8 ms·

Why OccupyGPL is wrong

77 points by xai3luGi 12y ago

Eridrus 12y ago
Arguments about GPL vs permissive licenses are pretty much moot when so many companies are building SaaS software. Without the Affero extension, GPL is pretty much toothless to stop SaaS companies using your software without releasing their source code. Personally, I think there should be an Affero LGPL since the abundance of permissively licensed code makes my day job so much more pleasant and I would be happy if everyone was forced to share their contributions. Though I will say that even AGPL seems like it has a hole where you simply expose whatever library you want to use as a network service, and you only have to release the wrapper. But I'm a little confused by what the goals of the GPL license are besides a warm and fuzzy feeling that no-one is ripping them off though. Professional software developers outnumber volunteers by huge margins, most people working on open source code bases are getting paid to do it. The ability of corporations to make use of open source is what funds most of the actual development. If you couldn't run proprietary software on Linux, it would probably not be getting any significant attention. Hence my thoughts on LGPL being a superior license to actually making sure improvements see the light of day. GPL is simply a nonstarter for most companies since they're trying to build up a useful asset and are not willing to open source key bits of it (which are generally not technically interesting), but are more than happy to release improvements to infrastructure, since that's not their core business. Is it just that the atmosphere has changed? When GPL was a more common license, it seems like they were really fighting the good fight, since companies weren't willing to release anything lest they give up some competitive advantage, whereas these days at least some code is being released.
- kazinator 12y ago
  > GPL is pretty much toothless to stop SaaS companies using your software That's because the GPL doesn't restrict use. It is not an EULA. (Of course, it has disclaimers related to use: by using the software, you agree with the liability disclaimers, but you don't have to agree with anything else just to be a user.) Users are free not to share their modifications. Until you redistribute, modifications are basically a form of use. This is in line with the GNU philosophy; Stallman certainly doesn't want you to feel that you're restricted from privately inspecting a program and altering it to suit your needs.
  - millstone 12y ago
    This is absolutely NOT in line with the GNU philosophy. See https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-serve.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s... This ought to be easy to see. If I take a modified emacs, put it on a web server, and provide access to it via a terminal emulator in a web browser, I've effectively distributed it without actually distributing it. It's an end run around the GPL.
    - Eridrus 12y ago
      Thanks for the link, a few more links in I found this: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-affero-gpl.html https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-affero-gpl.html > We don't see any sensible way to address the SaaSS problem with license conditions on particular programs. Even to write a legal condition to distinguish between SaaSS use and non-SaaSS use would be a challenge, and if we had that, it is not clear what we would want to require in the SaaSS case. Thus, our solution to the problem of SaaSS is simple: refuse to use it. > If a program is meant specifically and only for SaaSS, you shouldn't write it. But many programs are useful for a variety of kinds of services, including some that are SaaSS and some that are not. It's useful to write and release these programs so people can set up non-SaaSS services with them, and good to release them under the AGPL. So it seems like they do see it as an issue, but not one they can really do anything about in terms of licensing.
    - kazinator 12y ago
      That doesn't have anything to do with my argument, which describes a scenario in which there is a user who took some program and adapted it to suit his or her needs, running on his or her own equipment. In this situation, the program has additional users. However, they equipment doesn't belong to them. They are only visitors to someone else's private property. Even if they had the source to the modifications, they would not be able to make further modifications and put them into effect on your server, since they don't have administrative access. There is no run around the GPL; the GPL is simply not applicable. It can't give people the right to tinker with your private property. Never mind not having the GPL-granted rights: if the users are getting a free service, they don't even have any right to expect that it will continue. Tomorrow you might pull the plug on the server (perhaps forced to, due to economics) and that's that. The issue here isn't whether or not there is a GPL violation. There clearly isn't; the GPL simply isn't applicable. The issue here is that gullible users make uninformed choices such that they throw away freedoms. The "takes away your freedom" rhetoric therefore rings untrue. That's like saying a contract that you irresponsibly signed without reading it has "taken" your freedom away. Where is the personal accountability? The only genuine freedom-related problem is that widespread use of anything creates pressure on people to become users, simply in order to interoperate with the majority. The naive lemmings who unknowingly give up their rights create pressure on others to knowingly do so. I certainly don't want to be coerced into signing up for some SaaS just because it has turned into the only way of doing business.
- cbd1984 12y ago
  > But I'm a little confused by what the goals of the GPL license are besides a warm and fuzzy feeling that no-one is ripping them off though. To make sure open source developers aren't used as sharecroppers by companies that take their work, sell it for a profit, and don't release any improvements or allow anyone else to benefit from the fact the original work is open source.
  - geon 12y ago
    ...so, a warm and fuzzy feeling.
    - cbd1984 12y ago
      No. That's not it, and I'm tired of people lying and claiming that's all it is.
- jallmann 12y ago
