24 ms·

Why I am pro-GPL

286 points by paroneayea 11y ago

anon3_ 11y ago
> there are very few permissively licensed projects which aim at end users. Lack of citation and data noted. I'm assuming good faith and going to approach this as I would a fellow colleague :) I'm also going to assume you perhaps haven't been introduced to the vibrant ecosystem of permissive licensed software. The article also doesn't mention how GPL is a show-stopper at some companies where we are building proprietary solutions. Oracle, IBM, Sony, Apple, Microsoft, Boeing all are monetized empires that profit not just from binary blobs, but from providing a superior product. Also, being the patent holder is lucrative. How do you intend on running a business and feeding your employees, let alone making investors happy following the virtues of GPL? Consulting and support only goes so far. > Most of them are stepping stones towards further software development. Ever hear of DragonEgg? (GCC was used to bootstrap LLVM/clang in it's early days.) Devs use GPL software to write permissive software. Sometimes they do so because they have no choice but to reinvent the wheel because of GPL's rules.
- dublinben 11y ago
  >providing the user with the best products You've completely missed the point of the article, and the entire purpose of Free Software, if you think this is about 'providing users with products' and generating a return on investment.
  - gress 11y ago
    If you don't want to generate a return on the investment of your time, it means you have an alternate source of wealth. Most of us do not have that luxury, and therefore cannot share in the vision of Free Software.
  - anon3_ 11y ago
    > if you think this is about 'providing users with products' and generating a return on investment. In who's eyes? Consumers want the best product. Investors want a payout. How does GPL satisfy either of these? GPL doesn't have the nimbleness to be viable with the market. It doesn't respect creativity and time of developers or investors - leaving consumers left to pick a proprietary / permissive alternative. You don't need to be GPL to be open: You can MIT/BSD/Apache and still volunteer to not give out binary blobs [1] [1] https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=491435 https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=491435
    - __david__ 11y ago
      > You don't need to be GPL to be open: You can MIT/BSD/Apache and still volunteer to not give out binary blobs That's fine but it's only one level deep. What about the people that download your source and accept the terms of your license? They are totally free to make binary blobs and refuse to give source to their downloaders or their changes back to you. The GPL directly addresses that and keeps the code free, no matter who gets it from who. It's really the only way to guarantee software freedom.
    - yarrel 11y ago
      Consumers get better software Investors want a quicker payout. That's basically the economic argument for Open Source. How does the GPL support this better than complicit licenses? You'll have to pay me to find out. Because market.
- LoSboccacc 11y ago
  even if I work at a startup and I can do what the hell I want, I still go with lgpl, mit or bsd and stay miles from gpl gpl is just annoying to deal with, especially v3. downvote edit: fanboy gotta fanboy. it's not like downvoting can change my previous experiences.
  - JupiterMoon 11y ago
    Why is v3 more annoying for you than v2?
    - SomeCallMeTim 11y ago
      Can't speak for commenter above, but v3 has a "patent license" clause that is literally impossible for any large company to comply with. Not just difficult or undesirable, but impossible. GPLv3 requires you to offer a free license of any patent you have a license to that might apply to the GPLv3 software to anyone who might want to use that software. Almost any large company has at one time or another purchased broad patent licenses that cannot be sublicensed. So GPLv3 is an absolute non-starter for any large company. You want to doom a product, license it under GPLv3. It may not instantly kill it, but it will slowly strangle it.
      - LoSboccacc 11y ago
        it is also more difficult to demonstrate project independence. if two bits touch, GPLv3 spreads. v2 at least is worded in a way that allows non spreading if you can demonstrate the functionality can be replaced by a third party lib without altering the software functionality also it makes unnecessarily hard to comply. in GPLv2 it was quite easy to determine who was an user and who was entitled to receive the code. GPLv3 makes this unnecessarily difficult because it overreacted at previous GPLv2 shortcoming. Think for example deploying on a kiosk.
        JupiterMoon 11y ago
        > Think for example deploying on a kiosk. I thought that it depended upon who owns the kiosk and if software upgrades are a normal part of its operation?
