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I think Stallman misses the point that many of us who are at least latent distributists see in free/open source software. Freedom can't be defined as a freedom

I think Stallman misses the point that many of us who are at least latent distributists see in free/open source software. Freedom can't be defined as a freedom from restriction or a Lockean framework of liberty, as Stallman imagines, but rather the freedom to engage creative or productive endeavors without micromanagement from others.[1] The question, rather literally is who has a right to tell you what license your works go under, and under what circumstances. If freedom to create things is economically valuable (and I think it is), then one need not worry so much about people misappropriating things because in the end they cannot out-compete what is free and open. Yeah, SunOS forked from BSD. How is it doing these days compared to the open source versions? These days, my preferred license is the BSD license. I am uncomfortable with the MIT license's sublicensing grant, and I am even more uncomfortable with the AGPL, which strikes me as a demonstration that freedom in the name of freedom is ultimately self-consuming and self-defeating. I am willing to tolerate the GPL and in fact most of my works are licensed under that license for legacy code reasons. But I still prefer the BSD license. This license is very simple. I own my work and give everyone else a right to use it. They own their own contributions and an decide how to license those. Since freedom to create new solutions with the software is economically valuable, there I can expect that the original BSD-licensed versions will win out over the long run. [1] http://ledgersmbdev.blogspot.com/2013/04/a-distributist-view-on-software-freedom.html http://ledgersmbdev.blogspot.com/2013/04/a-distributist-view...

