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MIT: "heres <product>, do whatever you want with it" GPL: "heres <product>, do whatever you want with it as long as you make all your changes public, oh and th

MIT: "heres <product>, do whatever you want with it" GPL: "heres <product>, do whatever you want with it as long as you make all your changes public, oh and theres a ton of rules you need to conform to if you want to distribute <product> with <other_product>" I don't see how a license with MORE restrictions can be seen as free-er.

clarry 12y ago
GPL continued: "and because we came up with all these crazy rules, you'1l probably come across other free software (including ours) whose rules you can't abide by while playing by ours, so you're not permitted to do much to remix and redistribute these two code bases... sorry, you may not! but you're still free! ehehe! you're still free because you're a user and if you're trying to exercise the two or three freedoms that are relevant to developers and distributors, your freedoms no longer matter! you still have these freedoms though, even though you may not!" And if you still want to exercise these freedoms, you're like, you want to kill people ... that's crazy!
- bronson 12y ago
  I wish you'd said this in a less childish way. The point about GPLv2/v3 conflicts demonstrating how unfree the GPL can be is good, but the post itself is downvotable.
  - clarry 12y ago
    I'm not proud of the way I put it, but I guess that just shows how tired I am of this argument. The same hypocritical claims about GPL being free despite very obviously denying very important freedoms are repeated all over the place, and then I'm a killer and a developer (how evil of me to patch that code for someone!) and all that, because that's the most coherent arguments people can make. Ignoring the actually relevant freedoms at hand and going into meta-discussion about the meaning of freedom and making analogies concerning completely unrelated things (such as killing or otherwise harming) is how they argue when they can't address the problem -- if they don't just flat out say that I don't need that freedom to share or mix code... Yes I'm very tired of it. Life goes on, and I continue not to share a large body of GPLv2 licensed code with anybody because it would be illegal for me to do so. I keep telling them it's because the license is not free, but it just doesn't seem to work.
baq 12y ago
the code has more guarantees about its freedom. it's not about what you can do with the code, it's about the code itself.
belorn 12y ago
The old "if it has numerical less words, it must be better" argument. I can add one word to the MIT license, and it becomes the least compatible open source license in existence. One word. "Only the above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software." You can't parse out the effect of permissions by counting words, paragraphs or lines.

clarry 12y ago

GPL continued: "and because we came up with all these crazy rules, you'1l probably come across other free software (including ours) whose rules you can't abide by while playing by ours, so you're not permitted to do much to remix and redistribute these two code bases... sorry, you may not! but you're still free! ehehe! you're still free because you're a user and if you're trying to exercise the two or three freedoms that are relevant to developers and distributors, your freedoms no longer matter! you still have these freedoms though, even though you may not!" And if you still want to exercise these freedoms, you're like, you want to kill people ... that's crazy!

bronson 12y ago
I wish you'd said this in a less childish way. The point about GPLv2/v3 conflicts demonstrating how unfree the GPL can be is good, but the post itself is downvotable.
- clarry 12y ago
  I'm not proud of the way I put it, but I guess that just shows how tired I am of this argument. The same hypocritical claims about GPL being free despite very obviously denying very important freedoms are repeated all over the place, and then I'm a killer and a developer (how evil of me to patch that code for someone!) and all that, because that's the most coherent arguments people can make. Ignoring the actually relevant freedoms at hand and going into meta-discussion about the meaning of freedom and making analogies concerning completely unrelated things (such as killing or otherwise harming) is how they argue when they can't address the problem -- if they don't just flat out say that I don't need that freedom to share or mix code... Yes I'm very tired of it. Life goes on, and I continue not to share a large body of GPLv2 licensed code with anybody because it would be illegal for me to do so. I keep telling them it's because the license is not free, but it just doesn't seem to work.

baq 12y ago

the code has more guarantees about its freedom. it's not about what you can do with the code, it's about the code itself.

belorn 12y ago

The old "if it has numerical less words, it must be better" argument. I can add one word to the MIT license, and it becomes the least compatible open source license in existence. One word. "Only the above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software." You can't parse out the effect of permissions by counting words, paragraphs or lines.