3 ms·

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-licen

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.
      - quadrangle 11y ago
        You can use GPL alongside any other license at all, including proprietary. You have zero obligations under GPL for whatever you want to do with software privately. The only obligations relate to keeping the terms for others when you distribute the software to them.
    - moonchrome 11y ago
      >GPL allows any commercial activities, period OK - then release a commercial GPL app for iOS app store.
      - the_why_of_y 11y ago
        The GPL does not prevent you in any way from distributing an iOS application and charging money for it (provided that you make the source code available for that part of the app that is a derivative of the GPL'd work), it is just that in practice Apple will censor applications that contain GPL'd code from their App Store. That is entirely Apple's decision to make; they reportedly also censor apps that display nudity etc. and I would not be convinced by an argument that nobody can make money with pictures of nude people.
gillianseed 11y ago
>I would have to release it under GPL which I can't do. You don't have to release it under GPL, just a GPL compatible license, like MIT, BSD etc, what you are talking about is that you won't release the source code at all. >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. At the cost of becoming more like an open source 'core' for proprietary commercial plugins... I'm convinced Blender thrives mainly due to being free and fully open source, if you want somewhere to sell your proprierary plugins then just target one of the proprietary 3d solutions. >IMO GPL only makes sense if you plan on making a profit from the code you're releasing by re-licencing for commercial use, I think there are typically two major reasons for choosing GPL, one is of course to bestow end users with certain rights, which incidentally also favours the original developers since they are given those rights should someone modify and distribute modifications of their code, and secondly there is the one you mention where you can develop a fully free open project but also allow a special proprietary license for monetary compensation, this is quite rare AFAIK (but a smart way of letting the original developers get a piece of the pie), and I can only think of x264/x265 right now which does it.

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.
    - quadrangle 11y ago
      You can use GPL alongside any other license at all, including proprietary. You have zero obligations under GPL for whatever you want to do with software privately. The only obligations relate to keeping the terms for others when you distribute the software to them.
  - moonchrome 11y ago
    >GPL allows any commercial activities, period OK - then release a commercial GPL app for iOS app store.
    - the_why_of_y 11y ago
      The GPL does not prevent you in any way from distributing an iOS application and charging money for it (provided that you make the source code available for that part of the app that is a derivative of the GPL'd work), it is just that in practice Apple will censor applications that contain GPL'd code from their App Store. That is entirely Apple's decision to make; they reportedly also censor apps that display nudity etc. and I would not be convinced by an argument that nobody can make money with pictures of nude people.

gillianseed 11y ago

>I would have to release it under GPL which I can't do. You don't have to release it under GPL, just a GPL compatible license, like MIT, BSD etc, what you are talking about is that you won't release the source code at all. >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. At the cost of becoming more like an open source 'core' for proprietary commercial plugins... I'm convinced Blender thrives mainly due to being free and fully open source, if you want somewhere to sell your proprierary plugins then just target one of the proprietary 3d solutions. >IMO GPL only makes sense if you plan on making a profit from the code you're releasing by re-licencing for commercial use, I think there are typically two major reasons for choosing GPL, one is of course to bestow end users with certain rights, which incidentally also favours the original developers since they are given those rights should someone modify and distribute modifications of their code, and secondly there is the one you mention where you can develop a fully free open project but also allow a special proprietary license for monetary compensation, this is quite rare AFAIK (but a smart way of letting the original developers get a piece of the pie), and I can only think of x264/x265 right now which does it.