5 ms·

Why is it a shame?

by mikecsh 14y ago

Why is it a shame?

endgame 14y ago
Because while every piece of free software is a wound against proprietary software, the more liberal licences like LGPL and the BSD/MIT-style licences are a wound against free software: proprietary interests can take free code without giving anything back.
- VMG 14y ago
  With the MIT license, proprietary interests have the option of giving something back without having to give all back. Which very often happens.
- olgeni 14y ago
  > proprietary interests can take free code without giving anything back. As long as the author is ok with that, and proprietary interests are happy with merging their own changes on each upstream release, I don't see any wounds. Also, sometimes it's better for proprietary interests to lift (for example) a working TCP/IP implementation, rather than implementing their own poor thing and put it on the 'net for everybody else to deal with.
  - icebraining 14y ago
    Also, sometimes it's better for proprietary interests to lift (for example) a working TCP/IP implementation, rather than implementing their own poor thing and put it on the 'net for everybody else to deal with. rms agrees with you: http://lwn.net/2001/0301/a/rms-ov-license.php3 http://lwn.net/2001/0301/a/rms-ov-license.php3
- _pferreir_ 14y ago
  Yes, they can, which doesn't mean they will. I understand you may not like BSD/MIT, but LGPL seems pretty reasonable to me. It all depends on how big/important your software is... if it's something that you're sure you'll never be able to make a living out of and that may be useful for others, why ask for anything else other than an acknowledgement?
  - belorn 14y ago
    Citing a comment made by a lawyer several years ago. First ask oneself what situations you dont want to be in, and then prepare yourself for it. Some people dont want to see their code being used in a context that might hurt a other human being, like spyware hidden inside a video player. Say someone modified VLC to produce a proprietary video player which included functions that spied on the users activities. As a developer, I would feel slightly at unease if I heard a Chinese citizen died because he watched a unpopular video, and the government found out because the program I wrote helped in spying and identifying that user. Of course, that doesn't make producers of LGPL (or BSD/MIT) software evil or uncaring. Its up to each and every developer on how they view their work and its impact on society, and how far one want to go on that. Same goes for work, eating and spending habbits, money investments and so on.
    - mansr 14y ago
      Nothing in the GPL prevents such uses.
      - belorn 14y ago
        Well, GPL do prevent the production of an proprietary video player based on GPL code. Sure, they can produce a video player full of spyware and then give the source of the spyware to their users, but then, that would render that spyware useless as soon a anti-virus got their hand on it. Not to mention, users would avoid the program as the spyware would then be known.
        Sanddancer 14y ago
        Your GPLed video player wouldn't stop that in the least. Were I a government in such a situation, I could very easily either claim sovereign immunity to any sort of copyright questioning, or I could write a function that monitors what files were opened by the user that used well-exposed file system APIs, like inotify. The GPL would not stop human rights abuses at all.
        Fixnum 14y ago
- Quarrelsome 14y ago
  But the trade-off comes with an influx of developers and developers love to open source as much as they can (Microsoft and CodePlex being a decent example of a monolithic propriety beast being led toward open source by its developers). For a lot of developers in commercial positions it can be politically difficult to use GPL code but LGPL is much more politically expedient. These devs may well then contribute themselves either via the form of bug fixes or future work on more open projects once they leave their original employer.
- pretoriusB 14y ago
