4 ms·

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 r

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"

singpolyma3 1y ago
It's not about fairness. It's about making bad actors like Apple pay to do their own bad work. If they chose to make open source software and actually make the world better we wouldn't even be having this discussion.
- Expurple 1y ago
  Do you consider open-sourcing the software a necessary precondition for making the world better? In other words, can a company make the world better by making proprietary software? In my opinion, that's obviously true. (Although I too dislike Apple specifically) Your approach forces every company to redo the work, even the "good" ones. In fact, that probably makes the situation worse, because it raises the barrier to entry and forces companies to choose agressive and hostile business models in order to get that investment back. If a new "More Ethical Apple" could be started instantly with no software investment, we would have one, the users would be able to switch, and would directly benefit from this
  - alpaca128 1y ago
    > can a company make the world better by making proprietary software? If you assume a company that does not have any profit driven incentive to be anti-competitive and less accessible to some people, yes. But that's like assuming dictatorship can work if the dictator is just wise and benevolent enough. It's nice to think about but not viable in reality. > it raises the barrier to entry and forces companies to choose agressive and hostile business models in order to get that investment back You assume that corporations would not choose aggressive and hostile business models if they weren't forced to, which is obviously wrong. > If a new "More Ethical Apple" could be started instantly with no software investment This would not be possible with licenses that allow Apple to keep everything proprietary, which is what any profit driven company is incentivized to do. In other words, you need GPL for this scenario to be even theoretically possible.
    - Expurple 1y ago
      > You assume that corporations would not choose aggressive and hostile business models if they weren't forced to, which is obviously wrong. But, in my scenario specifically, they will be forced to by market forces (to some degree). Being less aggressive is a competitive advantage. In my scenario, the market is going to be flooded with competitors, some of whom are going to use that advantage. Even if some users still prefer the other advantages of proprietary Apple (as they do in reality), at least the users who care can switch and benefit. > This would not be possible with licenses that allow Apple to keep everything proprietary Sure, you can't clone Apple with literally "zero software investment". They will always have some proprietary parts. What I mean is that, in my scenario, they would have fewer proprietary rewrites (from GPL) and would use common permissive dependencies more often. Thus reducing the amount of proprietary code, and making their stack more uniform, "shallow", and easier to copy. Being easier to copy sounds like a downside that they'd like to avoid, but it's also cheaper, so a tradeoff comes into play.
      - Expurple 1y ago
        A good example of this pull towards cheaper maintainance is Microsoft eventually replacing its proprietary web engine with Chromium. Although, as I've noted in the other comment, that wouldn't happen if Chromium was permissively licensed. It happened because its partially LGPL/MPL, and thus you can't create a proprietary fork (but can still use it in a proprietary browser like the new MS Edge). It seems like somethimes LGPL/MPL have the best survival characteristics
  - singpolyma3 1y ago
    > can a company make the world better by making proprietary software Of course not
- throw0101d 1y ago
  > If they chose to make open source software and actually make the world better we wouldn't even be having this discussion. You mean like they did with LLVM/Clang? > The LLVM project started in 2000 at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, under the direction of Vikram Adve and Chris Lattner. LLVM was originally developed as a research infrastructure to investigate dynamic compilation techniques for static and dynamic programming languages. LLVM was released under the University of Illinois/NCSA Open Source License,[3] a permissive free software licence. In 2005, Apple Inc. hired Lattner and formed a team to work on the LLVM system for various uses within Apple's development systems.[26] LLVM has been an integral part of Apple's Xcode development tools for macOS and iOS since Xcode 4 in 2011.[27] * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LLVM#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LLVM#History

singpolyma3 1y ago

It's not about fairness. It's about making bad actors like Apple pay to do their own bad work. If they chose to make open source software and actually make the world better we wouldn't even be having this discussion.

Expurple 1y ago
Do you consider open-sourcing the software a necessary precondition for making the world better? In other words, can a company make the world better by making proprietary software? In my opinion, that's obviously true. (Although I too dislike Apple specifically) Your approach forces every company to redo the work, even the "good" ones. In fact, that probably makes the situation worse, because it raises the barrier to entry and forces companies to choose agressive and hostile business models in order to get that investment back. If a new "More Ethical Apple" could be started instantly with no software investment, we would have one, the users would be able to switch, and would directly benefit from this
- alpaca128 1y ago
  > can a company make the world better by making proprietary software? If you assume a company that does not have any profit driven incentive to be anti-competitive and less accessible to some people, yes. But that's like assuming dictatorship can work if the dictator is just wise and benevolent enough. It's nice to think about but not viable in reality. > it raises the barrier to entry and forces companies to choose agressive and hostile business models in order to get that investment back You assume that corporations would not choose aggressive and hostile business models if they weren't forced to, which is obviously wrong. > If a new "More Ethical Apple" could be started instantly with no software investment This would not be possible with licenses that allow Apple to keep everything proprietary, which is what any profit driven company is incentivized to do. In other words, you need GPL for this scenario to be even theoretically possible.
  - Expurple 1y ago
    > You assume that corporations would not choose aggressive and hostile business models if they weren't forced to, which is obviously wrong. But, in my scenario specifically, they will be forced to by market forces (to some degree). Being less aggressive is a competitive advantage. In my scenario, the market is going to be flooded with competitors, some of whom are going to use that advantage. Even if some users still prefer the other advantages of proprietary Apple (as they do in reality), at least the users who care can switch and benefit. > This would not be possible with licenses that allow Apple to keep everything proprietary Sure, you can't clone Apple with literally "zero software investment". They will always have some proprietary parts. What I mean is that, in my scenario, they would have fewer proprietary rewrites (from GPL) and would use common permissive dependencies more often. Thus reducing the amount of proprietary code, and making their stack more uniform, "shallow", and easier to copy. Being easier to copy sounds like a downside that they'd like to avoid, but it's also cheaper, so a tradeoff comes into play.
    - Expurple 1y ago
      A good example of this pull towards cheaper maintainance is Microsoft eventually replacing its proprietary web engine with Chromium. Although, as I've noted in the other comment, that wouldn't happen if Chromium was permissively licensed. It happened because its partially LGPL/MPL, and thus you can't create a proprietary fork (but can still use it in a proprietary browser like the new MS Edge). It seems like somethimes LGPL/MPL have the best survival characteristics
- singpolyma3 1y ago
  > can a company make the world better by making proprietary software Of course not
throw0101d 1y ago
> If they chose to make open source software and actually make the world better we wouldn't even be having this discussion. You mean like they did with LLVM/Clang? > The LLVM project started in 2000 at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, under the direction of Vikram Adve and Chris Lattner. LLVM was originally developed as a research infrastructure to investigate dynamic compilation techniques for static and dynamic programming languages. LLVM was released under the University of Illinois/NCSA Open Source License,[3] a permissive free software licence. In 2005, Apple Inc. hired Lattner and formed a team to work on the LLVM system for various uses within Apple's development systems.[26] LLVM has been an integral part of Apple's Xcode development tools for macOS and iOS since Xcode 4 in 2011.[27] * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LLVM#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LLVM#History