  > what the goals of the GPL license are besides a warm and fuzzy feeling that no-one is ripping them off GPL ensures freedom for users of the software, not developers of the software -- a distinction that is missed every single time licensing is discussed. Developers that use the GPL are (hopefully consciously) making a choice to ensure software freedom for their users. This article did a very good job of tackling this this from another perspective, by addressing the usual (and tired) argument that the GPL offers less freedom than more permissive licenses due to the share-alike clause. Limiting "power" to take away freedom is a nice way to put it. Not to derail this discussion, but my personal opinion is that the GPL is a bit ahead of its time. With the marginal cost of software being nil, the path of least resistance is just to make software free. The problem is, someone still has to produce this software, and unless we hit post-scarcity, production is going to cost money [1]. So the GPL straddles an awkward tension between ideals and economic reality right now. This is in addition to the more overt goals of FSF/GNU in terms of privacy, control and self-determination, which RMS has proven to be quite prescient about. [1] "In the long run, making programs free is a step toward the postscarcity world, where nobody will have to work very hard just to make a living. People will be free to devote themselves to activities that are fun, such as programming, after spending the necessary ten hours a week on required tasks such as legislation, family counseling, robot repair and asteroid prospecting. There will be no need to be able to make a living from programming." https://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.html https://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.html -- a very good read.
  - djur 12y ago
    Nearly every argument against the GPL is based on convenience or desirability for developers. I think in a lot of ways that's the primary split between the FSF free/OSI open source factions. Reading the GNU manifesto was a lifechanger for me. Even though I've strayed (i.e. am employed producing proprietary software), I still believe the GNU project and the FSF are the most important things to ever happen to the computing world.
  - Gurkenmaster 12y ago
    >GPL ensures freedom for users of the software, not developers of the software GPL may be true for end user facing applications but it's terrible for libraries where the primary user is the developer.
- frozenport 12y ago
  >>but are more than happy to release improvements to infrastructure, since that's not their core business. Without GPL companies choose what their `core business` is. I don't want to argue with a product vision manager what to release and what not the release - its much easier for me to remind them of the law.
  - geon 12y ago
    >> its much easier for me to remind them of the law. Isn't the benefit of open source - to get free updates to your code base - enough?
    - frozenport 12y ago
      Convincing other people is an unnecessary burden.
- logn 12y ago
  > Affero LGPL Yes, just the other day I was thinking over licensing options and realized this was needed too. The common way around it is to just grant an exception like Mongo did with their driver. Also, the Java world has been granting a classpath exception to GPL for ages. However, many people confuse AGPL for this non-existant Affero LGPL because they think that they can use an AGPL library in their proprietary code. I believe Mongo has contributed to this confusion but that ultimately the lack of this alternative license is mostly to blame. Regarding the rest of your post I disagree but more words explaining the value of GPL have been written than code :) so I'll not address that.
- throwaway8894 12y ago
  For anybody reading Eridrus' comment, it's a bunch of non sequiturs that indicate no understanding of software licensing. Rather than go through each sentence and point out why it's wrong myself, just read the GPL and a couple statements by Stallman first. Then as an exercise, read each sentence and point out why it's either wrong, or not even wrong.
- click170 12y ago
  I think the number of companies taking free software and making meaningful changes that they don't contribute back to the community is not that big at all, though I don't argue that some probably do exist. Consider the overhead involved in maintaining and packaging your own code base while still including updates from origin. Wouldn't it be much easier to submit a merge request so that you could just apt-get install the package and not worry about your own custom branch, not to mention feedback on your change from a much wider audience who are familiar with that code base? And then there's the fact that you're exposing yourself to liability that, again, would be solved by that merge request. It just seems like a lot of the ones that do, do it out of ignorance rather than malice. I don't disagree that companies need to build up assets, but I think for most companies including SaaS ones, those assets are systems which are comprised of unmodified FOSS software used in [sometimes not] innovative ways.
  - EmanueleAina 12y ago
    That may be the case now that FLOSS is worldwide renowed and people are starting to realize that private forks are costly, but it wasn't always so. The GPL was instrumental in forcing people to behave when nobody knew what to do, and it has been so successful that now people expect the behaviour enforced by it even when using more permissive licenses.
- cbd1984 12y ago
  > But I'm a little confused by what the goals of the GPL license are besides a warm and fuzzy feeling that no-one is ripping them off though. To make sure open source developers aren't used as sharecroppers by companies that take their work, sell it for a profit, and don't release any improvements or allow anyone else to benefit from the fact the original work is open source. (Other version hidden by mistake.)
kazinator 12y ago
http://choosealicense.com/no-license/ http://choosealicense.com/no-license/ neglects to cover liability, focusing only on permissions. While you may have a "right" not to put a license on your distributed work, you are open to liability if that work is implicated as a cause of some harm. A good chunk of the MIT license text is about liability, and it's ALL CAPS, which makes it 90% by weight.
- geon 12y ago
  Isn't this extremely US-centric? In my country, I can't even imagine someone suing (much less winning) for using a piece of software they got for free.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - pmontra 12y ago
