what happened last autumn? I'm not sure I recall.
  - Qem 1y ago
    Probably this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43587420 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43587420
    - phkahler 1y ago
      That would be one example. What about Redis pulling a license change, and the whole WordPress battle for control? If it ain't GPL and it IS popular, I think those kinds of things are more likely to happen than not.
      - Qem 1y ago
        Stallman is a real visionary warning us about those risks since de 80s.
        Expurple 1y ago
        That's true. But at the same time, the risk is kinda overblown. You can still use the last open version of Redis. There's even an open, community-maintained fork that you don't have to maintain yourself. Even GPL can't force a company to maintain and keep developing an open version when the company doesn't want to. Even if Redis was GPL (no CLA), they could still abandon it and write a compatible clone from scratch. AI makes it even easier to do
benlivengood 1y ago
In the very long run I'd hope we get sane intellectual property law: Software and logic circuitry is mathematics and should be unpatentable and trade secret is about the only protection for software/firmware/hardware; copyright terms shortened to the actual window of profitability (5-10 years) and only applying to "business logic". Nothing else makes much sense in the modern world; standards and interoperability benefit everyone to such an extent and change happens so rapidly that the majority of existing IP protection duration only harms historians.
- Expurple 1y ago
  Yeah, copyleft has always been just a hack to cope with the current legal framework
- eddythompson80 1y ago
  > and only applying to "business logic" One person's business is another's platform.
  - benlivengood 1y ago
    That's why I used the scare quotes; I don't have a hard and fast rule here for what's legitimate market-making software value and what's just rent-seeking. I think that much of the core features in Desktop Photoshop-style products or video games probably requires legitimate short copyright, for example. I don't think copyrighting a plugin interface or header files or hardware drivers makes any sense, unless there's significant creative work like e.g. the portions of GPU drivers that trade off appearance and speed in novel ways.
  - bitwize 1y ago
    The AS/400 (now IBM i) platform has a neat feature: all application software is compiled into a sort of bytecode called TIMI, for Technology Independent Machine Interface. The use of TIMI is completely transparent to developers and is implemented at an OS level; you as a programmer do not get access to the underlying instruction set. When a program is run, if the OS does not detect a native-code "shadow" binary for the program, it will AOT-compile it from the program's TIMI code before running it. Among other things, this allowed IBM to convert their systems from AS/400 CISC to 64-bit POWER-architecture in one swift yank of the tablecloth, with all application software running 100% backward-compatibly on the new architecture. But that's not the reason why TIMI was implemented. TIMI was implemented to fulfill an antitrust consent decree, under which IBM agreed to unbundle IBM hardware from software. But they still wanted to ship an OS with each system! So they declared that the OS was "firmware" and "microcode", hence part of the hardware, despite being loaded and booted from disk like any other OS. Anything considered "software" for the platform was written in TIMI. So here we indeed have a bright-line distinction between OS and application code; between platform and business logic. Such a sharp definition is pretty rare in the industry.
dafelst 1y ago
To me the larger question is whether or not GPLv2 achieves the goal of forcing big companies to contribute back to a project better than a more permissable license does. As stated in the article, Linux is the notable success story, but anecdotally it seems that the majority of projects with large company contributions are licensed with BSD/Apache/MIT but with contributor agreement attached. I wonder if anyone has compiled any data on whether GPLv2 does actually encourage contributions more than the more permissive alternatives. GPLv3 isn't even worth mentioning in this context, great concept, abject failure to thrive IMO.
SAI_Peregrinus 1y ago
Ignores the MPL as usual. IMO the MPL is better than BSD/MIT/Apache since it prevents your code getting closed, and better than GPL by not forcing others to open their code.
- Expurple 1y ago
  Indeed, MPL/LGPL are often a better tradeoff than GPL. But, in theory and according to the article, they should experience same effect. Just slower. When a (law-abiding) company finally has a strong reason to make some modification and keep it private, a proprietary replacement is coming. (Sometimes, as a "thin" fork of a permissive project, which then gets an engagement boost, reinforcing the point of the article)
  - Expurple 1y ago
    Ok, I have thought more about the topic. I was too concerned with "theory" in the above comment. Disregard it. Web engines are a huge practical example in favor of MPL/LGPL. They suggest that MPL/LGPL may indeed have the best survival characteristics. Companies love proprietary browsers. If there were a good-enough permissive web engine, a proprietary fork would happen and "win", even if as "a set of patches" on top of a permissive base maintained by the community for free. Luckily, the creators of FOSS web engines seem to have understood that and chose MPL/LGPL. This goes against the article. Companies love proprietary browsers. They will never contribute to a GPL web engine. That's why we don't have any good GPL web engines. This supports the article. Companies love proprietary browsers. Microsoft was one of the first movers on the web. They had the chance to create a competitive proprietary web engine from scratch. It was popular for a few decades. But eventually Microsoft gave up and adopted Chromium instead. Presumably, to reduce maintenance costs. It doesn't seem like their proprietary engine gave them any competitive advantages that would be worth the cost. This supports the article. So, the article is correct regarding GPL and proprietary, even (indirectly) predicting the continued absence of GPL web engines and the death of proprietary web engines. In 2015, when the article was written, IE was still bigger than Firefox and Safari on the desktop: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers But the article completely misses the huge success of MPL and LGPL. You are 100% correct.
yalok 1y ago
Just anecdotally, but this aligns with my observations on the trend/growth of successful useful open source projects that go with permissive BSD-like license. ~20 years ago there were way less of those than now. And as a SW developer doing client side/apps as well, using GPL/LGPL is a total pain and basically cost prohibitive, unless I work on my personal small project where I don’t care about having to/risking to open source the rest of the code and getting sued/cloned… Real life example from ~2010 - we ended up including an LGPL library in our mobile app code, and published/upstreamed all the modifications we did to that code (mostly ARM optimizations). Once the app became popular, our competitors came to us demanding the source code of our app - just because iOS didn’t support dynamic libraries (so we had to statically link it), and giving them the object code to relink it wasn’t enough for them (which would satisfy the spirit of LGPL), because they really wanted to see how we hacked around iOS camera input APIs…
- tines 1y ago
  > giving them the object code to relink it wasn’t enough for them (which would satisfy the spirit of LGPL) So they can take a hike?
- joshuaissac 1y ago
  > giving them the object code to relink it wasn’t enough for them (which would satisfy the spirit of LGPL) Doesn't that also satisfy the letter of the LGPL v2? > Accompany the work with the complete corresponding machine-readable source code for the Library [...] and, if the work is an executable linked with the Library, with the complete machine-readable "work that uses the Library", as object code and/or source code, so that the user can modify the Library and then relink to produce a modified executable containing the modified Library
  - mananaysiempre 1y ago
    Deliberately so, moreover, because distributing object files for relinking used to be common[1]. [1] https://lock.cmpxchg8b.com/linux123.html https://lock.cmpxchg8b.com/linux123.html
- deleted 1y ago
deleted 1y ago
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uludag 1y ago
> With enough time, any sufficiently large company can implement their own version of any software that anyone else has written. They usually won't write their own version if a high quality opensource version exists with a permissible license. Is this a true assertion? If you define sufficiently large company to be Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc. then sure, of course they can. That's an extremely high bar though and I would bet that even then, these companies would have to pick and choose their battles.
- Expurple 1y ago
  Rewriting "any software" is an extremely high bar to begin with. I think, we can agree that smaller utilities and libraries can be rewritten by anyone. Another comment [1] even references the "Bram's Law". It basically says that any piece of software that's easy to rewrite will be rewritten countless times (and most rewrites are going to be bad) [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44606219 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44606219
jcranmer 1y ago
One of the interesting things about the experience of LLVM and Clang isn't that it's killing off gcc--a decade after this was written, gcc is still the compiler of choice for most Linux distrubtions--but that it's killing off EDG, the C++ frontend that all proprietary C++ compilers used to use. Killing off proprietary software because the open source stuff is so much better is the vision of Stallman, and it's telling that a permissive license has been much more effective than a copyleft license in doing so.
- andrepd 1y ago
  That's completely orthogonal to the choice of license, but rather to the architecture of both projects.
larsiusprime 1y ago
I can think of at least a few counterexamples. The logic behind the hypothesis is decent and tells a plausible story, but I'd like to see a more robust analysis; has anyone done one since the article was first posted 10 years ago? Noteable counterxamples (excluding e.g. Linux): - Git (GPLv2) - Blender (GPLv2 & 3, from the looks of it) - Krita (GPLv3) - MySQL (GPLv2) -- still seems very popular in 2025 - QGIS (GPLv2)
- mananaysiempre 1y ago
  Notably, libgit2[1] is GPLv2 with a full linking exception, while e.g. go-git[2] is Apache2. [1] https://github.com/libgit2/libgit2 https://github.com/libgit2/libgit2 [2] https://github.com/go-git/go-git https://github.com/go-git/go-git
- throw_m239339 1y ago
  Blender used to be proprietary,the community had to raise money to buy the source code to make it free software. What a crazy success story for opensource.
- boje 1y ago
  Don't forget Qt (though I think that's more a corporation wanting to create an incentive to make commercial users pay for a license)
- dzaima 1y ago
  Git - jj[1] uses gitoxide for its git interop/backend (git being the backend of jj you're expected to use), both Apache/MIT; it functioned so cleanly I assumed it was invoking git directly, but apparently it's all custom! For new things I'd guess PostgreSQL vs MySQL is probably on the same order as llvm vs gcc; probably with PostgreSQL being better off than llvm even. [1]: https://github.com/jj-vcs/jj/ https://github.com/jj-vcs/jj/ (started by a Googler as a hobby project, now their full-time job at Google, so kinda fits into the "big orgs will replace things with permissive-licensed versions" narrative)
  - steveklabnik 1y ago
Guid_NewGuid 1y ago
