5 ms·

I'm glad that GNU led the way on software freedom, but I cannot help but feel like the GPL is going the way of old blue collar unions. Useful, nay, necessary a

I'm glad that GNU led the way on software freedom, but I cannot help but feel like the GPL is going the way of old blue collar unions. Useful, nay, necessary at one time, but have now outgrown their original mandate and now exist unto themselves.

gtt 17y ago
They are too young to die or retire. I think we still need both unions and GPL.
- alnayyir 17y ago
  Too young? Do you have any idea how old the Teamsters and the IWW are? The IWW was involved in turn-of-the-century populist anarchist agitprop and labor activism. Fer chrissakes, do you think nothing has changed since then? I make $20 an hour to code, and a guy I know makes $80/hour (he started at that wage!) to tape drywall and carry out garbage. If I could take his job, I would. I mean ffs. And that's in NYC.
  - jrockway 17y ago
    I make $20 an hour to code ... And that's in NYC. No offense, but unless you are a grad student and this is your stipend, you are horribly underpaid. The problem is not unions, the problem is where you have chosen to work.
    - alnayyir 17y ago
      I know that I'm horribly underpaid, but I took it because I was in a tight spot. I'll be moving out to California eventually.
ciupicri 17y ago
old blue collar unions = ?
- alnayyir 17y ago
  Wikipedia -> The history of laborer's unions in the United States. Urban dictionary -> blue collar
startingup 17y ago
Exactly my feeling. My thesis is that FSF achieved its popularity in the heyday of Microsoft monopoly serving as a counter-force, and as Microsoft's hegemony declined (thanks in part to FSF's efforts), it has become less relevant. Open source (I intentionally do not want to use Stallman's language on this) is thriving but FSF is not. GPL is way too dogmatic, and given the fact that most free software actually is written by people with a paycheck from those hated proprietary software companies (at any rate, companies that definitely do not buy into FSF dogma), there always has been an underlying tension between their philosophy and the vast majority of contributors to open source. Basically Stallman wants them to feel dirty getting that paycheck. As a result, we are moving to a different phase in the open source world - focus on code, not on the politics. I want to add an illustration of the perverse effects GPL produced in practice. MySQL - now in the hands of Larry Ellison ... there must be some irony there - perfectly shows how to use GPL in a very "interesting" way. I have dealt with MySQL salesmen on several occasions, so I know how they "use" GPL. Basically they would assert with full confidence that your use-case (whatever it may be) would violate GPL, so you have to pony up unless you want all your code to be GPL. They knew how to exploit "GPL fear" in companies, but would back down in most cases once you bring a lawyer. That is the practical real world effect of dogma. My prediction: MySQL will be orphaned intentionally by Oracle. No one else is going to touch it because forking the MySQL code will not let anyone escape the famous Oracle salesmen.
- alnayyir 17y ago
  We use MySQL at work. After a major infrastructural change I think I'll be able to get us to move to Postgres. It might depends on whether or not we have any fires to put out at that point but we'll see. Postgres is better supported by the framework we're moving to. shrugs I'm not sure what, if any, contributions I can make to this cause. When I have anything worth releasing, I try to release BSD, but I'd really like to be able to contribute to llvm. I don't know that I necessarily have any skills that would be useful to them. GPLv3 is horridly dogmatic. A great number of the old hackers are on some kind of corporate payroll, frequently Red Hat. I'm not certain I'm 100% comfortable with the current corporate patronage system because it has allowed people like Ulrich Drepper to dig out his private little Hell with glibc and torment anyone who begs a moment of his time.
dschobel 17y ago
Depends, if you mean to say that it's going to be replaced by things like the BSD or Apache license, then that's plausible. But a full-on death for OSS is not going to happen. The Creative Commons / Free Culture movement is fairly recent and only growing in popularity and it's easy to see how it dovetails with a lot of the FSFs work in software. People (and very large corporations alike) are clearly still seeing the value in liberally licensing their works so that lots of people can enjoy them.
- alnayyir 17y ago
  >Depends, if you mean to say that it's going to be replaced by things like the BSD or Apache license, then that's plausible. That is precisely what I meant. >But a full-on death for OSS is not going to happen. That's ludicrous, not what I said, and not what I want. I would carry the torch all by my lonesome if that actually happened. >The Creative Commons / Free Culture movement is fairly recent and only growing in popularity I don't care about either/or. I care about software. >People (and very large corporations alike) are clearly still seeing the value in liberally licensing their works so that lots of people can enjoy them. Mostly as a means of marketing/promotion in the hopes that people will pay for the stuff that they can't steal outright. Don't kid yourself otherwise.
tjr 17y ago
The vast majority of computer users, I would suppose, have no concept whatsoever of software freedom. A lot of software is still proprietary, and people are still running into problems just like RMS did years ago with being unable to fix the printer driver software. The software landscape has changed, but software freedom remains essential. The FSF has been perhaps a bit slow to respond to some of the changes (e.g., the AGPL probably should have been developed years earlier), but the underlying message stays the same, and, I believe, is increasingly important as software usage continues to waft into every conceivable facet of our lives.
- blasdel 17y ago
  The AGPL is a completely unenforceable EULA, both practically and legally. It attempts to restrict your ability to run the software -- freedom 0 The AGPL will never ever succeed. It will only ever be used by egotistical idiots and dying companies that wish to sear a scarlet letter into their code -- noone but I may profit from this work
  - lamby 17y ago
    > noone but I may profit from this work With a strict definition of "profit" this seems more a criticism of dual-licensed GPL works than the AGPL; software published under the AGPL does not grant any sort of monopoly to the person publishing it -- even if they were selling a proprietary version of the same code, it doesn't restrict third parties making money from it. And if we weaken our definition of "profit" to mean some sort of benefit, then the argument is even weaker.
    - blasdel 17y ago
      Third parties attempting to extend the software and sell access are intended to release source code. The only room for profit is in network effects -- any other attempt to sustain margins more than barely above actual costs would be tenuous, as someone else could come along and undercut you. The copyright holder(s) that licensed their work under the AGPL are not subject to any such restrictions (no multi-licensing is necessary). There's no way to compete with them fairly.
pingswept 17y ago
It seems that the GPL licenses are the most common licenses: http://www.blackducksoftware.com/oss/licenses/ http://www.blackducksoftware.com/oss/licenses/ I don't know whether it's actually true, but I find it surprising. It sounds like Black Duck Software runs some weird web crawler that collects license data continuously.