    Better be safe than sorry, in any country.
  - kazinator 12y ago
    Well, the BSD and MIT licenses are named after institutions that are in the US of A. Many popular software licenses are American, and are based in American legal doctrine. Liability related to something which was "free" makes a certain amount of sense. Something given away from free could be harmful. Just because the giver didn't take compensation doesn't mean it's not their fault. Basically, when you give something for free, you're implicitly making a representation that the thing is good. If you don't make any disclaimers, then that representation is all there is. And so if that something you gave away causes harm, your representation now looks like a misrepresentation: you tricked someone into being harmed by your gift. That's what I think is the general idea. If your country doesn't have this sort of concept among its legal doctrines and statutes, that's kind of bad!
manicdee 12y ago
Redundant rant. OccupyGPL site now redirects to http://choosealicense.com/ http://choosealicense.com/ OccupyGPL previously complained that GPL wasn't really free because it imposed the burden of freedom on the business trying to sell a closed-source product who was hoping to use GPL or other Copyleft code.
new299 12y ago
OccupyGPL now redirects to "choosealicense.com", but it's still available on waybackmachine if anyone's interested: http://web.archive.org/web/20150210203941/http://www.occupygpl.org/ http://web.archive.org/web/20150210203941/http://www.occupyg...
- djur 12y ago
  Wow, that is insanely over the top and also pretty poorly written. I appreciate the irony of using a historically leftist image like the raised fist to promote what is essentially a pro-capitalist message ("Even if these people are companies who want to develop proprietary solutions. [sic] A company using your technology will increase the value of the project").
  - digi_owl 12y ago
    Welcome to modern marketing/propaganda, no symbol is beyond re-purposing.
cogburnd02 12y ago
> In the strange world of OccupyGPL, that's a “restriction”, I guess because it… restricts you from placing restrictions on someone else? But that's as silly as saying that outlawing slavery reduces freedom, because it takes away some people's freedom to own slaves. Hey, the analogy may be inflammatory, but the logic is the same, and it doesn't make sense in either case. The freedom to take away others' freedom is not a meaningful freedom to have — the proper word for that is not "freedom" but "power". Where have I heard that before? Oh right, as usual, the FSF said this long ago: "[O]ne so-called freedom that we do not advocate is the 'freedom to choose any license you want for software you write.' We reject this because it is really a form of power, not a freedom. This oft overlooked distinction is crucial. Freedom is being able to make decisions that affect mainly you; power is being able to make decisions that affect others more than you. ... We in the free software movement are not opposed to business, but we have seen what happens when a software business has the 'freedom' to impose arbitrary rules on the users of software. ... We believe you should decide what to do with the software you use; however, that is not what today's law says. Current copyright law places us in the position of power over users of our code, whether we like it or not. The ethical response to this situation is to proclaim freedom for each user, just as the Bill of Rights was supposed to exercise government power by guaranteeing each citizen's freedoms. That is what the GNU General Public License is for: it puts you in control of your usage of the software while protecting you from others who would like to take control of your decisions." https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/freedom-or-power.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/freedom-or-power.html
- forrestthewoods 12y ago
  Da fuck? "Making a program proprietary is an exercise of power." So is releasing source code and limiting what they can do with it. Or forcing them to do extra things (share source) if they do certain things (modify source). Stallman believes that linking against a DLL constitutes a derived work that would be subject to the GPL's copyleft nature. The legal validity of that belief is unknown. You're free to call that freedom if you like. I'll be over here in a corner considering it an abuse of power. "If we confuse power with freedom, we will fail to uphold real freedom." On that I do not disagree.
new299 12y ago
As a developer, the GPL is useful when you want to ensure that people don't take your work and profit from it. So it's often useful when companies want to level the playing field, without allowing competitors to gain an advantage. A cynic might say it allows you to subsume the competition, and control the market (if you maintain control of development). This can make the GPL a "safer" license for companies to release code under in some situations. The GPL is also useful if you have a political interest in moving the community as a whole toward open source software for everything. BSD-like licenses are useful when you want to gain adoption above all else. So BSD-like (or dual licensing) can be useful for example for file format reference parsers, tools were you want to gain adoption by companies (perhaps to later provide consulting work). As a user of software (not a developer/vendor of any kind). You probably don't care, as long as you can gain access to the sourcecode, so you can potentially get bugs fixed by a contractor. But the GPL protects users interests, so it may well be in your interest to support the use of the GPL on new projects.
- geon 12y ago
  > the GPL is useful when you want to ensure that people don't take your work and profit from it. Huh? Are you saying you can't make a profit from gpl-ed code? Then why was it written to begin with? If company A can profit from it, then so can company B. As far as licenses are concerned anyway. Time to market and network effects are probably much more important.
  - wmf 12y ago
    The author of GPL code can (try to) profit via proprietary dual licensing, but others cannot. http://producingoss.com/en/dual-licensing.html http://producingoss.com/en/dual-licensing.html
  - new299 12y ago