I think people who prefer GPL and I hope for the same outcomes but we have a different (irreconcilable?) philosophical approach to getting there. In my view code (and all knowledge) wants to be free and a commons of knowledge enriches the whole world. I am opposed to most forms of copyright, patents and intellectual 'property'. Aside: My compromise position to this maximalist view is that I'd accept a 5 year copyright term with an exponentially increasing renewal fee. For me MIT/BSD/Apache is a way to provide code with minimal encumbrances under the current dominant legal system. GPL is an attempt to free knowledge that relies on the legal system and the threat of men with guns coming to force you to comply. However noble the intentions at the end of the day it is reliant on state force and reduces freedom, it is very good at providing fees for lawyers. Corporations can't embrace-extend-extinguish open source. This is because the source is always available. Sure they can use that knowledge to build a new, more popular, thing, but the existing source never goes away. It represents an un-enclosable commons.
- bji9jhff 1y ago
  > Corporations can't embrace-extend-extinguish open source. This is because the source is always available. Sure they can use that knowledge to build a new, more popular, thing, but the existing source never goes away. It represents an un-enclosable commons. Some counter-examples: * git is now mostly github * khtml is now mostly chrome * linux is now more android and chromeos than linux. Anyhow, the plain kernel is deeply corporate. You can still fork those project. But it would be mostly meaningless to do so.
  - Guid_NewGuid 1y ago
    But this doesn't really contradict the idea, in my view. Our existing property framework is built around physical goods that experience scarcity. The cost of code duplication is zero and it is (barring catastrophe) indestructible. Today you can browse the git codebase in the same way as 2 decades prior or hence. All the knowledge in those codebases is preserved for all time, freely available to anyone. They have been built upon in ways that don't necessarily give back but that wasn't a destructive event. Aside: Though if I remember correctly git and Linux are GPL so they create categories of thought-crime under copyleft if a judge holds your code to be too influenced by them. How influenced is too much? You better have enough money for lawyers to find out.
phkahler 1y ago
All large FLOSS programs are GPL licensed. Even with all the Rustaceans rewriting in Rust while abandoning the GPL, their flagship - Servo - is GPL licensed. There is an aversion to CLAs among those donating their time, and with that an aversion to permissive licenses. Im sure both will be around for a long time, but in the very long term GPL wins.
- deleted 1y ago
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- nicoburns 1y ago
  Servo is MPL not GPL licensed. And even even that's a bit of a problem for the Servo project, as it makes it hard to move code between Servo crates and other Rust ecosystem crates (which are typically MIT/Apache2.0), which means that Servo is it's own "island" somewhat disconnected from the rest of the Rust ecosystem. (there's nothing inherently wrong with the MPL, but it being a different and incompatible license to the rest of the ecosystem does cause problems)
- Expurple 1y ago
  Most other "flagships" of the Rust ecosystem (including rustc itself and ripgrep) are permissively-licensed, and still haven't been "hijacked" by a proprietary fork. Or by a copyleft fork, for that matter. Permissive licenses simply have better survival characteristics in the long run
- School-Cotton 1y ago
  Factually not true. Clang/LLVM: permissive Rustc: permissive Firefox: MPL Chromium: permissive Postgres: permissive LibreOffice: MPL CPython: permissive and so on...
ltbarcly3 1y ago
The fact that very large corporations are willing to spend tens and hundreds of millions of dollars to replicate software is exactly why the GPL is not irrelevant. What makes the GPL irrelevant is AI. AI in it's current incarnation is basically a magic copyright remover. It can memorize all the patterns, tricks, algorithms, and architecture of open source software and implement it again. In a few years you won't need git because you will just have an AI stamp out a git compatible tool if you need one. So if you care about Freedom, we need to move the battle from making sure you can get a copy of the source code to git, to making sure you can get a copy of the weights of the AI you are using to create software on demand.
- Expurple 1y ago
  > The fact that very large corporations are willing to spend tens and hundreds of millions of dollars to replicate software is exactly why the GPL is not irrelevant. No, it's the opposite. The premise of copyleft is forcing the dependents to contribute back to the community. If the corporations are writing proprietary replacements instead of contributing, copyleft has failed to deliver on its premise. In practice, permissively-licensed projects get more contributions back and benefit the community more. Simple as that.
  - ltbarcly3 1y ago
    We have no data on how much has not been contributed back due to corporations forking code or just copy pasting it into other projects. For all you know permissive licenses have dramatically reduced contributions back. We only know when they contribute, we have no data on when they don't. Stories like LLVM are good evidence for what you are saying, but the linux kernel is good evidence against it. Dozens of companies are forced to work together for the common good at a scale and level of resources that is unprecedented. Without the GPL this simply wouldn't (actually from an economic / game theory standpoint it couldn't) happen.
    - Expurple 1y ago
      It's true that we don't have any definitive data on this. But I buy the article's argument that upstreaming a patch once is simply cheaper than maintaining your own proprietary fork forever. It externalizes the efforts of maintaining it in the future. This means that public, community-maintained, permissively-licenced projects are a good deal for companies, and should win from the economic / game theory POV
munificent 1y ago
This article is a decade old. I wonder if the author still agrees with it given how the software and corporate landscape has changed over the past ten years. While I have always used maximally permissive licenses on my own open source software, I've been rethinking that stance in the past couple of years. I'm not sure where I stand now, but I don't fully agree with this post. In particular, perhaps my number one fear about the world at large is that the untethered effects of economies of scale are clearly leading to a net transfer of power into the hands of fewer and fewer corporate leaders. Permissive licenses are arguably agnostic to that effect: anyone can use the software, corporation or not. But given that large corporations already have significant economies of scale, the emergent effect is that a corporation can extract more value out of a piece of open source software than you or I can. If your goal is to discourage a handful of oligarchs eating the world, a permissive license may be opposed to that. It's sort of like breeding fish and dropping them in a lake. Sure, anyone can then grab their rod and reel and catch a few, so you aren't privileging the commercial fisheries industry by doing so. But once the trawler shows up, they're going to harvest a hell of a lot more fish than the dude with a bamboo rod. You may be thinking this analogy doesn't work because software isn't like fish. Copying a piece of software doesn't remove a fish from the lake for others to catch. But think about this at one level of abstraction higher. Copying software accomplishes nothing. It's just bits sitting on a disk. It's software being used by humans that matters. When a corporation takes a piece of open source software and puts it in front of users, time a user spends using that corporation's code is time not spent doing anything else. While software itself isn't a consumptive good, human attention is. Notice how all of the biggest, fastest growing corporations understand this. Attention is the ultimate economic commodity. Any company who can mine it effectively wins and any company that fails loses. This is why in the past decade we've seen seemingly weird business moves like Apple producing movies, NVIDIA doing game streaming, Amazon shipping games, Walmart selling video streaming, etc. We are shambling towards a post-material world where the most valuable good, the thing that produces the most value, is human attention. And, unfortunately, a few people figured this out sooner than the rest of us and a gobbling up all of that mental real estate and leaving nothing for anyone else.
maxhille 1y ago
BSD & Co are open source for developers GPL & Co are open source for users
- Expurple 1y ago
  The point of the article is that BSD & Co have better survival characteristics, eventually attracting more developers, producing higher-quality software, and making the users switch to that. In the long run, even from the user's perspective, GPL & Co is only for enthusiasts who don't prioritise the actual quality of the software that they use. As a user, I value my freedom, but BSD & Co gives me enough freedom. The article assumes that it's the best tradeoff for most users, and I agree with that
singpolyma3 1y ago
This whole argument hinges on the statement that the GPL "does nothing for users" but is "annoying for developers". I dispute both of these claims. GPL is all about doing something for users. It is users who are able to request source code. My entire network setup is based on the fact that I can customize my router which I can only do because users were able to request the source for the router in order to customize it. When it comes to "annoying for developers" we need to be clear. The GPL is annoying for developers of software that is not open source. It annoys them because it says they must either take the open source deal or else rewrite it themselves. Apple has famously used a lot of time and money to rewrite GPLd thengs. This is the goal. OTOH open source developers need not be annoyed by any GPL dependency since they can always use it without any trouble to themselves.
- joe_the_user 1y ago
  This, Moreover, a company can release a GPL'd version of their software and also offer a commercial license for their software (see Qt etc). So someone who's charging for their software can use it if they themselves pay. Some commercial vendors might annoyed by even this. But it would seem they "doth protest too much".
- aleph_minus_one 1y ago
  > The GPL is annoying for developers of software that is not open source. It is also annoying for developers of open-source software that is not GPL-licensed.
  - singpolyma3 1y ago
    It doesn't need to be, since they can still use it and keep their license the same etc.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
- Expurple 1y ago
  Compared to permissive licences (from the user's POV), GPL is merery a guarantee that a proprietary fork won't left you behind in the dust overnight. That's a rather strong guarantee that most people (including myself) don't need. I'm fine with a "plain" guarantee to fork the last free version. In exchange, I usually get better, well-supported software with more corporate contributions. > Apple has famously used a lot of time and money to rewrite GPLd thengs. This is the goal. As an aside, that's a terrible goal. Rewriting the same projects over and over is a waste of human potential. We could be solving unsolved problems and actually making the world better, instead of pursuing this weird and misguided notion of "fairness"
prima-facie 1y ago
This article is already largely irrelevant. The GPL (and the FSF), whether you like it or not, always has been a political movement. The aim of the movement is to expand the pool of free/libre software and to disallow commercial entities from gaining an unfair advantage without contributing back. With the GPLv2 they already have, as it permits them to run the software in the cloud, with their proprietary additions, without contributing back. AGPLv3 closes that loophole that's why it's even less popular. You can license your software as you wish, but in the long run the GPL has ensured that contributions reach back upstream for the common good, rather than for profit. The GPL gives protections for the people/end consumers, much like labour laws do in your own country. The GPL ensures that your contributions are respected, available to all, and not abused for profit (not always true, but tribunals have enforced the license terms before). The GPL has the effect of doing this globally while allowing contributions back from a global audience. It's genius and the companies absolutely hate it.