gtt 17y ago

They are too young to die or retire. I think we still need both unions and GPL.

alnayyir 17y ago
Too young? Do you have any idea how old the Teamsters and the IWW are? The IWW was involved in turn-of-the-century populist anarchist agitprop and labor activism. Fer chrissakes, do you think nothing has changed since then? I make $20 an hour to code, and a guy I know makes $80/hour (he started at that wage!) to tape drywall and carry out garbage. If I could take his job, I would. I mean ffs. And that's in NYC.
- jrockway 17y ago
  I make $20 an hour to code ... And that's in NYC. No offense, but unless you are a grad student and this is your stipend, you are horribly underpaid. The problem is not unions, the problem is where you have chosen to work.
  - alnayyir 17y ago
    I know that I'm horribly underpaid, but I took it because I was in a tight spot. I'll be moving out to California eventually.

ciupicri 17y ago

old blue collar unions = ?

alnayyir 17y ago
Wikipedia -> The history of laborer's unions in the United States. Urban dictionary -> blue collar

startingup 17y ago

Exactly my feeling. My thesis is that FSF achieved its popularity in the heyday of Microsoft monopoly serving as a counter-force, and as Microsoft's hegemony declined (thanks in part to FSF's efforts), it has become less relevant. Open source (I intentionally do not want to use Stallman's language on this) is thriving but FSF is not. GPL is way too dogmatic, and given the fact that most free software actually is written by people with a paycheck from those hated proprietary software companies (at any rate, companies that definitely do not buy into FSF dogma), there always has been an underlying tension between their philosophy and the vast majority of contributors to open source. Basically Stallman wants them to feel dirty getting that paycheck. As a result, we are moving to a different phase in the open source world - focus on code, not on the politics. I want to add an illustration of the perverse effects GPL produced in practice. MySQL - now in the hands of Larry Ellison ... there must be some irony there - perfectly shows how to use GPL in a very "interesting" way. I have dealt with MySQL salesmen on several occasions, so I know how they "use" GPL. Basically they would assert with full confidence that your use-case (whatever it may be) would violate GPL, so you have to pony up unless you want all your code to be GPL. They knew how to exploit "GPL fear" in companies, but would back down in most cases once you bring a lawyer. That is the practical real world effect of dogma. My prediction: MySQL will be orphaned intentionally by Oracle. No one else is going to touch it because forking the MySQL code will not let anyone escape the famous Oracle salesmen.