mpyne 13y ago
> Freedom can't be defined as a freedom from restriction or a Lockean framework of liberty, as Stallman imagines, but rather the freedom to creative endeavors without micromanagement from others. Freedom certainly can be defined in such a way, even if you don't happen to fall in with that definition. Put bluntly the big question between the two major license types is whether you're pushing for individual freedom or collective freedom. Rather I think the point that Stallman misses (or more likely, chooses to argue against) is that many open source programmers deliberately choose not to be "Free Software" political activists, but simply choose open source licenses for technical or social (but not political) reasoning. They don't want to save the world, they want to sling the best code.
- rout39574 13y ago
  He doesn't miss it; he outlines it specifically in the linked article. He correctly identifies it as a philosophically different approach to software, and to licensure. He hopes to communicate to those who have that short-sighted view, that their interests are not best served by focusing on just the code.
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jordigh 13y ago
The free vs open source thing is irrelevant to what you're saying above. Both the GPL and the BSD licenses are free and both are open source. Some BSD distributions even make a point of calling what they're doing "free software", e.g. http://www.openbsd.org/lyrics.html http://www.openbsd.org/lyrics.html
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  - jordigh 13y ago
    This is true even for the BSD licenses that are not GPL-compatible. "Free software" doesn't mean "GPL-compatible only."
    - icebraining 13y ago
      The GNU project even has a full list of GPL-Incompatible Free Software Licenses: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#GPLIncompatibleLicenses http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#GPLIncompatibl...
  - dragonwriter 13y ago
    > This is true because the 3 (and modified 2) clause BSD license are GPL compatible and approved by the FSF. They might be compatible with the GPLv3, because of its allowance of extra terms; they are strictly incompatible with the GPLv2, een though the FSF claimed that they were compatible with it when the GPLv2 was the current GPL version (the FSF's claim that they are compatible -- a self-interested one to induce people to relicenses BSD-licensed code as GPL-licensed code, is indefensible since both versions require specific copyright notices, the BSD license itself, and the specific disclaimer of warranty included as part of the BSD license, and all of those requirements are additional requirements incompatible with the GPLv2.) The FSF has an overt interest in promoting the relicensing of code under the GPL which gives them a motive to exaggerate the degree to which this action is valid under other licenses. They are not neutral, objective party when it comes to license compatibility.
_delirium 13y ago
> I am even more uncomfortable with the AGPL, which strikes me as a demonstration that freedom in the name of freedom is ultimately self-consuming and self-defeating I actually read the AGPL as driven by mostly pragmatic factors. It didn't even come from the FSF initially, but from a developer (Affero) who believed it fit their business strategy better than the existing licenses. One of the traditional business strategies built on the GPL, which RMS does not greatly like, but is quite possible to do, is the dual-licensed GPL/proprietary approach. People who are willing to GPL their own software may incorporate your code under the GPL's terms. Other people who prefer more traditional commercial terms can, alternately, purchase a commercial license. In the webapp setting this approach no longer works, because the GPL only covers "distribution", and a webapp backend is never distributed. Therefore nobody will buy a commercial license. The AGPL more or less restores the traditional GPL terms in the webapp setting, where you have to GPL your product if you ship an app containing the GPL'd code: only now, deploying a public webapp is a form of "shipping" (which is how most software devs actually do see the situation... deploying a live webapp is a modern-day form of shipping software). And in practice, it seems the most common alternative to the AGPL in this setting is to just keep your code fully proprietary, so competitors can't build on it. I think in that sense AGPL is helpful if it encourages more releases, e.g. if it encourages more companies to take the Launchpad approach with their code (AGPL) rather than the GitHub approach to it (proprietary). The other common alternative is to release the source but under a non-OSI license like "free for noncommercial use only, commercial users must buy a license". The AGPL seems at least more generous than that.
- jordigh 13y ago
  > One of the traditional business strategies built on the GPL, which RMS does not greatly like, but is quite possible to do, is the dual-licensed GPL/proprietary approach. He actually does like it: https://www.fsf.org/blogs/rms/selling-exceptions https://www.fsf.org/blogs/rms/selling-exceptions
  - aaron-lebo 13y ago
    It isn't obvious to me why he makes this exception. He is very rigorous in many of his other beliefs (GNU/Linux, this "open vs "free" debate). If he does not agree with BSD/MIT licenses because they inevitably allow companies to limit the "freedom" of their customers, how is selling an exception any different except that the open source project is now making money? I mean an argument could be made at that point that you are selling off your principles to the highest bidder. I don't necessarily believe that, but still...
Spooky23 13y ago
Your preference for BSD is certainly valid, but it's valid because of your objectives. If you want a software package that you own to be openly collaborated, but still controlled by you, the GPL is a great copyright construct to do that with. There isn't a right answer here. I think Stallman has an ideologically pure argument that is appealing to me as a consumer, but not always ideal for my business needs. I disagree that BSD solutions will necessarily "win" in the long run. There's no incentive to share.
- yxhuvud 13y ago