- Expurple 1y ago
  The article makes the point that, in practice, permissively-licenced projects see more contributions back. Copyleft projects are being rewritten as proprietary instead (with a few exceptions like Linux, which are too big to fail). The end result may be even worse for the user, if the proprietary alternative ends up being the most developed one, grows an ecosystem and a network effect, and eventually everyone is forced to use that. There's plenty of examples. It's not about "fairness". It's about reality and survival characteristics. As a user, I care about my freedom too. But permissively-licenced projects give me enough freedom to choose them over copyleft projects that are even slightly worse in quality
  - rpdillon 1y ago
    You've been very diligent in replying to the detractors in this thread, but I have yet to see any compelling examples. You say that there are plenty of examples of copyleft projects being overtaken by proprietary versions that then create network effects that end up being worse for the end user because the original project was copyleft. You further assert that if the original project had been permissively licensed, this wouldn't have happened. I'm unaware of this ever happening. Can you list a few of the examples you had in mind?
phendrenad2 1y ago
I think this is largely an illusion. Most open-source software isn't that successful, so it might seem like the choice of license didn't really matter for their success. But you'll notice that all of the big, successful open-source projects are either GPL, or can't be GPL because of the GPLs murky legality around linking (the article mostly hinges on such a case - LLVM). The author talks about GPL projects feeding back on themselves to create technological dominance. But it's much more than that. GPL encourages organizational dominance, too. It starts with watch dogs looking out for GPL violations. And it ends with a big nonprofit foundation providing training and paying developer's salaries. Why did Linux blast past BSD? The popular story is that some company was trying to claim ownership over BSD. But the same thing happened to Linux a decade or so later with SCO. I think the license created a no-win situation for anyone who wanted to create their own Unix-based OS. If it wasn't Linux-compatible, it wasn't valuable. And nobody could keep up with Linux's rapid pace of development. So everyone gave up and started contributing to Linux, causing the pace of development to increase even more. Now, Linux has what, a million commits per year? Something insane like that. Try achieving that with a BSD license.
- mdasen 1y ago
  I think that the SCO threat to Linux also came at a time when Linux was pretty immune from such a threat. If it's the early-90s and there's two options in their infancy and one had AT&T (one of the 5 largest companies) threatening it, you'll go with the other. In 1993, you're not using BSD or Linux and making a choice between them. The legal threat weighs heavy there. When SCO sued IBM, people were already using Linux including one of the biggest and most trusted names in computing (at the time): IBM. Migrating away from something is a hard choice. Likewise, Linux had IBM's army of lawyers defending it (yes, BSD was defended by UC Berkeley, but the school could have easily folded over a project that wasn't part of the school's core mission). SCO also wasn't much of a threat - they were a dying company trying to win a case against the biggest names in the industry. It's a lot easier to spread FUD against something no one is currently using that has a viable alternative. In 1993, Linux and BSD may have been equal, but AT&T's legal threat carried weight. People choosing one or the other weren't already using one. By 2003, 25% of the internet was powered by Linux. People were already using it and weren't going to be scared away by the claims of a dying corporation while powerful companies were defending Linux. You say yourself that if something wasn't Linux compatible, it wasn't valuable and so everyone had to be chasing and reimplementing Linux compatibility. But if BSD had been established for a decade and Linux was chasing BSD compatibility in 2003 and then SCO sued BSD, BSD would still have maintained dominance. When a company claimed ownership matters. Which company claimed ownership matters. "How big" the OS was when the challenge came matters. Frankly, reset Linux adoption to 0. Have everyone use BSD for 2-4 years. Then reintroduce Linux. You won't end up with Linux dominance. You'll end up with BSD dominance. Linux had a multi-year head start. As you note, once you become the dominant target, everyone else is chasing you. If BSD had a multi-year head start, Linux would have been chasing BSD and the roles would be swapped.
camgunz 1y ago
This article doesn't reckon with cloud providers (etc) eating your project. (2015) indeed.
- Expurple 1y ago
  Unless it's a heavily-modified proprietary fork, the cloud providers are only "eating" your profits. Not the share of the project itself. Profit isn't the top priority for everyone. I just want to have quality free software that I can use for my tasks. The more companies contribute and support it - the better. And even regarding proprietary forks, the article makes a point that, long-term, those are prone to enshittification and/or abandonment, while the open fork is always there and keeps changing maintainers and maturing unstoppably
  - camgunz 1y ago
    > And even regarding proprietary forks, the article makes a point that, long-term, those are prone to enshittification and/or abandonment, while the open fork is always there and keeps changing maintainers and maturing unstoppably Do you have any examples of this?
    - Expurple 1y ago
      No, I can't remember any dead proprietary forks that would support that idea. But somewhat, I can't remember any counterexamples either. I mean, a proprietary fork killing the permissive original. I can only remember: - AppGet vs WinGet. But that's one permissive program killing another. - The proprietary build of VSCode. But it's basically "a set of patches" on top of a still-maintained permissive base. And its popularity is at least somewhat dependent on the existence of that permissive base.
      - camgunz 1y ago
        They don't tend to "kill" the original, they just force them into "source available" licenses. Wikipedia has stuff like MariaDB, MongoDB, Sentry, Redis, etc. as some examples. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-available_software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-available_software
guilhas 1y ago
In the long run MIT code developer becomes irrelevant After the million dollar company forks it and includes it in their product without even saying hello. And the developer is left with a depression I think each project, and its conditions, can take advantage of diferent licences, there are very successful projects in all of them
cadamsdotcom 1y ago
Licenses that allow more collaboration end up winning, and permissive licenses allow more collaboration. That said, the source-availability requirement of the GPL did help kickstart things. In the 80s every unix vendor had their own closed source version of everything. The GPL - through the requirement of source availability - helped flip the industry over to collaborative building. It would’ve never gone that way if those working in the open did it under permissive licensing - that would have given closed-source vendors free labor and discouraged those working on free software. Nowadays it’s about velocity. In domains where collaborative building is producing more better software faster, it’s more expensive to work behind closed doors than to take others’ work for free. So you may as well use the open thing. And then when you want to add features or fix bugs, it’s a hassle to maintain your own fork while integrating new work from upstream. So you may as well upstream your work too!
Arch-TK 1y ago
Yeah, the Apache/BSD licensed code will always come out on top, when some big company eats it, and effectively dictates its development with no other fork gaining any traction and with the project effectively becoming enterprise-ified. This happens to a lesser or greater extent, but it happens.
- Expurple 1y ago
  Yeah. Related: https://hypercritical.co/2013/04/12/code-hard-or-go-home https://hypercritical.co/2013/04/12/code-hard-or-go-home
ranger207 1y ago
How do things like redis, Elasticsearch, or Terraform fit into this theory?
- Expurple 1y ago
  Disclaimer: I haven't been following any of these projects. Based on quick googling, they all follow a very similar pattern. The original is permissively licensed. After a decade of growth and popularity, it's relicensed as source-available to prevent AWS from hosting it and harming the financials [1][2][3]. Copyleft community forks fail to get traction. A permissive, corporate-funded fork gets traction. It's adopted by the Linux Foundation and is provided on AWS. Enough users and contributors switch to make it relevant and active to this day. In the few years that pass, the permissive fork doesn't die, but it doesn't overthrow the "official" fork either. The "official" fork makes money and is still widely used. Later, it becomes dual-licensed under a copyleft license [4]. The CEOs say that they've always wanted to stay open-source, and the goal of the license change was to force AWS to fork [1][2]. It's hard to tell whether the permissive forks will overthrow the "official" dual-licensed forks in the future. We need to wait for a decade to see. So far, at least in this space (dev-oriented tools that started as permissive), it seems like: - Permissive corporate forks get vastly more investment and interest, and quickly beat copyleft community forks (confirming the article). - Companies prefer more community-friendly licenses over full-on proprietary licenses (confirming the article). The originals are relicensed as source-available to cause the fork without alienating the community too much. The AWS forks are permissively licensed to get outside contributions and attract the community. AWS, obviously, profits the most from permissive code. That's because it doesn't really care about the code itself, and profits from hosting it instead. It reminds me of this timeless post about "commoditizing complements": https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/. Now I see the connection between this idea and the original post. Permissive code "unlocks" more of the "adjacent value", and that's why it's more desirable by most entities. Another post about corporate investment that I found while googling the topic: https://www.infoworld.com/article/2338938/follow-the-cloud-money.html https://www.infoworld.com/article/2338938/follow-the-cloud-m... [1] https://www.infoworld.com/article/3499400/elastics-return-to-open-source.html https://www.infoworld.com/article/3499400/elastics-return-to... [2] https://www.infoworld.com/article/3975620/redis-bets-big-on-an-open-source-return.html https://www.infoworld.com/article/3975620/redis-bets-big-on-... [3] https://www.infoq.com/news/2023/08/hashicorp-adopts-bsl/ https://www.infoq.com/news/2023/08/hashicorp-adopts-bsl/ [4] The latest versions of Elasticsearch and Redis are dual-licensed under AGPL. BSL'ed Terraform versions become available under MPL after 4 years from the publishing date: https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform/commit/b145fbcaadf0fa7d0e7040eac641d9aef2a26433 https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform/commit/b145fbcaadf0fa....
ece 1y ago
Bro quite literally does not understand the stated practical reasons projects use different licenses, makes up rationales for "exceptions" to suit his theory.

