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The GPL, and the Free Software Foundation, isn't there for the entrepeneurs. It's not there for businesses. It doesn't exclude them, but they are part of a bigg

The GPL, and the Free Software Foundation, isn't there for the entrepeneurs. It's not there for businesses. It doesn't exclude them, but they are part of a bigger whole. That whole being humankind. And to ensure the software freedom for all humandkind, the FSF tries to persuade programmers to use the GPL. That sounds horribly pompous, but IMHO that's the bones of it.

clarky07 11y ago
but how is it actually better than MIT or BSD? Why does precluding anyone from possibly making money on it make it better?
- quadrangle 11y ago
  GPL doesn't preclude people from making money. It only stops those particular business models that require proprietary restrictions put on software recipients. All other ways of making money are perfectly welcome under GPL. Given that restricting people is itself negative socially and that it is common for people and institutions to abuse the power they have when they control proprietary software that others use, blocking the proprietary stuff is indeed better than letting it happen in many cases. In some cases, the derivative could be feasibly free or non-free and the GPL makes it free, i.e. the derivative was going to happen either way, but the developer wasn't necessarily going to release the results freely, so GPL adds net freedom and value to the community.
moonchrome 11y ago
Actually GPL is more often than not the "we give you the source but we keep the copyright so if you want to use this in commercial purposes you need to re-license with us" - and it also doesn't work really well in the "open sourcing" in that case because people often build "enterprise version only" features on top. Look at Qt or Mono for example. I'd say GPL fails at "free software". Also GPL leads to a lot of shitty situations - for example - I'm developing a muscle simulation library for my product and my content pipeline is based on Blender. Under Blender GPL license, since I'm not redistributing Blender or any code from it in my product, I don't need to opensource my code. But if I want to integrate my tool in to Blender and give it away for free (to give back to community since my product isn't about animation) I would have to release it under GPL which I can't do. So in the end I can't give something back because of GPL. I could maybe do stuff like distribute a binary that talks to Blender via IPC but that's just a waste of my time and a suboptimal design solution because of a non-technical license reason, I'm not going to do that. Also Blender is actually a decent core tool, if they allowed companies to develop commercial plugins on top of it via LGPL or something it would (IMO) make the Blender adoption much faster. IMO GPL only makes sense if you plan on making a profit from the code you're releasing by re-licencing for commercial use, otherwise it's just a PITA.
- quadrangle 11y ago
  > Actually GPL is more often than not the "we give you the source but we keep the copyright so if you want to use this in commercial purposes you need to re-license with us" That requires citations. I suspect that this is actually the tiny minority of GPL software.
  - moonchrome 11y ago
    Actually that's true, I should have said most GPL software where I actually care about the license is GPL because of their business model - ie. I don't care about kernel or linux userland being GPL because I don't plan on building any commercial extensions to those - even if I make some changes (which I doubt I ever will but still) I don't mind pushing them upstream no matter what's their license. But most programmer facing stuff that's actually intended for commercial use is GPL as sort of a "trial mode" - you see exactly what you get and then if you want to actually use it you need to re-licence.
    - quadrangle 11y ago
      You can build commercial anything with GPL. GPL isn't anti-commerce. So, you don't need anyone's permission to do commercial things with GPL software. If a company says, "here's this under GPL, but if you want a commercial license, pay us specially" they are being deceptive. You don't need a special commercial license. GPL allows any commercial activities, period. You don't need to relicense in order to use the software commercially or to do any other use. The GPL respects freedom 0: freedom to use the software as you wish in whatever way you wish.
      - clarky07 11y ago
        Except for the part where you need to make anything you put it in GPL too... >freedom to use the software as you wish in whatever way you wish. unless you want to use it next to closed source, in which case you can't.
        11y ago

clarky07 11y ago

but how is it actually better than MIT or BSD? Why does precluding anyone from possibly making money on it make it better?

quadrangle 11y ago
GPL doesn't preclude people from making money. It only stops those particular business models that require proprietary restrictions put on software recipients. All other ways of making money are perfectly welcome under GPL. Given that restricting people is itself negative socially and that it is common for people and institutions to abuse the power they have when they control proprietary software that others use, blocking the proprietary stuff is indeed better than letting it happen in many cases. In some cases, the derivative could be feasibly free or non-free and the GPL makes it free, i.e. the derivative was going to happen either way, but the developer wasn't necessarily going to release the results freely, so GPL adds net freedom and value to the community.

moonchrome 11y ago

Actually GPL is more often than not the "we give you the source but we keep the copyright so if you want to use this in commercial purposes you need to re-license with us" - and it also doesn't work really well in the "open sourcing" in that case because people often build "enterprise version only" features on top. Look at Qt or Mono for example. I'd say GPL fails at "free software". Also GPL leads to a lot of shitty situations - for example - I'm developing a muscle simulation library for my product and my content pipeline is based on Blender. Under Blender GPL license, since I'm not redistributing Blender or any code from it in my product, I don't need to opensource my code. But if I want to integrate my tool in to Blender and give it away for free (to give back to community since my product isn't about animation) I would have to release it under GPL which I can't do. So in the end I can't give something back because of GPL. I could maybe do stuff like distribute a binary that talks to Blender via IPC but that's just a waste of my time and a suboptimal design solution because of a non-technical license reason, I'm not going to do that. Also Blender is actually a decent core tool, if they allowed companies to develop commercial plugins on top of it via LGPL or something it would (IMO) make the Blender adoption much faster. IMO GPL only makes sense if you plan on making a profit from the code you're releasing by re-licencing for commercial use, otherwise it's just a PITA.

quadrangle 11y ago
> Actually GPL is more often than not the "we give you the source but we keep the copyright so if you want to use this in commercial purposes you need to re-license with us" That requires citations. I suspect that this is actually the tiny minority of GPL software.
- moonchrome 11y ago
  Actually that's true, I should have said most GPL software where I actually care about the license is GPL because of their business model - ie. I don't care about kernel or linux userland being GPL because I don't plan on building any commercial extensions to those - even if I make some changes (which I doubt I ever will but still) I don't mind pushing them upstream no matter what's their license. But most programmer facing stuff that's actually intended for commercial use is GPL as sort of a "trial mode" - you see exactly what you get and then if you want to actually use it you need to re-licence.
  - quadrangle 11y ago
    You can build commercial anything with GPL. GPL isn't anti-commerce. So, you don't need anyone's permission to do commercial things with GPL software. If a company says, "here's this under GPL, but if you want a commercial license, pay us specially" they are being deceptive. You don't need a special commercial license. GPL allows any commercial activities, period. You don't need to relicense in order to use the software commercially or to do any other use. The GPL respects freedom 0: freedom to use the software as you wish in whatever way you wish.
    - clarky07 11y ago
      Except for the part where you need to make anything you put it in GPL too... >freedom to use the software as you wish in whatever way you wish. unless you want to use it next to closed source, in which case you can't.
      - 11y ago