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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 dece

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.

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.