44 points by Expurple 1y ago

>But think of the multi-trillion dollar companies!! If companies want to use manpower to reimplement GPL code, then fine. It’s always funny how accommodating people are for these companies.

Expurple 1y ago
The point of the article is that: 1. In most areas, they eventually will! 2. If there is a permissively-licensed project in that area, at least there's a decent chance that the "reimplementation" will be a fork of that project. At that fork has a decent chance of staying open or even being merged back into the upstream. That benefits the community more than a proprietary from-scratch rewrite (which would follow from a GPL-only open-source scene)
- lc9er 1y ago
  So if we're nice to the billionaires, they may return that kindness with table scraps - if we're lucky? Sounds like the tech version of trickle-down economics.
  - rglullis 1y ago
    Yeah, I don't get that argument. "Apple is funding LLVM, therefore it is getting better than GCC!". They are only funding it because it advances their goals. The moment they get what they want they will drop it or look for ways to keep the advantage all to themselves.
    - Expurple 1y ago
      The same could be said about non-corporate contributions. "People only contribute as long as they have a personal itch to scratch. The moment they get what they want, you're on your own again". That's always been the deal. Open source is not a guarantee of free support forever! It's a guarantee that you can always fork and keep using the project (or even developing it further)
      - lanstin 1y ago
        It’s just the academic method of sharing your work so the collective knowledge and state of the art increases monotonically. People seem to like to productive it, but even just publishing your source code so I or my llm can read it and modify it is useful. Very useful.
      - rglullis 1y ago
        I'm less concerned about "free support" and more about "commons-oriented R&D". There are some projects/people that I donate a small monthly amount. I don't do it because I'm expecting a specific feature to be developed, but simply because I think it's important to have support developers and let them work on something without being concerned about how to make a living out of their work.
        Expurple 1y ago
        Indeed, that's a very important thing to foster! In fact, I published a post about this just two days ago: https://home.expurple.me/posts/non-profit-foss-solves-the-conflict-of-interest/ https://home.expurple.me/posts/non-profit-foss-solves-the-co...
    - School-Cotton 1y ago
      Everyone only does anything if it advances their goals. Luckily Apple's goals w.r.t. LLVM are the same as everyone else's: have a high-quality compiler backend.
      - rglullis 1y ago
        Beware of sweeping generalizations. Most people only do things when it advances it goals, but there certainly are people that do things simply because they think is the right thing to do.
        Expurple 1y ago
        "Doing the right thing" (whatever that means for a person specifically) can be considered a goal too. Goals don't have to be selfish.
        rglullis 1y ago
        A goal implies a clear objective. "Doing the right thing" is a guiding principle.
        Expurple 1y ago
        "Following my inner guiding principles without compromising" seems clear enough. I don't think that you have to fully verbalize and rationalize your principles in order to commit to a clear goal of following them. You clearly feel when you do the wrong thing.
        rglullis 1y ago
        > Following my inner guiding principles without compromising" seems clear enough. To me, it's not. What are the outcomes that we are talking about here? > You clearly feel when you do the wrong thing. Do you think that the developers of, e.g, KHTML felt they were doing the wrong thing when they started working on a browser engine for Konqueror under LGPL? Would they continue working on it had they known that Apple would take their work to build what is arguably the most freedom-restricting web browser out there?
  - Expurple 1y ago
    Yes, but what's the better alternative? The article makes the point that you're not even getting table scraps back into your GPL project. In most cases, the companies prefer a proprietary rewrite. Now you're just stuck with a less-developed project, while the world around you uses more-developed proprietary alternatives and pushes you to do the same. But I guess, that somehow makes you feel better because you don't let the corporations "feed off your work" and instead just waste everyone's time on infinite rewrites?
- elsjaako 1y ago
  I don't see why a company that refuses to add to a GPL project has a "decent change" of releasing their code under a more permissive license. If you're going to talk about theoretical behavior from big companies, you can make stories any way you want. Let's say a big company selling computers wants to include a PCB editing software by default. If KiCAD was Apache licensed they may be tempted to make a special version for their customers, as a unique selling point. But it's GPL, so they have to choose between rewriting completely (a huge process), or just publishing the changes and being happy to include a good program. Or a company makes modifications to a GPL program for internal use, and decides they want to share it with partners/customers later. I have no reason to think these stories are more or less likely than the story of a company completely rejecting the GPL option but still deciding to upstream their changes.
  - m4rtink 1y ago
    Didn't Sony gobble up a whole bunch of stuff from FReeBSD for the last few Playstation release without hardly contributing anything back at all ? IIRC the might have sent some patches to improve SMP or sponsored a conference. Same with Microsoft and the Windows TCP stack lifted from BSD as well. Compare with GPL licensed projects, like the Linux Kernel & its license making many projects possible, like the OpenWRT project for example.
    - phkahler 1y ago
      Yeah I see a lot of corporate backing of Linux (GPL) and a bit of proprietarization of non GPL OSS. Meanwhile my employer also uses git and gcc, which are both GPL. Companies that use software like it Free. Companies that develop software like it permissive. There are more users than developers, especially for large more important programs.
  - School-Cotton 1y ago
    > I don't see why a company that refuses to add to a GPL project has a "decent change" of releasing their code under a more permissive license. It's simple in my experience. Many big companies have some set "A" of code that they want to keep private, and some set "B" that they don't care about keeping private. Lawyers are worried that at some point someone will accidentally include GPL code in something from "A" and force it to be made public. So they ban GPL entirely. They could in theory just ban GPL code from "A" and allow it in "B", but they can't trust that among thousands of employees none will make a mistake, so they just ban the GPL entirely.
throw_m239339 1y ago
Some people always forget that GPL is about the end user's rights, not developer's rights. If a fortune 500 re-implements some GPL library to make proprietary, then by all means. It changes nothing for the GPL code, it's still GPL and its license should guaranty user's rights.
- Expurple 1y ago
  But a proprietary fork doesn't change anything for permissively-licenced projects either! The open original is still available, you can still use it and fork it. If it's a popular project, a community-maintained fork will always happen. As a user, permissive licences give me enough freedom.
  - ZoomZoomZoom 1y ago
    > But a proprietary fork doesn't change anything for permissively-licenced projects either! It just mostly makes them irrelevant by EEE. A permissive license is simply asking for it.
    - Expurple 1y ago
      This is true in the short-term. One of the points of the article is that, long-term, proprietary forks are prone to enshittification and/or abandonment, while the open fork just keeps chugging along, maturing, and changing maintainers
- codeguro 1y ago
  Some people also forget that end users are also developers themselves. GPL helps everyone in this way.