  There are plenty of incentives to share. They can be summarized by this: Code that you don't share is code that you have to maintain yourself. Code that you share is code that you can offload the maintaining to someone else.
  - Spooky23 13y ago
    I agree. But offload != collaboration. With BSD, there is no legal incentive for somebody to take their ball and go home, or take your ball and sell it. Depending on what you want, that can be a good thing. Making commercialization difficult is not always bad -- if you own the copyrights, you can license to commercial users under terms favorable to you.
    - einhverfr 13y ago
      Also I don't think the BSD license makes it harder to commercialize software than the GPL does. You can't have a dual license model without the GPL, and that also requires copyright assignments. And once you do that, you are controlling not whether the software can be commercialized but merely who can commercialize it.
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- midas007 13y ago
  Licenses are a toolbox, like the tech they cover. Wanna stop basically everything commercial related? AGPL Wanna stop tivozation? GPL 3 Wanna allow tivozation? GPL 2 Wanna allow general commercialization? 2-clause BSD EDIT: if anyone remembers the OSS license feature matrix site that's new, plz reply.
aaron-lebo 13y ago
A friend recently introduced me to the ISC http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISC_license http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISC_license which is similar to the MIT and BSD except extraneous language has been removed. If you like the simplicity of BSD, maybe you'll like this even more? OpenBSD uses it.
brianpgordon 13y ago
> I am uncomfortable with the MIT license's sublicensing grant I did a little research to try to figure out what you meant; tell me if I have it right: MIT allows you to redistribute the code under a different license. The problem is that the sublicense might be more permissive than the MIT license, potentially allowing someone to bypass the requirements of the MIT license. Is that what you meant?
- einhverfr 13y ago
  Not quite. One right that can be passed on is the right to sublicense, which gives the licensee the right to issue new licenses. The licensee cannot provide downstream licenses to rights he or she did not receive. So the license can never be more permissive than the existing one. The difference is that under the BSD license, the original author grants licenses and requires notice on downstream redistribution. Someone can add code, however, and add restrictions to that code. The MIT license allows something very different, which is the right of a mere licensee to negotiate licenses (provided they are no more permissive than what was granted) on behalf of the licensor. So you can take MIT licensed code with no changes and relicense it under the GPL. The BSD license requires that you license only your code in it (and the corresponding work as a whole) under the GPL, but the MIT license allows you to add restrictions to code you did not author.
koide 13y ago
I don't think he misses the point. He just doesn't find it a good one. I mean, you are of course entitled to your opinion, and to call his a mistake, but saying RMS "misses the point" of what he's been working on almost 30 years is a bit disingenuous. And I personally disagree with the statement that BSD-like licenses are definitely better than GPL. As always, it depends. What would have happened to Linux without GPL? Would it support as many devices as it does? Would it be as widespread as it is? On the other hand, I agree that a BSD-like license has been a plus for PostgreSQL, by permitting the existence of various 'PostgreSQL enhanced' companies selling their versions and offering support. What's ultimately more important than the license is the people working on the project and the community that forms around it. They are what ultimately lead to success or failure, not the choice of a license.
- zanny 13y ago
  > What's ultimately more important than the license is the people working on the project and the community that forms around it. Is it? Look at the router industry - licenses like zlib, the busybox license, and the "no copyright" sqlite licenses have enabled an entire industry to take open source software and use it for profit without having to invest developer hours to making it themselves. But they still sell that software, and take away their users freedoms, on their routers. Every time I buy a new one, I have to either look for one with an open source firmware already installed, or be very careful to make sure one I get is supposed so I can reflash it (if its even possible on some models) to reclaim my freedoms. Tons of other embedded devices do the same. As long as Linux at least is gpl v2, they can get away with using the kernel as well as long as they don't modify it directly. And who knows how much open source code Microsoft and Apple have in their OS installs that has been heavily modified without any of that work being contributed back to the source projects while those companies profit off license key sales?
  - koide 13y ago
    Yes, it is. I don't understand your point. There are people taking advantage of both GPL and BSD. Some (not all) of the GPL violators can be made to comply, and none of the BSD "violators" can be made to comply, because they are not actual violators. All of the previous statements do not alter at all that all the software pieces that are "taken advantage of" are huge value contributions to society at large and that their success is not dependent on the license choice. If you are angered by "other people profiting with my free software" you will of course choose GPL to have an option to sue. If you don't care, you will choose BSD or GPL for another reason. Neither option will make much of a difference on the success of your project.
HerraBRE 13y ago
My apologies if this is slightly inflammatory, but in my opinion preferring BSD-style licenses over copyleft licenses is both selfish and elitist (or classist, if you will). It's an attitude which says that as long as the elite class of techies get freedom to do as they like, that's good enough. The freedom of the end-users does not matter, even to the point that when Free Software advocates ask developers to take their end-user's freedoms into account, that request is met with outright hostility. It's a very selfish and one-sided type of freedom. Freedom for us, not for them. Freedom to oppress, monetize and lock-in the peons who don't know how to code.
