7 ms·

And it is very important to remember: being able to do this is the reason why companies have brainwashed the Internet into choosing the MIT license for everythi

by o11c 11mo ago

And it is very important to remember: being able to do this is the reason why companies have brainwashed the Internet into choosing the MIT license for everything. With GPL-only code, the world would be much nicer for all of us.

RicoElectrico 11mo ago
Why it seems that MPL is left out of the discussion? I find its clauses a reasonable middle ground.
semi-extrinsic 11mo ago
Some of the reason why the MIT license etc. is more popular surely has to do with the license text itself. I can understand the MIT license, and my corp lawyer can easily understand all the consequences of using something under MIT license. With the GPL, not so much. It's verbose and complex and has different versions. Would it really be impossible to have a license with similar brevity as MIT but similar consequences as GPL?
- dtech 11mo ago
  No, the MIT license is short exactly because it has so little restrictions. You simply can't encode the desired result of GPL into 160 words like MIT can.
- debugnik 11mo ago
  Brevity maybe, but ease of understanding no. Copyleft licenses interact with copyright law in ways that permissive licences just don't need to. The closest you can get is probably MPL-2.0. The GPL is particularly bad here as it pretends to define what is or isn't a derivative work, which is outside the scope of a licence but within the scope of a court. The EUPL was created partly because EU directives bound the viral clause in ways the FSF won't admit to, although that one isn't simple either (I'm not a fan of its compatibility clause).
- graemep 11mo ago
  > I can understand the MIT license, and my corp lawyer can easily understand all the consequences of using something under MIT license. Sounds like you need a better lawyer. The consequences of the GPL are not all that complicated. In most cases it boils down to offering the source if you distribute the code outside your organisation.
  - regularfry 11mo ago
    The situations which cause that obligation to kick in can be decidedly non-obvious.
    - graemep 11mo ago
      How so?
      - regularfry 11mo ago
        Say you have linked against a GPL'd dependency which you have not modified but for which there is no API-compatible substitute. Are you now bound by the terms of the GPL? FSF says "yes", which tends to surprise people. But if there is an API-compatible, non-GPL'd substitute, the answer arguably becomes "no". Note that this has nothing to do either with your work or with your direct dependency, but on the existence of some random artifact out in the ecosystem which may come into existence at any point in the timeline.
        fsflover 11mo ago
        API is not a random artifact but a dedicated feature designed to separate one program from another. It also implies much more stability for the external connections to the code. It's like saying that display is a "random artifact" of a computer not making any difference in its design or usage.
        regularfry 11mo ago
        The API isn't the random artifact. The third party package that also implements it is.
- lelanthran 11mo ago
  > I can understand the MIT license, and my corp lawyer can easily understand all the consequences of using something under MIT license. With the GPL, not so much. Any IP lawyer who hasn't come across the GPL yet is probably not worth listening to. I mean, would you listen to a bridge engineer who hasn't yet heard of a calculator? Sure, they may understand their shit, but if they haven't heard of calculators yet they are clearly not in the industry. Any IP lawyer who hasn't yet read the GPL and formed a professional opinion on it isn't equipped to handle IP matters at all.
- fweimer 11mo ago
  There are whole industries built around the notion that “License: MIT” is everything that is required to meet the notification requirements in the license. So I wouldn't say that the MIT license is easy to understand.
bigstrat2003 11mo ago
Nobody needed to "brainwash" me into choosing the MIT license for my projects. I choose it because I disagree with the philosophy of the GPL, and think that true freedom requires the freedom for others to make their own licensing choices. You are quite welcome to disagree with that stance, but please cut out the inflammatory language. It's not charitable towards others and it isn't healthy for good discussion.
- oliwarner 11mo ago
  Despite anyone's personal views, it's undeniable that corps favour a Free they can use as they wish. It's also fairly evident that they make this favour known through their culture. Brainwashing may be a bit far, but only just. All for naught, I fear, while LLMs consume all and regurgitate license-free to vibe-coders everywhere.
- goku12 11mo ago
  > You are quite welcome to disagree with that stance, but please cut out the inflammatory language. It's not charitable towards others and it isn't healthy for good discussion. It is no more inflammatory than the coordinated war that was waged against copyleft licenses on tech fora and social media for more than a decade before hackers started to realize en masse that it was all a ploy to extract free labor from them. There are legitimate uses for permissive licenses and I still use them for those. But the big players certainly pushed them well beyond those cases where they made any sense. More than enough evidence has since emerged that prove this to be the case. It does no one any favors to deny the presence of bad actors and their malintent behind the utter mess we find ourselves in right now. I find it disturbing that whenever people express their frustration regarding this, there are attempts to shoot them down with accusations of inflammatory language, political correctness, etc. But the truth is that the big players have caused far far more damage than any inflammatory citicism they face for it now. What's actually unhealthy for good discussion is the dystopian censorship of criticisms because the truth make some people uncomfortable. Every bit of harsh criticism they receive here is something they willfully and rightfully earned.
  - embedding-shape 11mo ago
utopiah 11mo ago
Right, I think people misunderstand "free" when they are dominating versus "free" when they are the smaller player. One is a tool for domination and capture, the other is a tool for freedom ESPECIALLY against a bigger player.
ncruces 11mo ago
This is absurd. Most of, if not all, code that was released today was written by Google. Then can release it, or not release it, regardless of license. Android was never a community project with outside contributions. The license does not limit the original authors. I'm not saying Google shouldn't have released them immediately. But GPL vs Apache vs MIT has absolutely nothing to do with it.
- Vinnl 11mo ago
  I mostly agree, unless the new release modifies GPL code submitted by other entities than Google - their licensing of that code under GPL would force Google to release the rest too.
  - miroljub 11mo ago
    To be more pedantic here, Google doesn't have to publish anything anywhere. According to the GPL, the only thing they would have to do is provide source code to the users of their software upon their request.
    - Vinnl 11mo ago
      True, though I doubt that would've happened either (possibly it would have sped up this publication).
lenerdenator 11mo ago
Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by laziness. Personally, I MIT/BSD my stuff because, well... it means I don't have to think about it ever again. If I do GPL, I have to make sure that I'm following the rules set out in that license and making sure others who have based their code on my project have done the same. And that's, like, work, man, especially if you don't have a foundation and legal eagles on your side to double-check that everything's kosher. Linux is an exception, not a rule, in how GPL is usually handled in FLOSS projects.
- pwg 11mo ago
  > and making sure others who have based their code on my project have done the same. I do not believe the GPL requires that you make sure others who fork your code follow the GPL's rules. It places restrictions on those others, but does not require you verify that those others follow the restrictions.
  - lenerdenator 11mo ago
    Then what's the practical difference between that and MIT/BSD licensing?
    - BenjiWiebe 11mo ago
      Obviously, GPL allows you (and others) to request source code when Google uses a modified version of your code to make millions. It doesn't force you to go after them. With MIT, you Google would have no obligation at all to provide anything.
      - lenerdenator 11mo ago
        > It doesn't force you to go after them. That's just it, though. If it doesn't carry any sort of possibility of being enforced, well... why bother? I could just go with the easier-to-understand license, like someone upthread mentioned. If we're going to see the promised tech ecosystem that GPL's authors aimed to provide, we're going to need more people to take it seriously. Most people don't want to take it seriously, and if that's the case, we're better off if they just went with MIT/BSD.
singpolyma3 11mo ago
Except Google also violates the GPL so that's not the only relevant factor.