bombcar 1y ago

It may be true, but the GPL is uniquely positioned to create a floor that ratchets upwards, whereas the other licenses are susceptible to being consumed and extended.

conartist6 1y ago
I thought the author made the case that because of complexity economics the ratchet still works either way, and in fact that in 2025 GPL is actually a less-strong ratchet compared to Apache and MIT. If GPL was the stronger Ratchet you wouldn't ever expect to see an existential risk to a GPL project posed by an Apache one right?
Expurple 1y ago
True, but the article makes a point that it's very hard and unlikely to maintain technological superiority over a coproration that's determined enough. A corporation simply has much more resources. See also: https://hypercritical.co/2013/04/12/code-hard-or-go-home https://hypercritical.co/2013/04/12/code-hard-or-go-home
- ranger_danger 1y ago
  > maintain technological superiority Is this ever an actual goal for most GPL projects? Usually the ones I talk to are not even interested in gaining more users.
  - Expurple 1y ago
    From a developer/business point of view, there's no reason to use a more restrictive GPL dependency if it's not clearly "superior" to a permissively-licensed one. The article makes a case that this will eventually push GPL out of the mainstream. No one will use GPL because they "have to" (which is the whole premise of copyleft!). It will only be used by enthusiasts
    - singpolyma3 1y ago
      If the business wants to develop non open source software, then having them not use the GPLd project and thus profit off the free labour of others is a wonderful outcome.

mouse_ 1y ago

> The flaw is that in the long run, it keeps getting easier to write software. And people love reinventing the wheel. See: Bram's Law https://files.catbox.moe/qi5ha9.png https://files.catbox.moe/qi5ha9.png

djmips 1y ago
The most annoying part about reinventing the wheel might be renaming the wheel.

conartist6 1y ago

Great writeup! I couldn't agree more. I've been thinking about this a lot recently, because GPL was meant to ensure that vendors couldn't take OSS, turn it into closed source, and use it to extinguish the OSS. As JS-writing eng I live in an MIT-native offshoot of the OSS world and for us the ratchet that ensures we always get more and more free software is basically the fact that when your product is a script run in a scripting engine you can't ever truly hide anything. Since we have an alternate ratchet that has proven that it works to increase the amount and quality of OSS (over a 20-year time period), the GPL does seem as you say: a relic of times when we it seemed like software might only be a hobby. I'm writing a VCS kernel, basically, and its cost me the last 5 years of my life. My code is MIT. Do I have to think about the dangers of embrace-extend-extinguish? Yeah, but having the best product is a very strong defense, and building the widest coalition of supporters you can is how you get there.

conartist6 1y ago
To be more clear: my strategy is to eliminate the room that could be used to undercut me with more virulent technological or techno-social solutions. GPL would not be eliminating the room to undercut me with a slightly more viral clone of my product, but rather creating more room to undercut me. This is a real problem for a piece of software the value of which is in simplicity not complexity!

konstantinua00 1y ago

using BSD/MIT licences is like betting against black swan event sure, "contributing is cheaper than maintaining a fork" is true most of the time - but the moment new Microsoft comes in with "embrace, extend, extinguish" (or just copy and change), you're doomed and heck, we had that exact thing happen last autumn, iirc - making big news on this website

elsjaako 1y ago
Can you clarify what happened last autumn? I'm not sure I recall.
- Qem 1y ago
  Probably this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43587420 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43587420
  - phkahler 1y ago
    That would be one example. What about Redis pulling a license change, and the whole WordPress battle for control? If it ain't GPL and it IS popular, I think those kinds of things are more likely to happen than not.
    - Qem 1y ago
      Stallman is a real visionary warning us about those risks since de 80s.
      - Expurple 1y ago
        That's true. But at the same time, the risk is kinda overblown. You can still use the last open version of Redis. There's even an open, community-maintained fork that you don't have to maintain yourself. Even GPL can't force a company to maintain and keep developing an open version when the company doesn't want to. Even if Redis was GPL (no CLA), they could still abandon it and write a compatible clone from scratch. AI makes it even easier to do

benlivengood 1y ago

In the very long run I'd hope we get sane intellectual property law: Software and logic circuitry is mathematics and should be unpatentable and trade secret is about the only protection for software/firmware/hardware; copyright terms shortened to the actual window of profitability (5-10 years) and only applying to "business logic". Nothing else makes much sense in the modern world; standards and interoperability benefit everyone to such an extent and change happens so rapidly that the majority of existing IP protection duration only harms historians.

Expurple 1y ago
Yeah, copyleft has always been just a hack to cope with the current legal framework
eddythompson80 1y ago
> and only applying to "business logic" One person's business is another's platform.
- benlivengood 1y ago
  That's why I used the scare quotes; I don't have a hard and fast rule here for what's legitimate market-making software value and what's just rent-seeking. I think that much of the core features in Desktop Photoshop-style products or video games probably requires legitimate short copyright, for example. I don't think copyrighting a plugin interface or header files or hardware drivers makes any sense, unless there's significant creative work like e.g. the portions of GPU drivers that trade off appearance and speed in novel ways.
- bitwize 1y ago
  The AS/400 (now IBM i) platform has a neat feature: all application software is compiled into a sort of bytecode called TIMI, for Technology Independent Machine Interface. The use of TIMI is completely transparent to developers and is implemented at an OS level; you as a programmer do not get access to the underlying instruction set. When a program is run, if the OS does not detect a native-code "shadow" binary for the program, it will AOT-compile it from the program's TIMI code before running it. Among other things, this allowed IBM to convert their systems from AS/400 CISC to 64-bit POWER-architecture in one swift yank of the tablecloth, with all application software running 100% backward-compatibly on the new architecture. But that's not the reason why TIMI was implemented. TIMI was implemented to fulfill an antitrust consent decree, under which IBM agreed to unbundle IBM hardware from software. But they still wanted to ship an OS with each system! So they declared that the OS was "firmware" and "microcode", hence part of the hardware, despite being loaded and booted from disk like any other OS. Anything considered "software" for the platform was written in TIMI. So here we indeed have a bright-line distinction between OS and application code; between platform and business logic. Such a sharp definition is pretty rare in the industry.

dafelst 1y ago

To me the larger question is whether or not GPLv2 achieves the goal of forcing big companies to contribute back to a project better than a more permissable license does. As stated in the article, Linux is the notable success story, but anecdotally it seems that the majority of projects with large company contributions are licensed with BSD/Apache/MIT but with contributor agreement attached. I wonder if anyone has compiled any data on whether GPLv2 does actually encourage contributions more than the more permissive alternatives. GPLv3 isn't even worth mentioning in this context, great concept, abject failure to thrive IMO.

SAI_Peregrinus 1y ago

Ignores the MPL as usual. IMO the MPL is better than BSD/MIT/Apache since it prevents your code getting closed, and better than GPL by not forcing others to open their code.