- clarry 13y ago
  Permissive licenses give freedoms for techies and users equally. If it's free for one, it's free for the other. Less permissive licenses, and the GPL in particular, restrict both users and techies. Users can be subject to oppression, monetization and lock-in if they are willing. But it is their choice. And if they so want, they can grab that free code and hire a developer to "oppress, monetize, and lock-in" the other guy. If he is willing to be oppressed.
- dragonwriter 13y ago
  > It's an attitude which says that as long as the elite class of techies get freedom to do as they like, that's good enough. The freedom of the end-users does not matter I actually don't see the additional restrictions in the GPL as doing much for end users, per se. The real beneficiaries are still developers, just developers one level further removed from the licensor than the beneficiaries of the freedom in permissive licenses. But if you think that a substantial portion of the people using your work under a permissive license are themselves likely to offer a Free/Open license (whether permissive or copyleft), a copyleft license actually may reduce the freedom actually experienced by the indirect beneficiaries as well as that experienced by direct licensees.
- joesb 13y ago
  What freedom does BSD takes from users? Users are equally welcome to use BSD code. BSD allow anyone to do anything to BSD code. GPL prevents developers from doing everything to GPL code. That says more about users being selfish and eilitst than the other way around. Why? Just because they are end-users means they are better then me? That's exactly selfish right there.
EGreg 13y ago
I would say that the FSF is using Free Software as a weapon to get all the other proprietary software to open up. Usually the biggest barriers to entry by free software are network effects and proprietary agreements. See the recent article about Bloomberg http://mattturck.com/2014/03/19/can-the-bloomberg-terminal-be-toppled/ http://mattturck.com/2014/03/19/can-the-bloomberg-terminal-b... (I bet someone at bloomberg read it because they released an article the next day: http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-03-20/tesla-can-topple-the-car-dealer-monopoly http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-03-20/tesla-can-t...)
- einhverfr 13y ago
  That's why so much new software is FOSS. It's basically the only way to break in without massive funding and unrealistic expectations. Again, freedom is economically valuable.
mcguire 13y ago
"Yeah, SunOS forked from BSD. How is it doing these days compared to the open source versions?" How is BSD doing compared to Linux? (Keeping in mind that BSD is officially something like 20 years older than Linux.) I wonder how much better it would be doing if it hadn't been forked so many times by so many really smart people in the 80's and 90's?
- einhverfr 13y ago
  I can personally count the FreeBSD contributors in the LedgerSMB community. I don't know that firm counts are really possible but I would say FreeBSD ports were one of the first packages formally added (even before Debian). It's hard to say for sure. However, from what I have seenof the FreeBSD community, they seem quite active and vibrant.
belorn 13y ago
> The question, rather literally is who has a right to tell you what license your works go under, and under what circumstances. When ever I see this question put forth regarding GPL, I see it as extremely dishonest question. No one want to license software just for licensing sake. What some people want to do is to prohibit copying, modification and usage of work in order to create profits. The question you actually asking is: Who has the right to tell if restrictions on copying, modification and usage is allowed on a work. It has nothing to do with freedom, and the answer is always going to be the author. Political philosophers has long since past agreed that permission to restrict other people freedom is not liberty.
- einhverfr 13y ago
  > The question you actually asking is: Who has the right to tell if restrictions on copying, modification and usage is allowed on a work. It has nothing to do with freedom, and the answer is always going to be the author. Political philosophers has long since past agreed that permission to restrict other people freedom is not liberty. Read the full blog post. The question goes effectively to a question of enumerated liberties vs work ownership, and myself siding with the latter. There may be lots of reasons to license or not under the BSD license but once you do, then you are saying that anyone downstream gets to own their own work. Again I define "own" and "work" in the piece. I would recommend you read it.
thatthatis 13y ago
Well said. I've tried in the past to articulate the "creator's freedom" that you're talking about. To my view copy middle is the only truly free as in freedom licensing paradigm. But, I also don't think proprietary software is necessarily evil.
dTal 13y ago
>Freedom can't be defined as a freedom from restriction or a Lockean framework of liberty, as Stallman imagines, but rather the freedom to engage creative or productive endeavors without micromanagement from others. How is "freedom to engage creative or productive endeavors without micromanagement from others" not a "freedom from restriction"? Is the implication here that using the GPL is tantamount to "micromanagement from others"? Because I don't really see it. >one need not worry so much about people misappropriating things because in the end they cannot out-compete what is free and open. Yeah, SunOS forked from BSD. How is it doing these days compared to the open source versions? That's not the example I would pick. How about Apple forking FreeBSD? >The question, rather literally is who has a right to tell you what license your works go under I'm not sure what this has to do with GPL vs BSD. Nobody has the right to force you to use a particular license. Ideally, nobody gets to change the license of code you wrote either, just because they changed a variable name. It is this particular guarantee that the GPL provides and BSD doesn't.