- JupiterMoon 11y ago
  > how GPL is a show-stopper at some companies where we are building proprietary solutions Is this not one of the the main purposes of the GPL? To prevent companies taking the users freedom by "building proprietary solutions". > It also fails to mention that sometimes providing the user with the best products means protecting the investment and creative effort painstakingly poured into development of a product. Nope it doesn't fail to mention this. Your opinion here is totally orthogonal to the original premise of the free software movement (and of the GPL). The GPL was written on the premise that users are better off with objectively worse performing software that maintain the four freedoms. You probably disagree with me on whether software freedom is more important than software quality but it is important to understand the basis of our disagreement first.
- pwny 11y ago
  > The article also doesn't mention how GPL is a show-stopper at some companies where we are building proprietary solutions. > Oracle, IBM, Sony, Apple, Microsoft, Boeing all are monetized empires that profit not just from binary blobs, but from providing a superior product. Also, being the patent holder is lucrative. I'm really not a huge fan of the GPL but you have to realize those are by design. To a supporter of the license, that's actually a plus. > How do you intend on running a business and feeding your employees, let alone making investors happy following the virtues of GPL? Consulting and support only goes so far. If the GPL doesn't fit your business plan, just don't use it. Do you see Open-Source projects using leaked closed-source code (or complaining that they can't do so)? No one is preventing companies from rewriting equivalent code and the authors had the right to select whatever terms they wanted when they created their project. It's their creative output after all.
  - anon3_ 11y ago
    We also have lives to live - limited resources, money, and days on Earth. It's more intricate that the way you view it outside the world of academics, non-profits and eurozone states with social benefits that give you the freetime to do that. If you're open to knowing more, I could elaborate.
- jessaustin 11y ago
  > there are very few permissively licensed projects which aim at end users. Lack of citation and data noted. Four sentences later in TFA: But when I think of projects I use every day which are programs I actually run (for example, as an artist I use Blender, Gimp and Inkscape regularly), most of these are under the GPL. Those are three major data points. Do you have any data or citations to contribute?
- ben0x539 11y ago
  > I'm assuming good faith and going to approach this as I would a fellow colleague :) Wow, this is the most passive-aggressive display of good faith I've seen so far.
tdees40 11y ago
I work in industry. Anything GPL is a non-starter. I totally understand and appreciate the concerns, but at BigCorp GPL doesn't play. edit: I'm well aware that some people don't want industry using their code. Great! But that's really limiting the scope of who's going to get involved, and it's probably going to make it harder to get a sufficient community involved to help your project achieve liftoff.
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
  OK, so large companies won't extend your software. What's wrong with that?
  - mhurron 11y ago
    Some people don't have a problem with that.
  - jules 11y ago
    Maybe you want your software to be used? I wish people could be a bit less religious and moralistic about licenses, especially the GPL camp.
    - yarrel 11y ago
      People being less religious and moralistic about use at any cost would also be nice.
  - maxlybbert 11y ago
    The argument in the article is wrong. The assumption is that companies want to extend the software and keep their extensions "locked down." That does happen, but I have seen companies willing to extend software, and make the extension public, as long as they didn't have to make the extension GPL. Whether this makes sense, or is a case of failure to understand the GPL, it does exist.
    - liviu- 11y ago
smhenderson 11y ago
There is no reason to pit permissive and copyleft licensing against each other. Anyone doing so is doing a great disservice to user freedom. Or, IMHO more likely, has an agenda that benefits from permissive licensing.
- gress 11y ago
  An agenda such as putting food on the table.
  - theseatoms 11y ago
    A reason that can be used for literally any profit-seeking endeavor.
  - indlebe 11y ago
    How does permissive licensing put food on the table for those who created the code? If anything wouldn't it have the opposite effect?
    - err4nt 11y ago
      I put a simple, self-contained HTML/JS/CSS scratchpad (think JsFiddle, Codepen) on Github without a licence. I was contacted because somebody saw the project and wanted to use it to help teach a classroom HTML, but only if the licence was good. I quickly put it under MIT, which means though I never saw changes back - something I did helped somebody else teach a class of people HTML. That's doesn't put food on my table, but the same effort from me under a bad licence would have meant that good likely would not have come from my efforts. If you can have passive income projects that sit there and generate revenue over time without further input, why can't you have passive charitable giving, where you put in effort once and others are able to get value from it over and over again as time goes on. Permissive licences pay it forward in a way that viral licences don't.
      - indlebe 11y ago
        That doesn't at all address or relate to the question I asked, but instead provides a completely different talking point supporting permissive licenses as a charitable act.
TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
It's worth remembering why the GPL was invented. Stallman had a printer which had proprietary drivers, and he wanted to fix an issue with the driver. He couldn't. He created the GPL so that, in future, people wouldn't have this problem. Stallman created the GPL because he cared about user freedom.
- angersock 11y ago
  Our users are shittier than his users. I'm not sure their freedom is really worth caring about, after we've spent so long trying to help them. Our freedom, sure! The freedom of fellow hackers, sure! The freedom of people who give my email address to linkedin? Who tag me in photos on Facebook? Who use Google Voice and Amazon Echo around me? Who tweet photos of me without asking and thus put my likeness along with EXIF data of my position? Might as well monetize them.
  - liviu- 11y ago
    If this is of any consolation to you, I'm pretty sure Twitter strips EXIF data on upload.
    - angersock 11y ago
      Why would they do a silly thing like that? That data has got to be worth a lot--imagine, for example, doing accurate brand spread analysis by searching for brand logos in photos and looking at where they're being displayed via that data. It'd be stupid not to hang onto that data.
  - mwcampbell 11y ago
    The users you disparage are mostly good people who just aren't obsessed with technology, or its implications on privacy, as we are. They just don't know any better than to do what they do on LinkedIn and Facebook. I daresay you need to get out more; then you'll see these users as real people, and not one-dimensional subhuman things to be monetized.
    - 11y ago
deleted 11y ago
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gress 11y ago
This makes the usual false dichotomy between 'users' and 'developers' and positions GPL advocates as freedom fighters. Also as usual, there is no mention of how a GPL based economy can work. The reason the GPL is not loved by developers as much as the freedom fighters would like is because we need to earn a living. If GPL advocates can address that, they would be able to stop wasting time with these rants.
- icebraining 11y ago
  Hi! I, along with many other software developers, make a living out of developing GPL-licensed software. We build on top of an AGPL licensed platform (Odoo) and we offer both custom development and a SaaS hosting platform - and various services around those. We're not the next Microsoft, but we sell to some of the largest companies in our country (and many smaller ones), and make a comfortable living out of it. Proprietary licensing certainly makes it easier to build a moat, but it's certainly not required, there are alternative business models.
- pknight 11y ago
  You seem to be persisting the myth that developers aren't able to make a living under GPL. In the WordPress ecosystem virtually all products are GPL compatible and the economy is worth millions and millions. Developers are doing just fine under it, more than fine actually. I'd like to hear a single case where GPL licensing made a negative difference between financial success and failure (maybe they exist, but examples are never brought up, funnily).
  - gress 11y ago
    You seem to be perpetuating the fallacy that because some software developers can make a living under GPL, all software developers can do so. Perhaps the market has already chosen the correct balance of GPL vs permissive licenses.
    - pknight 11y ago
      I'm not perpetuating this supposed fallacy. Software developers fail with their products for various different reasons, there just seems to be very little evidence that the choice of GPL has impacted economic viability. At least I can say that there is very little evidence of that in the WordPress ecosystem. If you complain about the lack of an example of how a GPL based economy can work, you simply ignore existing markets. The WordPress ecosystem (worth billions) is almost exclusively GPL and developers are succeeding with successful products and services, operating businesses in all kinds of revenue ranges. Many small teams and even solo developers are regularly netting 6-7 figures a year. They are doing so utilizing a variety of business models, proving that almost any kind of solution can be made to work in some format, provided it's something people will pay for. There has always been some push back for the GPL, especially by designers, in the WordPress space. Despite that things are working. We have an entire commercial themes market that is selling GPL based themes, with many successful authors raking in money. Some people thought it was crazy, but theme sales are sky high. The only reason some developers aren't making money there isn't because GPL, it's because the competition is strong and the work is hard and some people can't or won't adapt.
arunc 11y ago
Free as in "Freedom".
beering 11y ago
A few years from now, when you want to hack on some new gizmo and you find out that the toolchain is a pile of proprietary blobs that only work on Windows and an old version of RHEL, you can thank the "pro-user" supporters of clang and its non-copyleft license. (I think this is already happening with GPU toolchains but that's not my field.)
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
  I mistakenly downvoted you, FWIW. This is happening with Apple. Apple were so enraged about a GPL compliance lawsuit that they pored tons of resources into LLVM, perhaps just out of spite.