Expurple 1y ago
Indeed, MPL/LGPL are often a better tradeoff than GPL. But, in theory and according to the article, they should experience same effect. Just slower. When a (law-abiding) company finally has a strong reason to make some modification and keep it private, a proprietary replacement is coming. (Sometimes, as a "thin" fork of a permissive project, which then gets an engagement boost, reinforcing the point of the article)
- Expurple 1y ago
  Ok, I have thought more about the topic. I was too concerned with "theory" in the above comment. Disregard it. Web engines are a huge practical example in favor of MPL/LGPL. They suggest that MPL/LGPL may indeed have the best survival characteristics. Companies love proprietary browsers. If there were a good-enough permissive web engine, a proprietary fork would happen and "win", even if as "a set of patches" on top of a permissive base maintained by the community for free. Luckily, the creators of FOSS web engines seem to have understood that and chose MPL/LGPL. This goes against the article. Companies love proprietary browsers. They will never contribute to a GPL web engine. That's why we don't have any good GPL web engines. This supports the article. Companies love proprietary browsers. Microsoft was one of the first movers on the web. They had the chance to create a competitive proprietary web engine from scratch. It was popular for a few decades. But eventually Microsoft gave up and adopted Chromium instead. Presumably, to reduce maintenance costs. It doesn't seem like their proprietary engine gave them any competitive advantages that would be worth the cost. This supports the article. So, the article is correct regarding GPL and proprietary, even (indirectly) predicting the continued absence of GPL web engines and the death of proprietary web engines. In 2015, when the article was written, IE was still bigger than Firefox and Safari on the desktop: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers But the article completely misses the huge success of MPL and LGPL. You are 100% correct.

yalok 1y ago

Just anecdotally, but this aligns with my observations on the trend/growth of successful useful open source projects that go with permissive BSD-like license. ~20 years ago there were way less of those than now. And as a SW developer doing client side/apps as well, using GPL/LGPL is a total pain and basically cost prohibitive, unless I work on my personal small project where I don’t care about having to/risking to open source the rest of the code and getting sued/cloned… Real life example from ~2010 - we ended up including an LGPL library in our mobile app code, and published/upstreamed all the modifications we did to that code (mostly ARM optimizations). Once the app became popular, our competitors came to us demanding the source code of our app - just because iOS didn’t support dynamic libraries (so we had to statically link it), and giving them the object code to relink it wasn’t enough for them (which would satisfy the spirit of LGPL), because they really wanted to see how we hacked around iOS camera input APIs…

tines 1y ago
> giving them the object code to relink it wasn’t enough for them (which would satisfy the spirit of LGPL) So they can take a hike?
joshuaissac 1y ago
> giving them the object code to relink it wasn’t enough for them (which would satisfy the spirit of LGPL) Doesn't that also satisfy the letter of the LGPL v2? > Accompany the work with the complete corresponding machine-readable source code for the Library [...] and, if the work is an executable linked with the Library, with the complete machine-readable "work that uses the Library", as object code and/or source code, so that the user can modify the Library and then relink to produce a modified executable containing the modified Library
- mananaysiempre 1y ago
  Deliberately so, moreover, because distributing object files for relinking used to be common[1]. [1] https://lock.cmpxchg8b.com/linux123.html https://lock.cmpxchg8b.com/linux123.html
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uludag 1y ago

> With enough time, any sufficiently large company can implement their own version of any software that anyone else has written. They usually won't write their own version if a high quality opensource version exists with a permissible license. Is this a true assertion? If you define sufficiently large company to be Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc. then sure, of course they can. That's an extremely high bar though and I would bet that even then, these companies would have to pick and choose their battles.

Expurple 1y ago
Rewriting "any software" is an extremely high bar to begin with. I think, we can agree that smaller utilities and libraries can be rewritten by anyone. Another comment [1] even references the "Bram's Law". It basically says that any piece of software that's easy to rewrite will be rewritten countless times (and most rewrites are going to be bad) [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44606219 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44606219

jcranmer 1y ago

One of the interesting things about the experience of LLVM and Clang isn't that it's killing off gcc--a decade after this was written, gcc is still the compiler of choice for most Linux distrubtions--but that it's killing off EDG, the C++ frontend that all proprietary C++ compilers used to use. Killing off proprietary software because the open source stuff is so much better is the vision of Stallman, and it's telling that a permissive license has been much more effective than a copyleft license in doing so.

andrepd 1y ago
That's completely orthogonal to the choice of license, but rather to the architecture of both projects.

larsiusprime 1y ago

I can think of at least a few counterexamples. The logic behind the hypothesis is decent and tells a plausible story, but I'd like to see a more robust analysis; has anyone done one since the article was first posted 10 years ago? Noteable counterxamples (excluding e.g. Linux): - Git (GPLv2) - Blender (GPLv2 & 3, from the looks of it) - Krita (GPLv3) - MySQL (GPLv2) -- still seems very popular in 2025 - QGIS (GPLv2)

mananaysiempre 1y ago
Notably, libgit2[1] is GPLv2 with a full linking exception, while e.g. go-git[2] is Apache2. [1] https://github.com/libgit2/libgit2 https://github.com/libgit2/libgit2 [2] https://github.com/go-git/go-git https://github.com/go-git/go-git
throw_m239339 1y ago
Blender used to be proprietary,the community had to raise money to buy the source code to make it free software. What a crazy success story for opensource.
boje 1y ago
Don't forget Qt (though I think that's more a corporation wanting to create an incentive to make commercial users pay for a license)
dzaima 1y ago
Git - jj[1] uses gitoxide for its git interop/backend (git being the backend of jj you're expected to use), both Apache/MIT; it functioned so cleanly I assumed it was invoking git directly, but apparently it's all custom! For new things I'd guess PostgreSQL vs MySQL is probably on the same order as llvm vs gcc; probably with PostgreSQL being better off than llvm even. [1]: https://github.com/jj-vcs/jj/ https://github.com/jj-vcs/jj/ (started by a Googler as a hobby project, now their full-time job at Google, so kinda fits into the "big orgs will replace things with permissive-licensed versions" narrative)
- steveklabnik 1y ago

Guid_NewGuid 1y ago

I think people who prefer GPL and I hope for the same outcomes but we have a different (irreconcilable?) philosophical approach to getting there. In my view code (and all knowledge) wants to be free and a commons of knowledge enriches the whole world. I am opposed to most forms of copyright, patents and intellectual 'property'. Aside: My compromise position to this maximalist view is that I'd accept a 5 year copyright term with an exponentially increasing renewal fee. For me MIT/BSD/Apache is a way to provide code with minimal encumbrances under the current dominant legal system. GPL is an attempt to free knowledge that relies on the legal system and the threat of men with guns coming to force you to comply. However noble the intentions at the end of the day it is reliant on state force and reduces freedom, it is very good at providing fees for lawyers. Corporations can't embrace-extend-extinguish open source. This is because the source is always available. Sure they can use that knowledge to build a new, more popular, thing, but the existing source never goes away. It represents an un-enclosable commons.

bji9jhff 1y ago
> Corporations can't embrace-extend-extinguish open source. This is because the source is always available. Sure they can use that knowledge to build a new, more popular, thing, but the existing source never goes away. It represents an un-enclosable commons. Some counter-examples: * git is now mostly github * khtml is now mostly chrome * linux is now more android and chromeos than linux. Anyhow, the plain kernel is deeply corporate. You can still fork those project. But it would be mostly meaningless to do so.
- Guid_NewGuid 1y ago
  But this doesn't really contradict the idea, in my view. Our existing property framework is built around physical goods that experience scarcity. The cost of code duplication is zero and it is (barring catastrophe) indestructible. Today you can browse the git codebase in the same way as 2 decades prior or hence. All the knowledge in those codebases is preserved for all time, freely available to anyone. They have been built upon in ways that don't necessarily give back but that wasn't a destructive event. Aside: Though if I remember correctly git and Linux are GPL so they create categories of thought-crime under copyleft if a judge holds your code to be too influenced by them. How influenced is too much? You better have enough money for lawyers to find out.

phkahler 1y ago

All large FLOSS programs are GPL licensed. Even with all the Rustaceans rewriting in Rust while abandoning the GPL, their flagship - Servo - is GPL licensed. There is an aversion to CLAs among those donating their time, and with that an aversion to permissive licenses. Im sure both will be around for a long time, but in the very long term GPL wins.