mpyne 13y ago

> Freedom can't be defined as a freedom from restriction or a Lockean framework of liberty, as Stallman imagines, but rather the freedom to creative endeavors without micromanagement from others. Freedom certainly can be defined in such a way, even if you don't happen to fall in with that definition. Put bluntly the big question between the two major license types is whether you're pushing for individual freedom or collective freedom. Rather I think the point that Stallman misses (or more likely, chooses to argue against) is that many open source programmers deliberately choose not to be "Free Software" political activists, but simply choose open source licenses for technical or social (but not political) reasoning. They don't want to save the world, they want to sling the best code.

rout39574 13y ago
He doesn't miss it; he outlines it specifically in the linked article. He correctly identifies it as a philosophically different approach to software, and to licensure. He hopes to communicate to those who have that short-sighted view, that their interests are not best served by focusing on just the code.
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jordigh 13y ago

The free vs open source thing is irrelevant to what you're saying above. Both the GPL and the BSD licenses are free and both are open source. Some BSD distributions even make a point of calling what they're doing "free software", e.g. http://www.openbsd.org/lyrics.html http://www.openbsd.org/lyrics.html

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- jordigh 13y ago
  This is true even for the BSD licenses that are not GPL-compatible. "Free software" doesn't mean "GPL-compatible only."
  - icebraining 13y ago
    The GNU project even has a full list of GPL-Incompatible Free Software Licenses: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#GPLIncompatibleLicenses http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#GPLIncompatibl...
- dragonwriter 13y ago
  > This is true because the 3 (and modified 2) clause BSD license are GPL compatible and approved by the FSF. They might be compatible with the GPLv3, because of its allowance of extra terms; they are strictly incompatible with the GPLv2, een though the FSF claimed that they were compatible with it when the GPLv2 was the current GPL version (the FSF's claim that they are compatible -- a self-interested one to induce people to relicenses BSD-licensed code as GPL-licensed code, is indefensible since both versions require specific copyright notices, the BSD license itself, and the specific disclaimer of warranty included as part of the BSD license, and all of those requirements are additional requirements incompatible with the GPLv2.) The FSF has an overt interest in promoting the relicensing of code under the GPL which gives them a motive to exaggerate the degree to which this action is valid under other licenses. They are not neutral, objective party when it comes to license compatibility.

_delirium 13y ago

> I am even more uncomfortable with the AGPL, which strikes me as a demonstration that freedom in the name of freedom is ultimately self-consuming and self-defeating I actually read the AGPL as driven by mostly pragmatic factors. It didn't even come from the FSF initially, but from a developer (Affero) who believed it fit their business strategy better than the existing licenses. One of the traditional business strategies built on the GPL, which RMS does not greatly like, but is quite possible to do, is the dual-licensed GPL/proprietary approach. People who are willing to GPL their own software may incorporate your code under the GPL's terms. Other people who prefer more traditional commercial terms can, alternately, purchase a commercial license. In the webapp setting this approach no longer works, because the GPL only covers "distribution", and a webapp backend is never distributed. Therefore nobody will buy a commercial license. The AGPL more or less restores the traditional GPL terms in the webapp setting, where you have to GPL your product if you ship an app containing the GPL'd code: only now, deploying a public webapp is a form of "shipping" (which is how most software devs actually do see the situation... deploying a live webapp is a modern-day form of shipping software). And in practice, it seems the most common alternative to the AGPL in this setting is to just keep your code fully proprietary, so competitors can't build on it. I think in that sense AGPL is helpful if it encourages more releases, e.g. if it encourages more companies to take the Launchpad approach with their code (AGPL) rather than the GitHub approach to it (proprietary). The other common alternative is to release the source but under a non-OSI license like "free for noncommercial use only, commercial users must buy a license". The AGPL seems at least more generous than that.