  - spiralpolitik 11y ago
    They were so spiteful that they offered to license the whole thing under the GPL. But because RMS uses an e-mail client written in the last century he missed the offer. https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-02/msg00594.html https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-02/msg00...
  - tzs 11y ago
    Nonsense. Since I've covered this before in detail, I'll just link to previous discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9737230#up_9740994 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9737230#up_9740994 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9474358#up_9475356 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9474358#up_9475356
smhenderson 11y ago
I feel like a lot of the comments in this thread are conflating permissively licensed software with closed source software. If you want to write software and keep it closed so you can make money off it I don't necessarily love the idea but I can respect it. But we're not talking about closed source here, just the difference between the GPL and permissive licenses like BSD, MIT, etc. I don't see how creating a killer app and releasing it permissively guarantees a developer an income. The opposite is the obvious effect. On the other hand using the GPL as your public license and negotiating a private license with a company like QT does seems like a logical way to provide user freedom, enjoy feedback and improvements from the community and still allow for a revenue stream. It's definitely a tired argument at this point so I was actually pretty happy when the author went out of his way to reiterate at the end of the article that there are benefits to both approaches, why can't we all just get along...
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
  > I feel like a lot of the comments in this thread are conflating permissively licensed software with closed source software. They're not. They're saying you can take permissively licensed software and make it proprietary.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
amirouche 11y ago
BSD was not meant to shape a future, it was created to maximize the reach of its software through devaluation. GPL was created to shape our future and continue to do so. Not just the forseable reach of our little lifes and immediate surroundings (if any). I see a lot of people looking at their immediate needs. IMO We need need to give time to Time. The problem is not FLOSS licensing or software. This is mostly a solved problem.
asgard1024 11y ago
I sympathize with the author, even though I work at a corporation that doesn't like GPL. I think big part why the GPL has been lately out of fashion is that many developers work for (big) companies, which of course (as correctly stated) benefit lot more from BSD than GPL. These developers naturally want to use the great software at work they do or use as a hobby, so they are willing to compromise with the powers at be (business leadership) and release their software under a more permissive license (or pressure their peers working on OSS to release it under more permissive license). Of course, if these developers acted really rationally, they would collectively rise up against such demands; but then they could just establish some sort of anarchist/libertarian/communist (depending on your leanings) commune where everything is fair and just. So I think it's a lot of small pragmatic decisions that ultimately lead to irrational results.
- omouse 11y ago
  >These developers naturally want to use the great software at work they do or use as a hobby, so they are willing to compromise with the powers at be (business leadership) and release their software under a more permissive license (or pressure their peers working on OSS to release it under more permissive license). The funny thing is that using the AGPL or GPL would benefit them; the company abides by whatever rules they want since they hold the copyright and the developer gets to use the code for their side projects. The only people who are out of luck are competitors who can't use the code unless they want to abide by the AGPL or GPL. Basically, using the GPL protects the company. The only concern you should have is if a competitor has enough resources and is unafraid of the GPL or you don't want users to self-host (supposedly eroding the revenue stream in a SaaS, though I don't see it since it takes effort to self-host)
lucozade 11y ago
I'm torn. I understand the benefits of enforcing user freedom. But it's not clear to me that users aren't better served by the ubiquity of re-use that the more permissive licenses have encouraged. For example, permissive licenses have helped with the walled garden that is iOS. But would end users be better off if we hadn't had iOS? If it were GPL'd, sure, but in reality it would never have been. So is its existence, and the competition it fostered with Android, net beneficial to users? Maybe more concretely, I feel that the deliberate hamstringing of GCC wrt a published IR to be, well, wrong. Again, I understand the arguments and I appreciate the reasoning but it's not clear that the end user is best served by this. For me, at least, it probably comes down to the simple statement that, as much as I value end user freedom, it isn't always the most beneficial thing for the end user. On a different day, mind, I'd probably argue the other way...
- phkahler 11y ago
  >> Maybe more concretely, I feel that the deliberate hamstringing of GCC wrt a published IR to be, well, wrong. I think hindsight has shown that strategy to be a mistake. But that's a separate issue from the license.
err4nt 11y ago
I'm very grateful the GPL exists, but I don't like the viral clause of the GPL. I find people sometimes aren't able to use GPLed code in their projects which defeats my purpose for putting it under an open licence in the first place. Lately I just release stuff under MIT which says you're free to do anything but remove the copyright notice, or sue me because you used my code. Other than that it's free for nearly any purpose.