    > Huh? Are you saying you can't make a profit from gpl-ed code? Then why was it written to begin with? If company A can profit from it, then so can company B. I think selling GPL'd software is a difficult proposition yes. I don't think I know of any of any GPL projects which are sold for profit (unless there's some other value-add, in which case they are selling the value-add not the GPL'd software). > As far as licenses are concerned anyway. Time to market and network effects are probably much more important. In a limited view of software where you're only talking about websites you're possibly correct...
comex 12y ago
> In the strange world of OccupyGPL, that’s a “restriction”, I guess because it… restricts you from placing restrictions on someone else? But that’s as silly as saying that outlawing slavery reduces freedom, because it takes away some people’s freedom to own slaves. Hey, the analogy may be inflammatory, but the logic is the same, and it doesn’t make sense in either case. The freedom to take away others’ freedom is not a meaningful freedom to have — the proper word for that is not “freedom” but “power”. A more pragmatic way to put it is that it restricts you from using the code in the many real-life situations in which GPLing your entire program is simply not an option. The ideology behind the GPL is fundamentally utopian: it starts with a result - that users of software should have the freedoms to use, modify, share, etc. - and reverse engineers the rest of the world from there, including business models that are very different from the way most companies operated at the time of its creation and now, and which are not always practical. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, as it leads to a quite firm and well-defined set of principles, and can serve as a lighthouse for real businesses to try to navigate towards. But it means that individual developers often find themselves in situations where the GNU philosophy is irrelevant - while it's talking about the choice of whether to write free or proprietary software, or this blog post is considering marginal issues like the physical difficulty of distributing source code, they have, for various reasons, already found free software unacceptable as a premise, and are faced with the choice of what software to use. By virtue of their employment or business situation, they are not in the "club", and certain software only available to the "club" is therefore unavailable. From this standpoint, it's easy to see why the GPL feels like a restriction of freedom. Sometimes the premise is more mutable than it originally seems. See "Why CLISP is under GPL"[1] (an email thread barely younger than I am at 22), the old Apple Objective-C thing, and probably a lot of other cases; or look at the case of the Linux kernel, where the utter technical dominance of a GPLed program over all alternatives in certain spaces (particularly embedded) has made a lot of companies who clearly want absolutely nothing to do with free software put up source release webpages. Such examples are often cited as benefits of the copyleft strategy, and rightly so. But for better or worse, they're the exception rather than the rule. [1] http://clisp.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/clisp/clisp/doc/Why-CLISP-is-under-GPL http://clisp.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/clisp/clisp/doc/Why-...
- belorn 12y ago
bitL 12y ago
This site just reinforces my view that people are getting more insane and lazy, and to stick with releasing my own software under GPL... It won't prevent anyone from "stealing" my code (e.g. incorporating it into their own code without giving any credits nor releasing their modifications to the public), but at least their conscience will make them feel a bit worse, which I believe OccupyGPL is a sign of. I had my own share of rip offs when I generously released my SQL database server code under a more permissive license and as a consequence for multiple years students ripped it off for their own projects at one university I attended, and pretended they wrote it themselves...
egil 12y ago
Google cache of the original page in question, http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:TSYSWNu5z2AJ:www.occupygpl.org/ http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:TSYSWNu...
anonbanker 12y ago
After viewing this link, I think RMS might not be seeing the big picture here. There isn't merely an attack on GCC, but rather an attack on Free Software itself. HN has proven for the past few years that the valley is less in-tune with individual freedom than they are with corporate-compatible licenses. This has understandably created some disconnect and often friction between us. but regardless, stay with me on my reasoning. within a three month window, we have seen: * a downright (successful) coup by systemd, which is an RPC backdoor for proprietary corporate software to bypass GPL restrictions via trivial bits of LGPL'ed code, wrapped in the controversial plan to swallow the GNU toolchain whole. * very real talks about (GPL'd) GCC being replaced by (BSD Licensed) LLVM, followed by the peanut gallery using this as an example of the inferior quality of the GPL. * an outright attack on the GPL, using the slimiest sound bytes and half-truths, for not being corporate-compatible. Call me a conspiracy theorist (Literally: one who has a proven hypothesis about a group of people working together to commit a crime), but in the eighteen years I've been running linux, I've never seen this large an effort to sway people from using Free Software before. And no, I haven't forgotten about SCO v. IBM[0], "Get The Facts" campaign, or Halloween Documents I and II[1]. It would be easy to make a case for Microsoft, still being run by Steve Ballmer[2], as the culprit. But Apple and Cisco (and Red Hat, post-CentOS purchase) are not very good players in the GPL sandbox, and we can't exactly rule them out. All I know is I see a pattern, and, Confirmation Bias notwithstanding, I'll keep talking about it if these sort of articles continue getting frontpaged on HN. 0. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO%E2%80%93Linux_controversies#Microsoft_funding_of_SCO_controversy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO%E2%80%93Linux_controversies... 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents#Documents_I_and_II http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents#Documents_I... 2. http://arstechnica.com/business/2015/02/one-year-in-its-still-steve-ballmers-microsoft-satya-nadella-just-runs-it/ http://arstechnica.com/business/2015/02/one-year-in-its-stil...