alnayyir 17y ago
We use MySQL at work. After a major infrastructural change I think I'll be able to get us to move to Postgres. It might depends on whether or not we have any fires to put out at that point but we'll see. Postgres is better supported by the framework we're moving to. shrugs I'm not sure what, if any, contributions I can make to this cause. When I have anything worth releasing, I try to release BSD, but I'd really like to be able to contribute to llvm. I don't know that I necessarily have any skills that would be useful to them. GPLv3 is horridly dogmatic. A great number of the old hackers are on some kind of corporate payroll, frequently Red Hat. I'm not certain I'm 100% comfortable with the current corporate patronage system because it has allowed people like Ulrich Drepper to dig out his private little Hell with glibc and torment anyone who begs a moment of his time.

dschobel 17y ago

Depends, if you mean to say that it's going to be replaced by things like the BSD or Apache license, then that's plausible. But a full-on death for OSS is not going to happen. The Creative Commons / Free Culture movement is fairly recent and only growing in popularity and it's easy to see how it dovetails with a lot of the FSFs work in software. People (and very large corporations alike) are clearly still seeing the value in liberally licensing their works so that lots of people can enjoy them.

alnayyir 17y ago
>Depends, if you mean to say that it's going to be replaced by things like the BSD or Apache license, then that's plausible. That is precisely what I meant. >But a full-on death for OSS is not going to happen. That's ludicrous, not what I said, and not what I want. I would carry the torch all by my lonesome if that actually happened. >The Creative Commons / Free Culture movement is fairly recent and only growing in popularity I don't care about either/or. I care about software. >People (and very large corporations alike) are clearly still seeing the value in liberally licensing their works so that lots of people can enjoy them. Mostly as a means of marketing/promotion in the hopes that people will pay for the stuff that they can't steal outright. Don't kid yourself otherwise.

tjr 17y ago

The vast majority of computer users, I would suppose, have no concept whatsoever of software freedom. A lot of software is still proprietary, and people are still running into problems just like RMS did years ago with being unable to fix the printer driver software. The software landscape has changed, but software freedom remains essential. The FSF has been perhaps a bit slow to respond to some of the changes (e.g., the AGPL probably should have been developed years earlier), but the underlying message stays the same, and, I believe, is increasingly important as software usage continues to waft into every conceivable facet of our lives.

blasdel 17y ago
The AGPL is a completely unenforceable EULA, both practically and legally. It attempts to restrict your ability to run the software -- freedom 0 The AGPL will never ever succeed. It will only ever be used by egotistical idiots and dying companies that wish to sear a scarlet letter into their code -- noone but I may profit from this work
- lamby 17y ago
  > noone but I may profit from this work With a strict definition of "profit" this seems more a criticism of dual-licensed GPL works than the AGPL; software published under the AGPL does not grant any sort of monopoly to the person publishing it -- even if they were selling a proprietary version of the same code, it doesn't restrict third parties making money from it. And if we weaken our definition of "profit" to mean some sort of benefit, then the argument is even weaker.
  - blasdel 17y ago
    Third parties attempting to extend the software and sell access are intended to release source code. The only room for profit is in network effects -- any other attempt to sustain margins more than barely above actual costs would be tenuous, as someone else could come along and undercut you. The copyright holder(s) that licensed their work under the AGPL are not subject to any such restrictions (no multi-licensing is necessary). There's no way to compete with them fairly.

pingswept 17y ago

It seems that the GPL licenses are the most common licenses: http://www.blackducksoftware.com/oss/licenses/ http://www.blackducksoftware.com/oss/licenses/ I don't know whether it's actually true, but I find it surprising. It sounds like Black Duck Software runs some weird web crawler that collects license data continuously.