by o11c 11mo ago

RicoElectrico 11mo ago

Why it seems that MPL is left out of the discussion? I find its clauses a reasonable middle ground.

semi-extrinsic 11mo ago

Some of the reason why the MIT license etc. is more popular surely has to do with the license text itself. I can understand the MIT license, and my corp lawyer can easily understand all the consequences of using something under MIT license. With the GPL, not so much. It's verbose and complex and has different versions. Would it really be impossible to have a license with similar brevity as MIT but similar consequences as GPL?

dtech 11mo ago
No, the MIT license is short exactly because it has so little restrictions. You simply can't encode the desired result of GPL into 160 words like MIT can.
debugnik 11mo ago
Brevity maybe, but ease of understanding no. Copyleft licenses interact with copyright law in ways that permissive licences just don't need to. The closest you can get is probably MPL-2.0. The GPL is particularly bad here as it pretends to define what is or isn't a derivative work, which is outside the scope of a licence but within the scope of a court. The EUPL was created partly because EU directives bound the viral clause in ways the FSF won't admit to, although that one isn't simple either (I'm not a fan of its compatibility clause).
graemep 11mo ago
> I can understand the MIT license, and my corp lawyer can easily understand all the consequences of using something under MIT license. Sounds like you need a better lawyer. The consequences of the GPL are not all that complicated. In most cases it boils down to offering the source if you distribute the code outside your organisation.
- regularfry 11mo ago
  The situations which cause that obligation to kick in can be decidedly non-obvious.
  - graemep 11mo ago
    How so?
    - regularfry 11mo ago
      Say you have linked against a GPL'd dependency which you have not modified but for which there is no API-compatible substitute. Are you now bound by the terms of the GPL? FSF says "yes", which tends to surprise people. But if there is an API-compatible, non-GPL'd substitute, the answer arguably becomes "no". Note that this has nothing to do either with your work or with your direct dependency, but on the existence of some random artifact out in the ecosystem which may come into existence at any point in the timeline.
      - fsflover 11mo ago
        API is not a random artifact but a dedicated feature designed to separate one program from another. It also implies much more stability for the external connections to the code. It's like saying that display is a "random artifact" of a computer not making any difference in its design or usage.
        regularfry 11mo ago
        The API isn't the random artifact. The third party package that also implements it is.
lelanthran 11mo ago
> I can understand the MIT license, and my corp lawyer can easily understand all the consequences of using something under MIT license. With the GPL, not so much. Any IP lawyer who hasn't come across the GPL yet is probably not worth listening to. I mean, would you listen to a bridge engineer who hasn't yet heard of a calculator? Sure, they may understand their shit, but if they haven't heard of calculators yet they are clearly not in the industry. Any IP lawyer who hasn't yet read the GPL and formed a professional opinion on it isn't equipped to handle IP matters at all.
fweimer 11mo ago
There are whole industries built around the notion that “License: MIT” is everything that is required to meet the notification requirements in the license. So I wouldn't say that the MIT license is easy to understand.