jordigh 13y ago
> One of the traditional business strategies built on the GPL, which RMS does not greatly like, but is quite possible to do, is the dual-licensed GPL/proprietary approach. He actually does like it: https://www.fsf.org/blogs/rms/selling-exceptions https://www.fsf.org/blogs/rms/selling-exceptions
- aaron-lebo 13y ago
  It isn't obvious to me why he makes this exception. He is very rigorous in many of his other beliefs (GNU/Linux, this "open vs "free" debate). If he does not agree with BSD/MIT licenses because they inevitably allow companies to limit the "freedom" of their customers, how is selling an exception any different except that the open source project is now making money? I mean an argument could be made at that point that you are selling off your principles to the highest bidder. I don't necessarily believe that, but still...

Spooky23 13y ago

Your preference for BSD is certainly valid, but it's valid because of your objectives. If you want a software package that you own to be openly collaborated, but still controlled by you, the GPL is a great copyright construct to do that with. There isn't a right answer here. I think Stallman has an ideologically pure argument that is appealing to me as a consumer, but not always ideal for my business needs. I disagree that BSD solutions will necessarily "win" in the long run. There's no incentive to share.

yxhuvud 13y ago
There are plenty of incentives to share. They can be summarized by this: Code that you don't share is code that you have to maintain yourself. Code that you share is code that you can offload the maintaining to someone else.
- Spooky23 13y ago
  I agree. But offload != collaboration. With BSD, there is no legal incentive for somebody to take their ball and go home, or take your ball and sell it. Depending on what you want, that can be a good thing. Making commercialization difficult is not always bad -- if you own the copyrights, you can license to commercial users under terms favorable to you.
  - einhverfr 13y ago
    Also I don't think the BSD license makes it harder to commercialize software than the GPL does. You can't have a dual license model without the GPL, and that also requires copyright assignments. And once you do that, you are controlling not whether the software can be commercialized but merely who can commercialize it.
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midas007 13y ago
Licenses are a toolbox, like the tech they cover. Wanna stop basically everything commercial related? AGPL Wanna stop tivozation? GPL 3 Wanna allow tivozation? GPL 2 Wanna allow general commercialization? 2-clause BSD EDIT: if anyone remembers the OSS license feature matrix site that's new, plz reply.

aaron-lebo 13y ago

A friend recently introduced me to the ISC http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISC_license http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISC_license which is similar to the MIT and BSD except extraneous language has been removed. If you like the simplicity of BSD, maybe you'll like this even more? OpenBSD uses it.

brianpgordon 13y ago

> I am uncomfortable with the MIT license's sublicensing grant I did a little research to try to figure out what you meant; tell me if I have it right: MIT allows you to redistribute the code under a different license. The problem is that the sublicense might be more permissive than the MIT license, potentially allowing someone to bypass the requirements of the MIT license. Is that what you meant?

einhverfr 13y ago
Not quite. One right that can be passed on is the right to sublicense, which gives the licensee the right to issue new licenses. The licensee cannot provide downstream licenses to rights he or she did not receive. So the license can never be more permissive than the existing one. The difference is that under the BSD license, the original author grants licenses and requires notice on downstream redistribution. Someone can add code, however, and add restrictions to that code. The MIT license allows something very different, which is the right of a mere licensee to negotiate licenses (provided they are no more permissive than what was granted) on behalf of the licensor. So you can take MIT licensed code with no changes and relicense it under the GPL. The BSD license requires that you license only your code in it (and the corresponding work as a whole) under the GPL, but the MIT license allows you to add restrictions to code you did not author.