  >Because while every piece of free software is a wound against proprietary software, the more liberal licences like LGPL and the BSD/MIT-style licences are a wound against free software Some of like like our proprietary software very much, thank you. I wouldn't want to live in a world where there would not have been a Photoshop, a Premiere or a Logic Pro but only their open source "alternatives". >proprietary interests can take free code without giving anything back. On the contrary. In reality BSD style licenses _enable_ companies to give something back to a project, whereas they would not be able with a GPL license. Sounds strange? Let me explain: Take a BSD licensed project X. (a) A company wants to ship something based on X, but as closed source and with proprietary extensions. (b) They can do it, since X is BSD licensed. (c) In order not to have to maintain a fork themselves, they also give back their fixes and improvements to the core X project, off which everybody in the community benefits. So, the company gets to add proprietary extensions and ship closed source code based on X AND the project gets to benefit from the company's work on core X. If X was GPL, the company would not have touched it, and would have opted for some other project instead. All those contributions back to the X community would have been lost. That's how it works with Apple and LLVM, for example. That's one of the reasons developers chose BSD/MIT/LGPL over GPL. Because they _specifically_ want people and companies to be able to have that option.
  - icebraining 14y ago
    Some of like like our proprietary software very much, thank you. I wouldn't want to live in a world where there would not have been a Photoshop, a Premiere or a Logic Pro but only their open source "alternatives". Pro or against proprietary software, it's a fallacy to assume that in a world where Photoshop didn't exist, its alternatives would be the same. Having a copy of PS for a relatively cheap price is a great incentive not to devote more resources to alternatives.
    - pretoriusB 14y ago
      >Pro or against proprietary software, it's a fallacy to assume that in a world where Photoshop didn't exist, its alternatives would be the same. Having a copy of PS for a relatively cheap price is a great incentive not to devote more resources to alternatives. In principle, yes, it's problematic to assume any alternative reality in which something has changed will otherwise be the same as ours. Things affect each other. That said, the assumption in this _particular_ case seems like a safe bet to me. For one, Photoshop does not have a "relatively cheap price". It's over $500 dollars by itself, and some thousand dollars with the rest of the suite. Also note that the people that "have a copy of Photoshop" and need it with all it's power are not the same people that are "devoting more resources to the alternatives". The former are graphic designers and illustrators, where the latter are programmers. Since most programmers are casual image editing software users, they wouldn't need Photoshop. And indeed, those users get just fine with Gimp. So it's not like if Photoshop wasn't available programmers would have flocked to make an equivalent program.
- tobiasu 14y ago
  > proprietary interests can take free code without giving anything back. I have bad news for you. Proprietary interests do take GPL code (any version), heavily modify and extend it, without ever giving back. The GPL specifies that you have to give the source code to the entities you distribute the work to - not to the general public or the original authors. Since most custom software is B2B, it will "never" show up on the internet. In case the software is bundled into something physical, like an expensive CNC machine, it is even less likely.
  - uxp 14y ago
    My Visio TV has GPLd and other more open code in it (libmpeg2, among others like libpng and libtiff). The manual states something like "As required by law, you can log on to our website and request a CD of the code running on this machine for a manufacturing fee, blah blah". Naturally, their site has no such thing, and customer service gives you strange looks when you ask for the code that runs on the TV. Its a pretty common red-tape circus. Everyone does that. I have no stake in the matter personally, so I haven't pursued it very far, but you're absolutely correct that GPL code is consistently used inappropriately. The only time the license restricts someone from using it is when they try to follow the rules. "When guns are outlawed, only the outlaws will have guns". That said, it's still nice to see projects realize this and try to give people that follow the rules more personal freedom to incorporate the code into something that might need to be more closed than a sourceforge project.
- icebraining 14y ago
  The GPL is not about giving code back. It's about giving forward.
  - ontheotherhand 14y ago
    The wittiest thing I read today was at the very bottom of a HN discussion, whooshing over people's heads :)
- darkarmani 14y ago
  Most people write code so it can be used. They don't care about wounding anything. If the choice is between having your code being used or having no one use it, most people will chose the more liberal licenses.