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nicoburns 1y ago
Servo is MPL not GPL licensed. And even even that's a bit of a problem for the Servo project, as it makes it hard to move code between Servo crates and other Rust ecosystem crates (which are typically MIT/Apache2.0), which means that Servo is it's own "island" somewhat disconnected from the rest of the Rust ecosystem. (there's nothing inherently wrong with the MPL, but it being a different and incompatible license to the rest of the ecosystem does cause problems)
Expurple 1y ago
Most other "flagships" of the Rust ecosystem (including rustc itself and ripgrep) are permissively-licensed, and still haven't been "hijacked" by a proprietary fork. Or by a copyleft fork, for that matter. Permissive licenses simply have better survival characteristics in the long run
School-Cotton 1y ago
Factually not true. Clang/LLVM: permissive Rustc: permissive Firefox: MPL Chromium: permissive Postgres: permissive LibreOffice: MPL CPython: permissive and so on...

ltbarcly3 1y ago

The fact that very large corporations are willing to spend tens and hundreds of millions of dollars to replicate software is exactly why the GPL is not irrelevant. What makes the GPL irrelevant is AI. AI in it's current incarnation is basically a magic copyright remover. It can memorize all the patterns, tricks, algorithms, and architecture of open source software and implement it again. In a few years you won't need git because you will just have an AI stamp out a git compatible tool if you need one. So if you care about Freedom, we need to move the battle from making sure you can get a copy of the source code to git, to making sure you can get a copy of the weights of the AI you are using to create software on demand.

Expurple 1y ago
> The fact that very large corporations are willing to spend tens and hundreds of millions of dollars to replicate software is exactly why the GPL is not irrelevant. No, it's the opposite. The premise of copyleft is forcing the dependents to contribute back to the community. If the corporations are writing proprietary replacements instead of contributing, copyleft has failed to deliver on its premise. In practice, permissively-licensed projects get more contributions back and benefit the community more. Simple as that.
- ltbarcly3 1y ago
  We have no data on how much has not been contributed back due to corporations forking code or just copy pasting it into other projects. For all you know permissive licenses have dramatically reduced contributions back. We only know when they contribute, we have no data on when they don't. Stories like LLVM are good evidence for what you are saying, but the linux kernel is good evidence against it. Dozens of companies are forced to work together for the common good at a scale and level of resources that is unprecedented. Without the GPL this simply wouldn't (actually from an economic / game theory standpoint it couldn't) happen.
  - Expurple 1y ago
    It's true that we don't have any definitive data on this. But I buy the article's argument that upstreaming a patch once is simply cheaper than maintaining your own proprietary fork forever. It externalizes the efforts of maintaining it in the future. This means that public, community-maintained, permissively-licenced projects are a good deal for companies, and should win from the economic / game theory POV

munificent 1y ago

This article is a decade old. I wonder if the author still agrees with it given how the software and corporate landscape has changed over the past ten years. While I have always used maximally permissive licenses on my own open source software, I've been rethinking that stance in the past couple of years. I'm not sure where I stand now, but I don't fully agree with this post. In particular, perhaps my number one fear about the world at large is that the untethered effects of economies of scale are clearly leading to a net transfer of power into the hands of fewer and fewer corporate leaders. Permissive licenses are arguably agnostic to that effect: anyone can use the software, corporation or not. But given that large corporations already have significant economies of scale, the emergent effect is that a corporation can extract more value out of a piece of open source software than you or I can. If your goal is to discourage a handful of oligarchs eating the world, a permissive license may be opposed to that. It's sort of like breeding fish and dropping them in a lake. Sure, anyone can then grab their rod and reel and catch a few, so you aren't privileging the commercial fisheries industry by doing so. But once the trawler shows up, they're going to harvest a hell of a lot more fish than the dude with a bamboo rod. You may be thinking this analogy doesn't work because software isn't like fish. Copying a piece of software doesn't remove a fish from the lake for others to catch. But think about this at one level of abstraction higher. Copying software accomplishes nothing. It's just bits sitting on a disk. It's software being used by humans that matters. When a corporation takes a piece of open source software and puts it in front of users, time a user spends using that corporation's code is time not spent doing anything else. While software itself isn't a consumptive good, human attention is. Notice how all of the biggest, fastest growing corporations understand this. Attention is the ultimate economic commodity. Any company who can mine it effectively wins and any company that fails loses. This is why in the past decade we've seen seemingly weird business moves like Apple producing movies, NVIDIA doing game streaming, Amazon shipping games, Walmart selling video streaming, etc. We are shambling towards a post-material world where the most valuable good, the thing that produces the most value, is human attention. And, unfortunately, a few people figured this out sooner than the rest of us and a gobbling up all of that mental real estate and leaving nothing for anyone else.

maxhille 1y ago

BSD & Co are open source for developers GPL & Co are open source for users

Expurple 1y ago
The point of the article is that BSD & Co have better survival characteristics, eventually attracting more developers, producing higher-quality software, and making the users switch to that. In the long run, even from the user's perspective, GPL & Co is only for enthusiasts who don't prioritise the actual quality of the software that they use. As a user, I value my freedom, but BSD & Co gives me enough freedom. The article assumes that it's the best tradeoff for most users, and I agree with that

singpolyma3 1y ago

This whole argument hinges on the statement that the GPL "does nothing for users" but is "annoying for developers". I dispute both of these claims. GPL is all about doing something for users. It is users who are able to request source code. My entire network setup is based on the fact that I can customize my router which I can only do because users were able to request the source for the router in order to customize it. When it comes to "annoying for developers" we need to be clear. The GPL is annoying for developers of software that is not open source. It annoys them because it says they must either take the open source deal or else rewrite it themselves. Apple has famously used a lot of time and money to rewrite GPLd thengs. This is the goal. OTOH open source developers need not be annoyed by any GPL dependency since they can always use it without any trouble to themselves.

joe_the_user 1y ago
This, Moreover, a company can release a GPL'd version of their software and also offer a commercial license for their software (see Qt etc). So someone who's charging for their software can use it if they themselves pay. Some commercial vendors might annoyed by even this. But it would seem they "doth protest too much".
aleph_minus_one 1y ago
> The GPL is annoying for developers of software that is not open source. It is also annoying for developers of open-source software that is not GPL-licensed.
- singpolyma3 1y ago
  It doesn't need to be, since they can still use it and keep their license the same etc.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
Expurple 1y ago
Compared to permissive licences (from the user's POV), GPL is merery a guarantee that a proprietary fork won't left you behind in the dust overnight. That's a rather strong guarantee that most people (including myself) don't need. I'm fine with a "plain" guarantee to fork the last free version. In exchange, I usually get better, well-supported software with more corporate contributions. > Apple has famously used a lot of time and money to rewrite GPLd thengs. This is the goal. As an aside, that's a terrible goal. Rewriting the same projects over and over is a waste of human potential. We could be solving unsolved problems and actually making the world better, instead of pursuing this weird and misguided notion of "fairness"

prima-facie 1y ago

This article is already largely irrelevant. The GPL (and the FSF), whether you like it or not, always has been a political movement. The aim of the movement is to expand the pool of free/libre software and to disallow commercial entities from gaining an unfair advantage without contributing back. With the GPLv2 they already have, as it permits them to run the software in the cloud, with their proprietary additions, without contributing back. AGPLv3 closes that loophole that's why it's even less popular. You can license your software as you wish, but in the long run the GPL has ensured that contributions reach back upstream for the common good, rather than for profit. The GPL gives protections for the people/end consumers, much like labour laws do in your own country. The GPL ensures that your contributions are respected, available to all, and not abused for profit (not always true, but tribunals have enforced the license terms before). The GPL has the effect of doing this globally while allowing contributions back from a global audience. It's genius and the companies absolutely hate it.