77 points by xai3luGi 12y ago

Arguments about GPL vs permissive licenses are pretty much moot when so many companies are building SaaS software. Without the Affero extension, GPL is pretty much toothless to stop SaaS companies using your software without releasing their source code. Personally, I think there should be an Affero LGPL since the abundance of permissively licensed code makes my day job so much more pleasant and I would be happy if everyone was forced to share their contributions. Though I will say that even AGPL seems like it has a hole where you simply expose whatever library you want to use as a network service, and you only have to release the wrapper. But I'm a little confused by what the goals of the GPL license are besides a warm and fuzzy feeling that no-one is ripping them off though. Professional software developers outnumber volunteers by huge margins, most people working on open source code bases are getting paid to do it. The ability of corporations to make use of open source is what funds most of the actual development. If you couldn't run proprietary software on Linux, it would probably not be getting any significant attention. Hence my thoughts on LGPL being a superior license to actually making sure improvements see the light of day. GPL is simply a nonstarter for most companies since they're trying to build up a useful asset and are not willing to open source key bits of it (which are generally not technically interesting), but are more than happy to release improvements to infrastructure, since that's not their core business. Is it just that the atmosphere has changed? When GPL was a more common license, it seems like they were really fighting the good fight, since companies weren't willing to release anything lest they give up some competitive advantage, whereas these days at least some code is being released.