koide 13y ago

I don't think he misses the point. He just doesn't find it a good one. I mean, you are of course entitled to your opinion, and to call his a mistake, but saying RMS "misses the point" of what he's been working on almost 30 years is a bit disingenuous. And I personally disagree with the statement that BSD-like licenses are definitely better than GPL. As always, it depends. What would have happened to Linux without GPL? Would it support as many devices as it does? Would it be as widespread as it is? On the other hand, I agree that a BSD-like license has been a plus for PostgreSQL, by permitting the existence of various 'PostgreSQL enhanced' companies selling their versions and offering support. What's ultimately more important than the license is the people working on the project and the community that forms around it. They are what ultimately lead to success or failure, not the choice of a license.

zanny 13y ago
> What's ultimately more important than the license is the people working on the project and the community that forms around it. Is it? Look at the router industry - licenses like zlib, the busybox license, and the "no copyright" sqlite licenses have enabled an entire industry to take open source software and use it for profit without having to invest developer hours to making it themselves. But they still sell that software, and take away their users freedoms, on their routers. Every time I buy a new one, I have to either look for one with an open source firmware already installed, or be very careful to make sure one I get is supposed so I can reflash it (if its even possible on some models) to reclaim my freedoms. Tons of other embedded devices do the same. As long as Linux at least is gpl v2, they can get away with using the kernel as well as long as they don't modify it directly. And who knows how much open source code Microsoft and Apple have in their OS installs that has been heavily modified without any of that work being contributed back to the source projects while those companies profit off license key sales?
- koide 13y ago
  Yes, it is. I don't understand your point. There are people taking advantage of both GPL and BSD. Some (not all) of the GPL violators can be made to comply, and none of the BSD "violators" can be made to comply, because they are not actual violators. All of the previous statements do not alter at all that all the software pieces that are "taken advantage of" are huge value contributions to society at large and that their success is not dependent on the license choice. If you are angered by "other people profiting with my free software" you will of course choose GPL to have an option to sue. If you don't care, you will choose BSD or GPL for another reason. Neither option will make much of a difference on the success of your project.

HerraBRE 13y ago

My apologies if this is slightly inflammatory, but in my opinion preferring BSD-style licenses over copyleft licenses is both selfish and elitist (or classist, if you will). It's an attitude which says that as long as the elite class of techies get freedom to do as they like, that's good enough. The freedom of the end-users does not matter, even to the point that when Free Software advocates ask developers to take their end-user's freedoms into account, that request is met with outright hostility. It's a very selfish and one-sided type of freedom. Freedom for us, not for them. Freedom to oppress, monetize and lock-in the peons who don't know how to code.

clarry 13y ago
Permissive licenses give freedoms for techies and users equally. If it's free for one, it's free for the other. Less permissive licenses, and the GPL in particular, restrict both users and techies. Users can be subject to oppression, monetization and lock-in if they are willing. But it is their choice. And if they so want, they can grab that free code and hire a developer to "oppress, monetize, and lock-in" the other guy. If he is willing to be oppressed.
dragonwriter 13y ago
> It's an attitude which says that as long as the elite class of techies get freedom to do as they like, that's good enough. The freedom of the end-users does not matter I actually don't see the additional restrictions in the GPL as doing much for end users, per se. The real beneficiaries are still developers, just developers one level further removed from the licensor than the beneficiaries of the freedom in permissive licenses. But if you think that a substantial portion of the people using your work under a permissive license are themselves likely to offer a Free/Open license (whether permissive or copyleft), a copyleft license actually may reduce the freedom actually experienced by the indirect beneficiaries as well as that experienced by direct licensees.
joesb 13y ago
What freedom does BSD takes from users? Users are equally welcome to use BSD code. BSD allow anyone to do anything to BSD code. GPL prevents developers from doing everything to GPL code. That says more about users being selfish and eilitst than the other way around. Why? Just because they are end-users means they are better then me? That's exactly selfish right there.