- belorn 11y ago
  Its good that you have defined a purpose for why you release code. When I see people share a photo on a flikr, a video on youtube, or a song on a band/indy website they also have a purpose for that. Often it is not to allow companies to use it in their proprietary products or incorporate it into commercials, but sometimes they do allow it. Its their choice to decide how viral and restrictives they are when sharing to the public, even if they can't dictate how entitled the recipient will feel towards the conditions. The goal of the license is thus to define what the author will accept and what they don't. The more authors that actually make an aware choice, the better the result is.
yellowapple 11y ago
I think this article (and possibly the speaker the article responds to; I haven't seen any transcript or recording yet) misses one of the bigger poitns of permissive licensing: the ability for virtually any free software project to reuse your code. As a developer writing a library or somesuch, my concern is often whether or not I'm locking a large number of projects out of making use of my code. Yeah, this means that proprietary software can use it, too, but at least I'm credited for the work (as per the terms of most copyfree/copycenter licenses) and other FOSS projects have the same ability. This isn't to say that copyleft is automatically bad, but rather that consideration for the general development ecosystem is a worthwhile consideration. If you're a Perl hacker, for example, you're probably going to use "the same license as perl itself" (GPL + Artistic License) or perhaps the Artistic License 2.0 because those are the norms of the Perl community. If you're a Ruby hacker, you're probably going to use the MIT license because that's the most common. If you're writing an Emacs package, you'll probably release it under the GPL. If you're writing an Erlang module, I'd reckon the Apache license nowadays to be the new baseline. This is also affected by which operating system you're targeting. BSD folks will tend to lean permissive, while GNU/Linux folks will tend to lean copyleft. Windows and OS X folks will tend to lean proprietary or permissive. In other words, what license to pick really depends on the norms of the platform you're writing for. There's no "wrong" answer here unless the license you choose excessively impedes reusability by the broader community you're operating in, in which case you would be wise to adapt accordingly.
- nickpsecurity 11y ago
  Good point on how all OSS developers benefit rather than just FOSS. However, the author did address that by noting the permissive licenses goal was mass adoption and FOSS was pushing their notion of freedom.
  - yellowapple 11y ago
    True. I got the impression that the specific nuance of benefiting FOSS as much as non-FOSS was being a bit glossed over, though. It's a little bit more nuanced than "mass adoption", too, though. For me (as someone who tends to lean permissive in his software projects), it's more about deduplication of work and making my things as useful as possible for everyone. I'd love for a GPL project or an MPL project or an Apache project or a BSD project or whatever to find enough value in the code I write to not feel that they have to write such code themselves.
hasenj 11y ago
I think the GPL is a little outdated in that it misses the point on what really matters to ensuring the user's freedom. I think having an open source application is useless to the end user. I mean really useless in and of itself. What really matters is standarizing the data format and providing tools to convert/export to various other formats. Say I'm using application X as a free-software word processor. Two years later I decide I'm done with it, for various reasons it's annoying. I want to migrate to some other application Y. Also suppose that X hasn't been in development for over a year and no one is maintaining it. Also suppose X is very complicated and no one understands how the code works. What do I get as a user? What benefit do I get from X being open-source? Almost nothing. On the other hand, if X came with tools to "liberate" data from itself, and had its data format extensively documented, then I could get some real benefits. The only thing open source does is allow developers to collectively work on infrastructure tools. Such as git, etc.
- yarrel 11y ago
  As a user, you get an application that uses the library that application X used to export its files. Or you get a version of application X compiled for your new platform, that can save to an intermediate format loadable by application Y. Or you get application Y with an implementation of the file format for application X because the developers were free to study application X's code. Those are the benefits you get as a user. Better code, usable in more scenarios, that better supports your freedom to use it. The GPL ensures that freedom.
- vezzy-fnord 11y ago
  I think having an open source application is useless to the end user. I mean really useless in and of itself. It's not useless. The end user does benefit from it, just not directly. They benefit from the various modifications and enhancements under copyleft that are either integrated upstream or make it to other projects that they may use. They're also unhampered by usage or redistribution restrictions that may potentially get them into legal quagmire from more zealous vendors. What really matters is standarizing the data format and providing tools to convert/export to various other formats. Data formats are software, too. Other than the spec that standardizes them, there is a reference implementation which should preferably be free. In fact, being free is crucially important here: it means any extensions to the format are sent back, instead of a vendor pulling off an "embrace, extend, extinguish" by adding non-standard features to their proprietary implementation which they then lock other software to. Also suppose that X hasn't been in development for over a year and no one is maintaining it. Then the project is orphaned. Someone may or may not step up. The good thing is they can. Also suppose X is very complicated and no one understands how the code works. And yet the code is there, so it's not insurmountable if the utility is high enough to get past the bus factor.