kazinator 12y ago
> GPL is pretty much toothless to stop SaaS companies using your software That's because the GPL doesn't restrict use. It is not an EULA. (Of course, it has disclaimers related to use: by using the software, you agree with the liability disclaimers, but you don't have to agree with anything else just to be a user.) Users are free not to share their modifications. Until you redistribute, modifications are basically a form of use. This is in line with the GNU philosophy; Stallman certainly doesn't want you to feel that you're restricted from privately inspecting a program and altering it to suit your needs.
- millstone 12y ago
  This is absolutely NOT in line with the GNU philosophy. See https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-serve.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s... This ought to be easy to see. If I take a modified emacs, put it on a web server, and provide access to it via a terminal emulator in a web browser, I've effectively distributed it without actually distributing it. It's an end run around the GPL.
  - Eridrus 12y ago
    Thanks for the link, a few more links in I found this: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-affero-gpl.html https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-affero-gpl.html > We don't see any sensible way to address the SaaSS problem with license conditions on particular programs. Even to write a legal condition to distinguish between SaaSS use and non-SaaSS use would be a challenge, and if we had that, it is not clear what we would want to require in the SaaSS case. Thus, our solution to the problem of SaaSS is simple: refuse to use it. > If a program is meant specifically and only for SaaSS, you shouldn't write it. But many programs are useful for a variety of kinds of services, including some that are SaaSS and some that are not. It's useful to write and release these programs so people can set up non-SaaSS services with them, and good to release them under the AGPL. So it seems like they do see it as an issue, but not one they can really do anything about in terms of licensing.
  - kazinator 12y ago
    That doesn't have anything to do with my argument, which describes a scenario in which there is a user who took some program and adapted it to suit his or her needs, running on his or her own equipment. In this situation, the program has additional users. However, they equipment doesn't belong to them. They are only visitors to someone else's private property. Even if they had the source to the modifications, they would not be able to make further modifications and put them into effect on your server, since they don't have administrative access. There is no run around the GPL; the GPL is simply not applicable. It can't give people the right to tinker with your private property. Never mind not having the GPL-granted rights: if the users are getting a free service, they don't even have any right to expect that it will continue. Tomorrow you might pull the plug on the server (perhaps forced to, due to economics) and that's that. The issue here isn't whether or not there is a GPL violation. There clearly isn't; the GPL simply isn't applicable. The issue here is that gullible users make uninformed choices such that they throw away freedoms. The "takes away your freedom" rhetoric therefore rings untrue. That's like saying a contract that you irresponsibly signed without reading it has "taken" your freedom away. Where is the personal accountability? The only genuine freedom-related problem is that widespread use of anything creates pressure on people to become users, simply in order to interoperate with the majority. The naive lemmings who unknowingly give up their rights create pressure on others to knowingly do so. I certainly don't want to be coerced into signing up for some SaaS just because it has turned into the only way of doing business.
cbd1984 12y ago
> But I'm a little confused by what the goals of the GPL license are besides a warm and fuzzy feeling that no-one is ripping them off though. To make sure open source developers aren't used as sharecroppers by companies that take their work, sell it for a profit, and don't release any improvements or allow anyone else to benefit from the fact the original work is open source.
- geon 12y ago
  ...so, a warm and fuzzy feeling.
  - cbd1984 12y ago
    No. That's not it, and I'm tired of people lying and claiming that's all it is.
jallmann 12y ago
> what the goals of the GPL license are besides a warm and fuzzy feeling that no-one is ripping them off GPL ensures freedom for users of the software, not developers of the software -- a distinction that is missed every single time licensing is discussed. Developers that use the GPL are (hopefully consciously) making a choice to ensure software freedom for their users. This article did a very good job of tackling this this from another perspective, by addressing the usual (and tired) argument that the GPL offers less freedom than more permissive licenses due to the share-alike clause. Limiting "power" to take away freedom is a nice way to put it. Not to derail this discussion, but my personal opinion is that the GPL is a bit ahead of its time. With the marginal cost of software being nil, the path of least resistance is just to make software free. The problem is, someone still has to produce this software, and unless we hit post-scarcity, production is going to cost money [1]. So the GPL straddles an awkward tension between ideals and economic reality right now. This is in addition to the more overt goals of FSF/GNU in terms of privacy, control and self-determination, which RMS has proven to be quite prescient about. [1] "In the long run, making programs free is a step toward the postscarcity world, where nobody will have to work very hard just to make a living. People will be free to devote themselves to activities that are fun, such as programming, after spending the necessary ten hours a week on required tasks such as legislation, family counseling, robot repair and asteroid prospecting. There will be no need to be able to make a living from programming." https://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.html https://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.html -- a very good read.
- djur 12y ago
  Nearly every argument against the GPL is based on convenience or desirability for developers. I think in a lot of ways that's the primary split between the FSF free/OSI open source factions. Reading the GNU manifesto was a lifechanger for me. Even though I've strayed (i.e. am employed producing proprietary software), I still believe the GNU project and the FSF are the most important things to ever happen to the computing world.
- Gurkenmaster 12y ago
  >GPL ensures freedom for users of the software, not developers of the software GPL may be true for end user facing applications but it's terrible for libraries where the primary user is the developer.
frozenport 12y ago
>>but are more than happy to release improvements to infrastructure, since that's not their core business. Without GPL companies choose what their `core business` is. I don't want to argue with a product vision manager what to release and what not the release - its much easier for me to remind them of the law.
- geon 12y ago
  >> its much easier for me to remind them of the law. Isn't the benefit of open source - to get free updates to your code base - enough?
  - frozenport 12y ago
    Convincing other people is an unnecessary burden.
logn 12y ago
> Affero LGPL Yes, just the other day I was thinking over licensing options and realized this was needed too. The common way around it is to just grant an exception like Mongo did with their driver. Also, the Java world has been granting a classpath exception to GPL for ages. However, many people confuse AGPL for this non-existant Affero LGPL because they think that they can use an AGPL library in their proprietary code. I believe Mongo has contributed to this confusion but that ultimately the lack of this alternative license is mostly to blame. Regarding the rest of your post I disagree but more words explaining the value of GPL have been written than code :) so I'll not address that.
throwaway8894 12y ago
For anybody reading Eridrus' comment, it's a bunch of non sequiturs that indicate no understanding of software licensing. Rather than go through each sentence and point out why it's wrong myself, just read the GPL and a couple statements by Stallman first. Then as an exercise, read each sentence and point out why it's either wrong, or not even wrong.
click170 12y ago
I think the number of companies taking free software and making meaningful changes that they don't contribute back to the community is not that big at all, though I don't argue that some probably do exist. Consider the overhead involved in maintaining and packaging your own code base while still including updates from origin. Wouldn't it be much easier to submit a merge request so that you could just apt-get install the package and not worry about your own custom branch, not to mention feedback on your change from a much wider audience who are familiar with that code base? And then there's the fact that you're exposing yourself to liability that, again, would be solved by that merge request. It just seems like a lot of the ones that do, do it out of ignorance rather than malice. I don't disagree that companies need to build up assets, but I think for most companies including SaaS ones, those assets are systems which are comprised of unmodified FOSS software used in [sometimes not] innovative ways.
- EmanueleAina 12y ago
  That may be the case now that FLOSS is worldwide renowed and people are starting to realize that private forks are costly, but it wasn't always so. The GPL was instrumental in forcing people to behave when nobody knew what to do, and it has been so successful that now people expect the behaviour enforced by it even when using more permissive licenses.
cbd1984 12y ago
> But I'm a little confused by what the goals of the GPL license are besides a warm and fuzzy feeling that no-one is ripping them off though. To make sure open source developers aren't used as sharecroppers by companies that take their work, sell it for a profit, and don't release any improvements or allow anyone else to benefit from the fact the original work is open source. (Other version hidden by mistake.)

kazinator 12y ago

http://choosealicense.com/no-license/ http://choosealicense.com/no-license/ neglects to cover liability, focusing only on permissions. While you may have a "right" not to put a license on your distributed work, you are open to liability if that work is implicated as a cause of some harm. A good chunk of the MIT license text is about liability, and it's ALL CAPS, which makes it 90% by weight.

