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>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 wo

>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.
  - icebraining 14y ago
    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. A price is only cheap or expensive relatively to something. Compared to the necessary money to improve a free program, $500 is ridiculously cheap. It's also pretty cheap compared to the benefits accrued by most professionals users by using it. 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. And exactly why wouldn't designers and illustrators pay (read: devote resources) programmers to improve it, just like they do now? If your claim is that people don't pay for OSS development, my paycheck says otherwise.
    - pretoriusB 14y ago
      >And exactly why wouldn't designers and illustrators pay (read: devote resources) programmers to improve it, just like they do now? If your claim is that people don't pay for OSS development, my paycheck says otherwise. No, my claim is that people don't generally pay directly to support OSS development, and never in the scale of supporting huge teams of programmers, equipment, testing, etc like Adobe does. There are very few examples of people in a field paying directly for OSS programmers to create programs for their profession. Don't conflate a company paying for OSS software or employing programmers working on OSS (like Sun, Oracle, RedHat, IBM etc), with "people" and specifically graphic professionals paying programmers to create OSS graphic editing programs. (The one counter-example I can think of, Bender, was closed source, and not doing very well financially when people sponsored it's becoming OSS). Heck, GTK+, the very toolkit used not only by Gimp but by a huge ecosystem of programs, is left with ONE programmer working on it (he posted a complain a few months ago).
mikegerwitz 14y ago
> 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. It is important to understand the distinction between "open source" and "free software". Open source focuses on the benefits of "open" code and development and how it can create superior software. Free Software focuses on the ethical issues---while free software developers certainly want contributors, the emphasis is on the fact that the software respects your freedom and, for that, it's far superior to any other proprietary alternative; free software users constantly make sacrifices in functionality and usability, and we're okay with that. http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.h... (I'm not saying that those are the views of the VLC project---I know very little of their opinions.)
- pretoriusB 14y ago
  >Open source focuses on the benefits of "open" code and development and how it can create superior software. Free Software focuses on the ethical issues---while free software developers certainly want contributors, the emphasis is on the fact that the software respects your freedom and, for that, it's far superior to any other proprietary alternative Well, the "far superior" part is just, like, your opinion, man. [to quote "The Dude"]. >free software users constantly make sacrifices in functionality and usability, and we're okay with that. If a more usable program or one with more functionality can make people freer to do stuff with it, then the software doesn't really respect their full freedom, only a constrained software-centric notion of it.
  - belorn 14y ago
    Mixing the concepts of functionality and freedom into one concept do not work. If the program has more functionality, but limits the users in way of Intellectual freedom or Liberties, it doesnt make people more "freer to do stuff". What you got is a program with less freedom but more functionality. Two distinct property of the program. Let me make an exmaple. Is a video editing program "very free" if it have every function in the world, best usability, and is perfect in every sense, but as a legal requirement it demands all copyright ownership of any video edited? Is that program more "free" than say VLMC? What if the proprietary did allow the users to retain the copyright, but, only if the video included a ad snippet? What if non-ad included was okey, but the video had to first to go a central censor bureau to check that no kittens was harmed? what if the video instead went to the local copyright bureau to be checked for any copyright infringement? What if it included a hidden water stamp? Freedom is more than functionality.
crististm 14y ago
BSD is used exactly because you can hide your improvements from others. You can hide the code of your proprietary extensions. If you choose to, you can give or take away my freedom to further improve these extensions. No different from closed source. On the other hand if what you are targeting are "companies" that take your code and never give back, then BSD is a fine choice.
gillianseed 14y ago
>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. All it takes is to list projects like Linux and GCC to show that yes, companies can give something back just fine with GPL. What you are referring to are companies who wants to use open source in proprietary software, and yes for them GPL is not an option unless they can make a deal with the owners of said GPL licenced software for dual licencing. Then again GPL is created on the premise that all recipients shall have access to the source code so obviously it won't work with proprietary software which typically relies on keeping the source code hidden while charging for binaries. >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. And one of the reasons developers chose GPL over BSD/MIT is that they want to recieve ANY enhancements made to their code. There's no right or wrong here, developers will make the decision for THEIR code. So typically an open source developer will choose between: do I want to allow people/companies to take the code I offer and return nothing/only what they want of any changes they make (BSD/MIT-style) or do I want them to have to return any changes made to the specific code I share (LGPL,MPL-style) or do I want them to open source any code with witch they link my code (GPL) Looking at how these licences are employed in 'real-life' it's my impression that GPL is often used for larger, full solutions/applications, while BSD/MIT/LGPL/MPL etc are dominant in component/framework style code. Again I'm not taking any sides when it comes to licencing, I also have no problem with proprietary code (unless it tries to lock-in my data by only offering a proprietary format which is a no-no for me).
- pretoriusB 14y ago
  >All it takes is to list projects like Linux and GCC to show that yes, companies can give something back just fine with GPL. That only works for server software, like Linux, and basic infrastructure that tons of companies use, like GCC, etc. And it works because they don't have to distribute said software. On the server side, it doesn't make any difference if the license is BSD or GPL. In both cases, companies get to make whatever changes they want, deploy at their infrastructure, and NOT release the code (because they're not re-distributing it). Plus, in a lot of cases, they use Linux as a commodity underlying layer, so they don't care about making proprietary changes at all.
ttflee 14y ago
That most of such analyses on the purpose of people choosing between BSD/GPL are mostly based on the presumption of imaginary or hypothetical reactions of human rather than solid data from real world, renders these analyses less convincing as such assumptions on human behaviours are very likely to be wrong.