0xdeadbeefbabe 11y ago
If you want freedom don't involve any lawyers. 's why the Trex ate the lawyer first: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMzfrod7hcE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMzfrod7hcE
zobzu 11y ago
My name is zobzu. I fight for the users, and I'm standing up for the GPL. (seriously tho, same license by default, same reasons - feel free to downvote, it won't change my licensing choices)
jbandela1 11y ago
I think the GPL license actually makes user freedom worse by encouraging developers to release software as web apps instead of as client applications. This is because a web application that uses GPL software is not required to release its source code whereas a client application would be required to release its source code. The difference in user freedom between web apps and client apps is much bigger than the difference between a GPL client app and a proprietary client app. With a client app, even a proprietary one - the user at least in theory can see exactly what the application is doing and what data it is transmitting where. So for the average user - GPL has encouraged loss of user freedom. Of course this doesn't affect Stallman because he does not use any web apps.
- Tyr42 11y ago
  I also feel the the GPL Affero licence (the GPL response to this, by re-wording it so that you still have to share the source if it's a webapp) is not very clear. I know the company I'm working at is willing to be a good GPL citizen, but refuses to touch GPL affero'd code with a 3 meter pole. I like it in principle, but I don't feel like it's a good solution in practice, at least until we get some cases going before a judge to see how it gets interpreted. http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-affero-gpl.en.html http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-affero-gpl.en.html
  - quadrangle 11y ago
    AGPL is perfectly clear: if you make source available under AGPL, you are in compliance. There's nothing to worry about. Plus, nobody ever sues you initially over (A)GPL compliance, they just ask you to come into compliance and only sue you if you refuse. Just release the source initially, and you're all set. Why is this hard?
- nickpsecurity 11y ago
  Ironic and interesting point. The client applications also had more efficiency, reliability, and security when set up right. Really hard to do that with web apps to the point that it took a lot of work by smart people to get it working this well. So, we loose across the board.
nickpsecurity 11y ago
The first half of the article was good and balanced. I especially like the distinction in lay terms: copyleft to push freedom; non-copyleft to push adoption. That's a great way to describe it to a person contemplating what license to choose. Then, the article goes in a different direction that embodies negative qualities that author critiqued in the related presentation. Let's address a bit of this from my pro-consumer, pro-security/quality, pro-OSS, anti-copyleft perspective. Mentioned that just so my bias is clear upfront and why I push adoption-oriented licenses (esp for open hardware & high assurance). re stepping stone. Yes, this is the common goal of proprietary use of anti-copyleft software. IIRC, copyleft software got its start using the architecture, languages, tools, and platforms of BSD and proprietary offerings. So, even GPL proponents build on existing work. Anyone wanting an open, free version of a given enhancement can similarly produce it starting with the same stepping stones. re open to closed. We saw this happen with Apple App Store, the QNX source reversal, attempts to combine open code with DRM, and so on. This is bad. However, it almost exclusively happens with companies whose licensing, TOS's, SLA's, etc allow for this sort of thing. That's where the problem is. Avoiding such companies, selecting safest licenses, and/or ensuring certain conditions are perpetual in contracts/licenses are easiest solution. GPL is actually a successful implementation of my claim, although it wasn't good enough. Affero corrected a major deficiency and more evolutions will probably follow. Many more licensing schemes can happen to reduce negative impact of business participation while empowering users. The common theme in most gripes is what the companies do. The reason we have this problem is that users almost exclusively do business with scumbag companies. They don't care about terms. They don't care about its ethics. Prior abuses rarely make them change companies (see Microsoft and Facebook). They don't try to leverage their buying power to force (existing) or incentivize (startups) companies to negotiate something that's favorable to them and future-proof in main risk areas. Like the old saying, the only thing that was necessary for triumph of evil was that good people did nothing [while evil kept its eye on the ball and its hands/feet in a sprint]. A lot of these problems can be avoided by simply investing in the right organizations. People who pick up Microsoft's server operating system are in for more schemes than those that used FreeBSD with commercial support. Certain small companies behind IDE's and libraries have had great terms for their users for years with minimal hassles unlike the mess that's Microsoft's development