Why is it a shame?

by mikecsh 14y ago

Why is it a shame?

Because while every piece of free software is a wound against proprietary software, the more liberal licences like LGPL and the BSD/MIT-style licences are a wound against free software: proprietary interests can take free code without giving anything back.

VMG 14y ago
With the MIT license, proprietary interests have the option of giving something back without having to give all back. Which very often happens.
olgeni 14y ago
> proprietary interests can take free code without giving anything back. As long as the author is ok with that, and proprietary interests are happy with merging their own changes on each upstream release, I don't see any wounds. Also, sometimes it's better for proprietary interests to lift (for example) a working TCP/IP implementation, rather than implementing their own poor thing and put it on the 'net for everybody else to deal with.
- icebraining 14y ago
  Also, sometimes it's better for proprietary interests to lift (for example) a working TCP/IP implementation, rather than implementing their own poor thing and put it on the 'net for everybody else to deal with. rms agrees with you: http://lwn.net/2001/0301/a/rms-ov-license.php3 http://lwn.net/2001/0301/a/rms-ov-license.php3
_pferreir_ 14y ago
Yes, they can, which doesn't mean they will. I understand you may not like BSD/MIT, but LGPL seems pretty reasonable to me. It all depends on how big/important your software is... if it's something that you're sure you'll never be able to make a living out of and that may be useful for others, why ask for anything else other than an acknowledgement?
- belorn 14y ago
  Citing a comment made by a lawyer several years ago. First ask oneself what situations you dont want to be in, and then prepare yourself for it. Some people dont want to see their code being used in a context that might hurt a other human being, like spyware hidden inside a video player. Say someone modified VLC to produce a proprietary video player which included functions that spied on the users activities. As a developer, I would feel slightly at unease if I heard a Chinese citizen died because he watched a unpopular video, and the government found out because the program I wrote helped in spying and identifying that user. Of course, that doesn't make producers of LGPL (or BSD/MIT) software evil or uncaring. Its up to each and every developer on how they view their work and its impact on society, and how far one want to go on that. Same goes for work, eating and spending habbits, money investments and so on.
  - mansr 14y ago
    Nothing in the GPL prevents such uses.
    - belorn 14y ago
      Well, GPL do prevent the production of an proprietary video player based on GPL code. Sure, they can produce a video player full of spyware and then give the source of the spyware to their users, but then, that would render that spyware useless as soon a anti-virus got their hand on it. Not to mention, users would avoid the program as the spyware would then be known.
      - Sanddancer 14y ago
        Your GPLed video player wouldn't stop that in the least. Were I a government in such a situation, I could very easily either claim sovereign immunity to any sort of copyright questioning, or I could write a function that monitors what files were opened by the user that used well-exposed file system APIs, like inotify. The GPL would not stop human rights abuses at all.
      - Fixnum 14y ago
Quarrelsome 14y ago
But the trade-off comes with an influx of developers and developers love to open source as much as they can (Microsoft and CodePlex being a decent example of a monolithic propriety beast being led toward open source by its developers). For a lot of developers in commercial positions it can be politically difficult to use GPL code but LGPL is much more politically expedient. These devs may well then contribute themselves either via the form of bug fixes or future work on more open projects once they leave their original employer.
pretoriusB 14y ago
>Because while every piece of free software is a wound against proprietary software, the more liberal licences like LGPL and the BSD/MIT-style licences are a wound against free software Some of like like our proprietary software very much, thank you. I wouldn't want to live in a world where there would not have been a Photoshop, a Premiere or a Logic Pro but only their open source "alternatives". >proprietary interests can take free code without giving anything back. On the contrary. In reality BSD style licenses _enable_ companies to give something back to a project, whereas they would not be able with a GPL license. Sounds strange? Let me explain: Take a BSD licensed project X. (a) A company wants to ship something based on X, but as closed source and with proprietary extensions. (b) They can do it, since X is BSD licensed. (c) In order not to have to maintain a fork themselves, they also give back their fixes and improvements to the core X project, off which everybody in the community benefits. So, the company gets to add proprietary extensions and ship closed source code based on X AND the project gets to benefit from the company's work on core X. If X was GPL, the company would not have touched it, and would have opted for some other project instead. All those contributions back to the X community would have been lost. That's how it works with Apple and LLVM, for example. That's one of the reasons developers chose BSD/MIT/LGPL over GPL. Because they _specifically_ want people and companies to be able to have that option.
- icebraining 14y ago
  Some of like like our proprietary software very much, thank you. I wouldn't want to live in a world where there would not have been a Photoshop, a Premiere or a Logic Pro but only their open source "alternatives". Pro or against proprietary software, it's a fallacy to assume that in a world where Photoshop didn't exist, its alternatives would be the same. Having a copy of PS for a relatively cheap price is a great incentive not to devote more resources to alternatives.
  - pretoriusB 14y ago
    >Pro or against proprietary software, it's a fallacy to assume that in a world where Photoshop didn't exist, its alternatives would be the same. Having a copy of PS for a relatively cheap price is a great incentive not to devote more resources to alternatives. In principle, yes, it's problematic to assume any alternative reality in which something has changed will otherwise be the same as ours. Things affect each other. That said, the assumption in this _particular_ case seems like a safe bet to me. For one, Photoshop does not have a "relatively cheap price". It's over $500 dollars by itself, and some thousand dollars with the rest of the suite. Also note that the people that "have a copy of Photoshop" and need it with all it's power are not the same people that are "devoting more resources to the alternatives". The former are graphic designers and illustrators, where the latter are programmers. Since most programmers are casual image editing software users, they wouldn't need Photoshop. And indeed, those users get just fine with Gimp. So it's not like if Photoshop wasn't available programmers would have flocked to make an equivalent program.
tobiasu 14y ago
> proprietary interests can take free code without giving anything back. I have bad news for you. Proprietary interests do take GPL code (any version), heavily modify and extend it, without ever giving back. The GPL specifies that you have to give the source code to the entities you distribute the work to - not to the general public or the original authors. Since most custom software is B2B, it will "never" show up on the internet. In case the software is bundled into something physical, like an expensive CNC machine, it is even less likely.
- uxp 14y ago
  My Visio TV has GPLd and other more open code in it (libmpeg2, among others like libpng and libtiff). The manual states something like "As required by law, you can log on to our website and request a CD of the code running on this machine for a manufacturing fee, blah blah". Naturally, their site has no such thing, and customer service gives you strange looks when you ask for the code that runs on the TV. Its a pretty common red-tape circus. Everyone does that. I have no stake in the matter personally, so I haven't pursued it very far, but you're absolutely correct that GPL code is consistently used inappropriately. The only time the license restricts someone from using it is when they try to follow the rules. "When guns are outlawed, only the outlaws will have guns". That said, it's still nice to see projects realize this and try to give people that follow the rules more personal freedom to incorporate the code into something that might need to be more closed than a sourceforge project.
icebraining 14y ago
The GPL is not about giving code back. It's about giving forward.
- ontheotherhand 14y ago
  The wittiest thing I read today was at the very bottom of a HN discussion, whooshing over people's heads :)
darkarmani 14y ago
Most people write code so it can be used. They don't care about wounding anything. If the choice is between having your code being used or having no one use it, most people will chose the more liberal licenses.