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.
- icebraining 14y ago
  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. A price is only cheap or expensive relatively to something. Compared to the necessary money to improve a free program, $500 is ridiculously cheap. It's also pretty cheap compared to the benefits accrued by most professionals users by using it. 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. And exactly why wouldn't designers and illustrators pay (read: devote resources) programmers to improve it, just like they do now? If your claim is that people don't pay for OSS development, my paycheck says otherwise.
  - pretoriusB 14y ago
    >And exactly why wouldn't designers and illustrators pay (read: devote resources) programmers to improve it, just like they do now? If your claim is that people don't pay for OSS development, my paycheck says otherwise. No, my claim is that people don't generally pay directly to support OSS development, and never in the scale of supporting huge teams of programmers, equipment, testing, etc like Adobe does. There are very few examples of people in a field paying directly for OSS programmers to create programs for their profession. Don't conflate a company paying for OSS software or employing programmers working on OSS (like Sun, Oracle, RedHat, IBM etc), with "people" and specifically graphic professionals paying programmers to create OSS graphic editing programs. (The one counter-example I can think of, Bender, was closed source, and not doing very well financially when people sponsored it's becoming OSS). Heck, GTK+, the very toolkit used not only by Gimp but by a huge ecosystem of programs, is left with ONE programmer working on it (he posted a complain a few months ago).

mikegerwitz 14y ago

> 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. It is important to understand the distinction between "open source" and "free software". Open source focuses on the benefits of "open" code and development and how it can create superior software. Free Software focuses on the ethical issues---while free software developers certainly want contributors, the emphasis is on the fact that the software respects your freedom and, for that, it's far superior to any other proprietary alternative; free software users constantly make sacrifices in functionality and usability, and we're okay with that. http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.h... (I'm not saying that those are the views of the VLC project---I know very little of their opinions.)

pretoriusB 14y ago
>Open source focuses on the benefits of "open" code and development and how it can create superior software. Free Software focuses on the ethical issues---while free software developers certainly want contributors, the emphasis is on the fact that the software respects your freedom and, for that, it's far superior to any other proprietary alternative Well, the "far superior" part is just, like, your opinion, man. [to quote "The Dude"]. >free software users constantly make sacrifices in functionality and usability, and we're okay with that. If a more usable program or one with more functionality can make people freer to do stuff with it, then the software doesn't really respect their full freedom, only a constrained software-centric notion of it.
- belorn 14y ago
  Mixing the concepts of functionality and freedom into one concept do not work. If the program has more functionality, but limits the users in way of Intellectual freedom or Liberties, it doesnt make people more "freer to do stuff". What you got is a program with less freedom but more functionality. Two distinct property of the program. Let me make an exmaple. Is a video editing program "very free" if it have every function in the world, best usability, and is perfect in every sense, but as a legal requirement it demands all copyright ownership of any video edited? Is that program more "free" than say VLMC? What if the proprietary did allow the users to retain the copyright, but, only if the video included a ad snippet? What if non-ad included was okey, but the video had to first to go a central censor bureau to check that no kittens was harmed? what if the video instead went to the local copyright bureau to be checked for any copyright infringement? What if it included a hidden water stamp? Freedom is more than functionality.

crististm 14y ago

BSD is used exactly because you can hide your improvements from others. You can hide the code of your proprietary extensions. If you choose to, you can give or take away my freedom to further improve these extensions. No different from closed source. On the other hand if what you are targeting are "companies" that take your code and never give back, then BSD is a fine choice.

gillianseed 14y ago

>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. All it takes is to list projects like Linux and GCC to show that yes, companies can give something back just fine with GPL. What you are referring to are companies who wants to use open source in proprietary software, and yes for them GPL is not an option unless they can make a deal with the owners of said GPL licenced software for dual licencing. Then again GPL is created on the premise that all recipients shall have access to the source code so obviously it won't work with proprietary software which typically relies on keeping the source code hidden while charging for binaries. >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. And one of the reasons developers chose GPL over BSD/MIT is that they want to recieve ANY enhancements made to their code. There's no right or wrong here, developers will make the decision for THEIR code. So typically an open source developer will choose between: do I want to allow people/companies to take the code I offer and return nothing/only what they want of any changes they make (BSD/MIT-style) or do I want them to have to return any changes made to the specific code I share (LGPL,MPL-style) or do I want them to open source any code with witch they link my code (GPL) Looking at how these licences are employed in 'real-life' it's my impression that GPL is often used for larger, full solutions/applications, while BSD/MIT/LGPL/MPL etc are dominant in component/framework style code. Again I'm not taking any sides when it comes to licencing, I also have no problem with proprietary code (unless it tries to lock-in my data by only offering a proprietary format which is a no-no for me).

pretoriusB 14y ago
>All it takes is to list projects like Linux and GCC to show that yes, companies can give something back just fine with GPL. That only works for server software, like Linux, and basic infrastructure that tons of companies use, like GCC, etc. And it works because they don't have to distribute said software. On the server side, it doesn't make any difference if the license is BSD or GPL. In both cases, companies get to make whatever changes they want, deploy at their infrastructure, and NOT release the code (because they're not re-distributing it). Plus, in a lot of cases, they use Linux as a commodity underlying layer, so they don't care about making proprietary changes at all.

ttflee 14y ago

That most of such analyses on the purpose of people choosing between BSD/GPL are mostly based on the presumption of imaginary or hypothetical reactions of human rather than solid data from real world, renders these analyses less convincing as such assumptions on human behaviours are very likely to be wrong.