Expurple 1y ago
The article makes the point that, in practice, permissively-licenced projects see more contributions back. Copyleft projects are being rewritten as proprietary instead (with a few exceptions like Linux, which are too big to fail). The end result may be even worse for the user, if the proprietary alternative ends up being the most developed one, grows an ecosystem and a network effect, and eventually everyone is forced to use that. There's plenty of examples. It's not about "fairness". It's about reality and survival characteristics. As a user, I care about my freedom too. But permissively-licenced projects give me enough freedom to choose them over copyleft projects that are even slightly worse in quality
- rpdillon 1y ago
  You've been very diligent in replying to the detractors in this thread, but I have yet to see any compelling examples. You say that there are plenty of examples of copyleft projects being overtaken by proprietary versions that then create network effects that end up being worse for the end user because the original project was copyleft. You further assert that if the original project had been permissively licensed, this wouldn't have happened. I'm unaware of this ever happening. Can you list a few of the examples you had in mind?

phendrenad2 1y ago

I think this is largely an illusion. Most open-source software isn't that successful, so it might seem like the choice of license didn't really matter for their success. But you'll notice that all of the big, successful open-source projects are either GPL, or can't be GPL because of the GPLs murky legality around linking (the article mostly hinges on such a case - LLVM). The author talks about GPL projects feeding back on themselves to create technological dominance. But it's much more than that. GPL encourages organizational dominance, too. It starts with watch dogs looking out for GPL violations. And it ends with a big nonprofit foundation providing training and paying developer's salaries. Why did Linux blast past BSD? The popular story is that some company was trying to claim ownership over BSD. But the same thing happened to Linux a decade or so later with SCO. I think the license created a no-win situation for anyone who wanted to create their own Unix-based OS. If it wasn't Linux-compatible, it wasn't valuable. And nobody could keep up with Linux's rapid pace of development. So everyone gave up and started contributing to Linux, causing the pace of development to increase even more. Now, Linux has what, a million commits per year? Something insane like that. Try achieving that with a BSD license.

mdasen 1y ago
I think that the SCO threat to Linux also came at a time when Linux was pretty immune from such a threat. If it's the early-90s and there's two options in their infancy and one had AT&T (one of the 5 largest companies) threatening it, you'll go with the other. In 1993, you're not using BSD or Linux and making a choice between them. The legal threat weighs heavy there. When SCO sued IBM, people were already using Linux including one of the biggest and most trusted names in computing (at the time): IBM. Migrating away from something is a hard choice. Likewise, Linux had IBM's army of lawyers defending it (yes, BSD was defended by UC Berkeley, but the school could have easily folded over a project that wasn't part of the school's core mission). SCO also wasn't much of a threat - they were a dying company trying to win a case against the biggest names in the industry. It's a lot easier to spread FUD against something no one is currently using that has a viable alternative. In 1993, Linux and BSD may have been equal, but AT&T's legal threat carried weight. People choosing one or the other weren't already using one. By 2003, 25% of the internet was powered by Linux. People were already using it and weren't going to be scared away by the claims of a dying corporation while powerful companies were defending Linux. You say yourself that if something wasn't Linux compatible, it wasn't valuable and so everyone had to be chasing and reimplementing Linux compatibility. But if BSD had been established for a decade and Linux was chasing BSD compatibility in 2003 and then SCO sued BSD, BSD would still have maintained dominance. When a company claimed ownership matters. Which company claimed ownership matters. "How big" the OS was when the challenge came matters. Frankly, reset Linux adoption to 0. Have everyone use BSD for 2-4 years. Then reintroduce Linux. You won't end up with Linux dominance. You'll end up with BSD dominance. Linux had a multi-year head start. As you note, once you become the dominant target, everyone else is chasing you. If BSD had a multi-year head start, Linux would have been chasing BSD and the roles would be swapped.

camgunz 1y ago

This article doesn't reckon with cloud providers (etc) eating your project. (2015) indeed.

Expurple 1y ago
Unless it's a heavily-modified proprietary fork, the cloud providers are only "eating" your profits. Not the share of the project itself. Profit isn't the top priority for everyone. I just want to have quality free software that I can use for my tasks. The more companies contribute and support it - the better. And even regarding proprietary forks, the article makes a point that, long-term, those are prone to enshittification and/or abandonment, while the open fork is always there and keeps changing maintainers and maturing unstoppably
- camgunz 1y ago
  > And even regarding proprietary forks, the article makes a point that, long-term, those are prone to enshittification and/or abandonment, while the open fork is always there and keeps changing maintainers and maturing unstoppably Do you have any examples of this?
  - Expurple 1y ago
    No, I can't remember any dead proprietary forks that would support that idea. But somewhat, I can't remember any counterexamples either. I mean, a proprietary fork killing the permissive original. I can only remember: - AppGet vs WinGet. But that's one permissive program killing another. - The proprietary build of VSCode. But it's basically "a set of patches" on top of a still-maintained permissive base. And its popularity is at least somewhat dependent on the existence of that permissive base.
    - camgunz 1y ago
      They don't tend to "kill" the original, they just force them into "source available" licenses. Wikipedia has stuff like MariaDB, MongoDB, Sentry, Redis, etc. as some examples. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-available_software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-available_software

guilhas 1y ago

In the long run MIT code developer becomes irrelevant After the million dollar company forks it and includes it in their product without even saying hello. And the developer is left with a depression I think each project, and its conditions, can take advantage of diferent licences, there are very successful projects in all of them

cadamsdotcom 1y ago

Licenses that allow more collaboration end up winning, and permissive licenses allow more collaboration. That said, the source-availability requirement of the GPL did help kickstart things. In the 80s every unix vendor had their own closed source version of everything. The GPL - through the requirement of source availability - helped flip the industry over to collaborative building. It would’ve never gone that way if those working in the open did it under permissive licensing - that would have given closed-source vendors free labor and discouraged those working on free software. Nowadays it’s about velocity. In domains where collaborative building is producing more better software faster, it’s more expensive to work behind closed doors than to take others’ work for free. So you may as well use the open thing. And then when you want to add features or fix bugs, it’s a hassle to maintain your own fork while integrating new work from upstream. So you may as well upstream your work too!

Arch-TK 1y ago

Yeah, the Apache/BSD licensed code will always come out on top, when some big company eats it, and effectively dictates its development with no other fork gaining any traction and with the project effectively becoming enterprise-ified. This happens to a lesser or greater extent, but it happens.

Expurple 1y ago
Yeah. Related: https://hypercritical.co/2013/04/12/code-hard-or-go-home https://hypercritical.co/2013/04/12/code-hard-or-go-home

ranger207 1y ago

How do things like redis, Elasticsearch, or Terraform fit into this theory?

Expurple 1y ago
Disclaimer: I haven't been following any of these projects. Based on quick googling, they all follow a very similar pattern. The original is permissively licensed. After a decade of growth and popularity, it's relicensed as source-available to prevent AWS from hosting it and harming the financials [1][2][3]. Copyleft community forks fail to get traction. A permissive, corporate-funded fork gets traction. It's adopted by the Linux Foundation and is provided on AWS. Enough users and contributors switch to make it relevant and active to this day. In the few years that pass, the permissive fork doesn't die, but it doesn't overthrow the "official" fork either. The "official" fork makes money and is still widely used. Later, it becomes dual-licensed under a copyleft license [4]. The CEOs say that they've always wanted to stay open-source, and the goal of the license change was to force AWS to fork [1][2]. It's hard to tell whether the permissive forks will overthrow the "official" dual-licensed forks in the future. We need to wait for a decade to see. So far, at least in this space (dev-oriented tools that started as permissive), it seems like: - Permissive corporate forks get vastly more investment and interest, and quickly beat copyleft community forks (confirming the article). - Companies prefer more community-friendly licenses over full-on proprietary licenses (confirming the article). The originals are relicensed as source-available to cause the fork without alienating the community too much. The AWS forks are permissively licensed to get outside contributions and attract the community. AWS, obviously, profits the most from permissive code. That's because it doesn't really care about the code itself, and profits from hosting it instead. It reminds me of this timeless post about "commoditizing complements": https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/. Now I see the connection between this idea and the original post. Permissive code "unlocks" more of the "adjacent value", and that's why it's more desirable by most entities. Another post about corporate investment that I found while googling the topic: https://www.infoworld.com/article/2338938/follow-the-cloud-money.html https://www.infoworld.com/article/2338938/follow-the-cloud-m... [1] https://www.infoworld.com/article/3499400/elastics-return-to-open-source.html https://www.infoworld.com/article/3499400/elastics-return-to... [2] https://www.infoworld.com/article/3975620/redis-bets-big-on-an-open-source-return.html https://www.infoworld.com/article/3975620/redis-bets-big-on-... [3] https://www.infoq.com/news/2023/08/hashicorp-adopts-bsl/ https://www.infoq.com/news/2023/08/hashicorp-adopts-bsl/ [4] The latest versions of Elasticsearch and Redis are dual-licensed under AGPL. BSL'ed Terraform versions become available under MPL after 4 years from the publishing date: https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform/commit/b145fbcaadf0fa7d0e7040eac641d9aef2a26433 https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform/commit/b145fbcaadf0fa....

ece 1y ago

Bro quite literally does not understand the stated practical reasons projects use different licenses, makes up rationales for "exceptions" to suit his theory.