bigstrat2003 11mo ago

Nobody needed to "brainwash" me into choosing the MIT license for my projects. I choose it because I disagree with the philosophy of the GPL, and think that true freedom requires the freedom for others to make their own licensing choices. You are quite welcome to disagree with that stance, but please cut out the inflammatory language. It's not charitable towards others and it isn't healthy for good discussion.

oliwarner 11mo ago
Despite anyone's personal views, it's undeniable that corps favour a Free they can use as they wish. It's also fairly evident that they make this favour known through their culture. Brainwashing may be a bit far, but only just. All for naught, I fear, while LLMs consume all and regurgitate license-free to vibe-coders everywhere.
goku12 11mo ago
> You are quite welcome to disagree with that stance, but please cut out the inflammatory language. It's not charitable towards others and it isn't healthy for good discussion. It is no more inflammatory than the coordinated war that was waged against copyleft licenses on tech fora and social media for more than a decade before hackers started to realize en masse that it was all a ploy to extract free labor from them. There are legitimate uses for permissive licenses and I still use them for those. But the big players certainly pushed them well beyond those cases where they made any sense. More than enough evidence has since emerged that prove this to be the case. It does no one any favors to deny the presence of bad actors and their malintent behind the utter mess we find ourselves in right now. I find it disturbing that whenever people express their frustration regarding this, there are attempts to shoot them down with accusations of inflammatory language, political correctness, etc. But the truth is that the big players have caused far far more damage than any inflammatory citicism they face for it now. What's actually unhealthy for good discussion is the dystopian censorship of criticisms because the truth make some people uncomfortable. Every bit of harsh criticism they receive here is something they willfully and rightfully earned.
- embedding-shape 11mo ago

utopiah 11mo ago

Right, I think people misunderstand "free" when they are dominating versus "free" when they are the smaller player. One is a tool for domination and capture, the other is a tool for freedom ESPECIALLY against a bigger player.

ncruces 11mo ago

This is absurd. Most of, if not all, code that was released today was written by Google. Then can release it, or not release it, regardless of license. Android was never a community project with outside contributions. The license does not limit the original authors. I'm not saying Google shouldn't have released them immediately. But GPL vs Apache vs MIT has absolutely nothing to do with it.

Vinnl 11mo ago
I mostly agree, unless the new release modifies GPL code submitted by other entities than Google - their licensing of that code under GPL would force Google to release the rest too.
- miroljub 11mo ago
  To be more pedantic here, Google doesn't have to publish anything anywhere. According to the GPL, the only thing they would have to do is provide source code to the users of their software upon their request.
  - Vinnl 11mo ago
    True, though I doubt that would've happened either (possibly it would have sped up this publication).

lenerdenator 11mo ago

Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by laziness. Personally, I MIT/BSD my stuff because, well... it means I don't have to think about it ever again. If I do GPL, I have to make sure that I'm following the rules set out in that license and making sure others who have based their code on my project have done the same. And that's, like, work, man, especially if you don't have a foundation and legal eagles on your side to double-check that everything's kosher. Linux is an exception, not a rule, in how GPL is usually handled in FLOSS projects.

pwg 11mo ago
> and making sure others who have based their code on my project have done the same. I do not believe the GPL requires that you make sure others who fork your code follow the GPL's rules. It places restrictions on those others, but does not require you verify that those others follow the restrictions.
- lenerdenator 11mo ago
  Then what's the practical difference between that and MIT/BSD licensing?
  - BenjiWiebe 11mo ago
    Obviously, GPL allows you (and others) to request source code when Google uses a modified version of your code to make millions. It doesn't force you to go after them. With MIT, you Google would have no obligation at all to provide anything.
    - lenerdenator 11mo ago
      > It doesn't force you to go after them. That's just it, though. If it doesn't carry any sort of possibility of being enforced, well... why bother? I could just go with the easier-to-understand license, like someone upthread mentioned. If we're going to see the promised tech ecosystem that GPL's authors aimed to provide, we're going to need more people to take it seriously. Most people don't want to take it seriously, and if that's the case, we're better off if they just went with MIT/BSD.

singpolyma3 11mo ago

Except Google also violates the GPL so that's not the only relevant factor.