geon 12y ago
Isn't this extremely US-centric? In my country, I can't even imagine someone suing (much less winning) for using a piece of software they got for free.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- pmontra 12y ago
  Better be safe than sorry, in any country.
- kazinator 12y ago
  Well, the BSD and MIT licenses are named after institutions that are in the US of A. Many popular software licenses are American, and are based in American legal doctrine. Liability related to something which was "free" makes a certain amount of sense. Something given away from free could be harmful. Just because the giver didn't take compensation doesn't mean it's not their fault. Basically, when you give something for free, you're implicitly making a representation that the thing is good. If you don't make any disclaimers, then that representation is all there is. And so if that something you gave away causes harm, your representation now looks like a misrepresentation: you tricked someone into being harmed by your gift. That's what I think is the general idea. If your country doesn't have this sort of concept among its legal doctrines and statutes, that's kind of bad!

manicdee 12y ago

Redundant rant. OccupyGPL site now redirects to http://choosealicense.com/ http://choosealicense.com/ OccupyGPL previously complained that GPL wasn't really free because it imposed the burden of freedom on the business trying to sell a closed-source product who was hoping to use GPL or other Copyleft code.

new299 12y ago

OccupyGPL now redirects to "choosealicense.com", but it's still available on waybackmachine if anyone's interested: http://web.archive.org/web/20150210203941/http://www.occupygpl.org/ http://web.archive.org/web/20150210203941/http://www.occupyg...

djur 12y ago
Wow, that is insanely over the top and also pretty poorly written. I appreciate the irony of using a historically leftist image like the raised fist to promote what is essentially a pro-capitalist message ("Even if these people are companies who want to develop proprietary solutions. [sic] A company using your technology will increase the value of the project").
- digi_owl 12y ago
  Welcome to modern marketing/propaganda, no symbol is beyond re-purposing.

cogburnd02 12y ago

> In the strange world of OccupyGPL, that's a “restriction”, I guess because it… restricts you from placing restrictions on someone else? But that's as silly as saying that outlawing slavery reduces freedom, because it takes away some people's freedom to own slaves. Hey, the analogy may be inflammatory, but the logic is the same, and it doesn't make sense in either case. The freedom to take away others' freedom is not a meaningful freedom to have — the proper word for that is not "freedom" but "power". Where have I heard that before? Oh right, as usual, the FSF said this long ago: "[O]ne so-called freedom that we do not advocate is the 'freedom to choose any license you want for software you write.' We reject this because it is really a form of power, not a freedom. This oft overlooked distinction is crucial. Freedom is being able to make decisions that affect mainly you; power is being able to make decisions that affect others more than you. ... We in the free software movement are not opposed to business, but we have seen what happens when a software business has the 'freedom' to impose arbitrary rules on the users of software. ... We believe you should decide what to do with the software you use; however, that is not what today's law says. Current copyright law places us in the position of power over users of our code, whether we like it or not. The ethical response to this situation is to proclaim freedom for each user, just as the Bill of Rights was supposed to exercise government power by guaranteeing each citizen's freedoms. That is what the GNU General Public License is for: it puts you in control of your usage of the software while protecting you from others who would like to take control of your decisions." https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/freedom-or-power.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/freedom-or-power.html

forrestthewoods 12y ago
Da fuck? "Making a program proprietary is an exercise of power." So is releasing source code and limiting what they can do with it. Or forcing them to do extra things (share source) if they do certain things (modify source). Stallman believes that linking against a DLL constitutes a derived work that would be subject to the GPL's copyleft nature. The legal validity of that belief is unknown. You're free to call that freedom if you like. I'll be over here in a corner considering it an abuse of power. "If we confuse power with freedom, we will fail to uphold real freedom." On that I do not disagree.

new299 12y ago

As a developer, the GPL is useful when you want to ensure that people don't take your work and profit from it. So it's often useful when companies want to level the playing field, without allowing competitors to gain an advantage. A cynic might say it allows you to subsume the competition, and control the market (if you maintain control of development). This can make the GPL a "safer" license for companies to release code under in some situations. The GPL is also useful if you have a political interest in moving the community as a whole toward open source software for everything. BSD-like licenses are useful when you want to gain adoption above all else. So BSD-like (or dual licensing) can be useful for example for file format reference parsers, tools were you want to gain adoption by companies (perhaps to later provide consulting work). As a user of software (not a developer/vendor of any kind). You probably don't care, as long as you can gain access to the sourcecode, so you can potentially get bugs fixed by a contractor. But the GPL protects users interests, so it may well be in your interest to support the use of the GPL on new projects.

geon 12y ago
> the GPL is useful when you want to ensure that people don't take your work and profit from it. Huh? Are you saying you can't make a profit from gpl-ed code? Then why was it written to begin with? If company A can profit from it, then so can company B. As far as licenses are concerned anyway. Time to market and network effects are probably much more important.
- wmf 12y ago
  The author of GPL code can (try to) profit via proprietary dual licensing, but others cannot. http://producingoss.com/en/dual-licensing.html http://producingoss.com/en/dual-licensing.html
- new299 12y ago
  > Huh? Are you saying you can't make a profit from gpl-ed code? Then why was it written to begin with? If company A can profit from it, then so can company B. I think selling GPL'd software is a difficult proposition yes. I don't think I know of any of any GPL projects which are sold for profit (unless there's some other value-add, in which case they are selling the value-add not the GPL'd software). > As far as licenses are concerned anyway. Time to market and network effects are probably much more important. In a limited view of software where you're only talking about websites you're possibly correct...