EGreg 13y ago

I would say that the FSF is using Free Software as a weapon to get all the other proprietary software to open up. Usually the biggest barriers to entry by free software are network effects and proprietary agreements. See the recent article about Bloomberg http://mattturck.com/2014/03/19/can-the-bloomberg-terminal-be-toppled/ http://mattturck.com/2014/03/19/can-the-bloomberg-terminal-b... (I bet someone at bloomberg read it because they released an article the next day: http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-03-20/tesla-can-topple-the-car-dealer-monopoly http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-03-20/tesla-can-t...)

einhverfr 13y ago
That's why so much new software is FOSS. It's basically the only way to break in without massive funding and unrealistic expectations. Again, freedom is economically valuable.

mcguire 13y ago

"Yeah, SunOS forked from BSD. How is it doing these days compared to the open source versions?" How is BSD doing compared to Linux? (Keeping in mind that BSD is officially something like 20 years older than Linux.) I wonder how much better it would be doing if it hadn't been forked so many times by so many really smart people in the 80's and 90's?

einhverfr 13y ago
I can personally count the FreeBSD contributors in the LedgerSMB community. I don't know that firm counts are really possible but I would say FreeBSD ports were one of the first packages formally added (even before Debian). It's hard to say for sure. However, from what I have seenof the FreeBSD community, they seem quite active and vibrant.

belorn 13y ago

> The question, rather literally is who has a right to tell you what license your works go under, and under what circumstances. When ever I see this question put forth regarding GPL, I see it as extremely dishonest question. No one want to license software just for licensing sake. What some people want to do is to prohibit copying, modification and usage of work in order to create profits. The question you actually asking is: Who has the right to tell if restrictions on copying, modification and usage is allowed on a work. It has nothing to do with freedom, and the answer is always going to be the author. Political philosophers has long since past agreed that permission to restrict other people freedom is not liberty.

einhverfr 13y ago
> The question you actually asking is: Who has the right to tell if restrictions on copying, modification and usage is allowed on a work. It has nothing to do with freedom, and the answer is always going to be the author. Political philosophers has long since past agreed that permission to restrict other people freedom is not liberty. Read the full blog post. The question goes effectively to a question of enumerated liberties vs work ownership, and myself siding with the latter. There may be lots of reasons to license or not under the BSD license but once you do, then you are saying that anyone downstream gets to own their own work. Again I define "own" and "work" in the piece. I would recommend you read it.

thatthatis 13y ago

Well said. I've tried in the past to articulate the "creator's freedom" that you're talking about. To my view copy middle is the only truly free as in freedom licensing paradigm. But, I also don't think proprietary software is necessarily evil.

dTal 13y ago

>Freedom can't be defined as a freedom from restriction or a Lockean framework of liberty, as Stallman imagines, but rather the freedom to engage creative or productive endeavors without micromanagement from others. How is "freedom to engage creative or productive endeavors without micromanagement from others" not a "freedom from restriction"? Is the implication here that using the GPL is tantamount to "micromanagement from others"? Because I don't really see it. >one need not worry so much about people misappropriating things because in the end they cannot out-compete what is free and open. Yeah, SunOS forked from BSD. How is it doing these days compared to the open source versions? That's not the example I would pick. How about Apple forking FreeBSD? >The question, rather literally is who has a right to tell you what license your works go under I'm not sure what this has to do with GPL vs BSD. Nobody has the right to force you to use a particular license. Ideally, nobody gets to change the license of code you wrote either, just because they changed a variable name. It is this particular guarantee that the GPL provides and BSD doesn't.