comex 12y ago

> In the strange world of OccupyGPL, that’s a “restriction”, I guess because it… restricts you from placing restrictions on someone else? But that’s as silly as saying that outlawing slavery reduces freedom, because it takes away some people’s freedom to own slaves. Hey, the analogy may be inflammatory, but the logic is the same, and it doesn’t make sense in either case. The freedom to take away others’ freedom is not a meaningful freedom to have — the proper word for that is not “freedom” but “power”. A more pragmatic way to put it is that it restricts you from using the code in the many real-life situations in which GPLing your entire program is simply not an option. The ideology behind the GPL is fundamentally utopian: it starts with a result - that users of software should have the freedoms to use, modify, share, etc. - and reverse engineers the rest of the world from there, including business models that are very different from the way most companies operated at the time of its creation and now, and which are not always practical. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, as it leads to a quite firm and well-defined set of principles, and can serve as a lighthouse for real businesses to try to navigate towards. But it means that individual developers often find themselves in situations where the GNU philosophy is irrelevant - while it's talking about the choice of whether to write free or proprietary software, or this blog post is considering marginal issues like the physical difficulty of distributing source code, they have, for various reasons, already found free software unacceptable as a premise, and are faced with the choice of what software to use. By virtue of their employment or business situation, they are not in the "club", and certain software only available to the "club" is therefore unavailable. From this standpoint, it's easy to see why the GPL feels like a restriction of freedom. Sometimes the premise is more mutable than it originally seems. See "Why CLISP is under GPL"[1] (an email thread barely younger than I am at 22), the old Apple Objective-C thing, and probably a lot of other cases; or look at the case of the Linux kernel, where the utter technical dominance of a GPLed program over all alternatives in certain spaces (particularly embedded) has made a lot of companies who clearly want absolutely nothing to do with free software put up source release webpages. Such examples are often cited as benefits of the copyleft strategy, and rightly so. But for better or worse, they're the exception rather than the rule. [1] http://clisp.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/clisp/clisp/doc/Why-CLISP-is-under-GPL http://clisp.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/clisp/clisp/doc/Why-...

belorn 12y ago

bitL 12y ago

This site just reinforces my view that people are getting more insane and lazy, and to stick with releasing my own software under GPL... It won't prevent anyone from "stealing" my code (e.g. incorporating it into their own code without giving any credits nor releasing their modifications to the public), but at least their conscience will make them feel a bit worse, which I believe OccupyGPL is a sign of. I had my own share of rip offs when I generously released my SQL database server code under a more permissive license and as a consequence for multiple years students ripped it off for their own projects at one university I attended, and pretended they wrote it themselves...

egil 12y ago

Google cache of the original page in question, http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:TSYSWNu5z2AJ:www.occupygpl.org/ http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:TSYSWNu...

anonbanker 12y ago

After viewing this link, I think RMS might not be seeing the big picture here. There isn't merely an attack on GCC, but rather an attack on Free Software itself. HN has proven for the past few years that the valley is less in-tune with individual freedom than they are with corporate-compatible licenses. This has understandably created some disconnect and often friction between us. but regardless, stay with me on my reasoning. within a three month window, we have seen: * a downright (successful) coup by systemd, which is an RPC backdoor for proprietary corporate software to bypass GPL restrictions via trivial bits of LGPL'ed code, wrapped in the controversial plan to swallow the GNU toolchain whole. * very real talks about (GPL'd) GCC being replaced by (BSD Licensed) LLVM, followed by the peanut gallery using this as an example of the inferior quality of the GPL. * an outright attack on the GPL, using the slimiest sound bytes and half-truths, for not being corporate-compatible. Call me a conspiracy theorist (Literally: one who has a proven hypothesis about a group of people working together to commit a crime), but in the eighteen years I've been running linux, I've never seen this large an effort to sway people from using Free Software before. And no, I haven't forgotten about SCO v. IBM[0], "Get The Facts" campaign, or Halloween Documents I and II[1]. It would be easy to make a case for Microsoft, still being run by Steve Ballmer[2], as the culprit. But Apple and Cisco (and Red Hat, post-CentOS purchase) are not very good players in the GPL sandbox, and we can't exactly rule them out. All I know is I see a pattern, and, Confirmation Bias notwithstanding, I'll keep talking about it if these sort of articles continue getting frontpaged on HN. 0. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO%E2%80%93Linux_controversies#Microsoft_funding_of_SCO_controversy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO%E2%80%93Linux_controversies... 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents#Documents_I_and_II http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents#Documents_I... 2. http://arstechnica.com/business/2015/02/one-year-in-its-still-steve-ballmers-microsoft-satya-nadella-just-runs-it/ http://arstechnica.com/business/2015/02/one-year-in-its-stil...