tools. Services provided by non-profits, cooperatives, and companies simply focused on customer satisfaction have done great compared to race to bottom in cost or highest shareholder earnings that get many others scheming on customers. Pick the right people/companies/tools, maintain an out to avoid lock-in (open formats/API's help), and invest in that. Double down on it if they use permissive licenses and re-invest back into their communities. In the end, this is more a problem of incentives than purely a legal one. People trust companies that don't care about them. They get screwed. Stop doing that. Do plenty more of the opposite. On top of it, explore alternatives [1] to popular source-sharing models in case business opportunities arise. Get momentum going in directions other than companies that do lock-in and lock-down. After all, I've done a lot of business with proprietary companies and have mostly avoided being boxed in. Same goes for FOSS use. Imagine that... All about what you use, how, and from whom. Sacrifices will need to be made, though, and now we're getting back to user demand (incentives) driving the negative practices. Outside a niche, I don't see it happening because market as a whole won't take responsibility to make it happen. The problems are market's fault, as usual. Good that niche commercial, OSS, and FOSS have given us plenty of good stuff to work with. I encourage all of them to keep at it without a need to fight with any. I avoid GPL strictly for economic reasons: certain investments don't happen, esp high assurance or ASIC development, unless they can recover the cost somehow. Additionally, companies adopting high quality components makes stuff more robust over time. Finally, making money allows them to fight inevitable patent suits that will attempt to put them out of business and create more patents for defensive use. So, for economic reasons, I oppose the GPL in some spaces while respecting it and being neutral in others. My OS is GPL, for instance, and I'm grateful to its developers & community. :) [1] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/05/friday_squid_bl_424.html#c6051639 https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/05/friday_squid_...
ggreer 11y ago
The author gives good reasons for preferring the GPL to BSD-style licenses, but it seems to me that there's an even better license for his ideals: the AGPL.[1] It fulfills the same purpose as the GPL, but it fixes loopholes such as running code on remote servers (most website back-ends). I've yet to hear a good argument from ideals that prefers the GPL to AGPL. The latter really does give people more freedom over how they can use and modify software. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affero_General_Public_License https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affero_General_Public_License
- Gregordinary 11y ago
  The author actually uses the AGPLv3 for MediaGoblin: http://mediagoblin.org/ http://mediagoblin.org/
  - ggreer 11y ago
    Thanks for the info. This confuses me. He knows about the AGPL. He uses it for his own code. Yet he doesn't even mention it in a post about his favorite license. Why?
    - Gregordinary 11y ago
      I found that odd as well. He mentioned using the AGPL for MediaGoblin at LibrePlanet a couple years ago. Not sure why no mention now.
awinder 11y ago
> To return to the arguments made last night, though copyleft > defends source, in my view this is merely a strategy towards > defending users. And indeed, as in terms of where freedoms > lie between those who make use of the source and code side of > things vs the end-user-application side of things, one might > notice a trend: there are very few permissively licensed projects > which aim at end users. Most of them are stepping stones towards > further software development. And this is great! I am glad that > we have so many development tools available, and it seems that > permissive/lax licensing is an excellent strategy here. But when > I think of projects I use every day which are programs I actually run > (for example, as an artist I use Blender, Gimp and Inkscape > regularly), most of these are under the GPL. How many truly major > end-user-facing software applications can you think of that > are under permissive licenses? I can think of many under copyleft, > and very few under permissive licenses. This is no coincidence. > Assuming you wish to fight for freedom of the end user, and ensure > that your software remains free for that end user, copyleft > is an excellent strategy. This was the key paragraph from my reading anyways. This is not an argument for / against whichever license, it's an argument that different types of code and projects have different licensing trends, and those probably align with how the code is going to be used and the audience that it's targeting.
llllllllllllll 11y ago
I think this quote from the article is what is all qbout. "In Shane's talk last night, he argued against copyleft because software licenses should have "no strings attached". But the very strategy that is advocated above is all about attaching strings! Copyleft's strings say "you can use my stuff, as long as you give back what you make from it". But the proprietary differentiation strategy's strings say "I will use your stuff, and then add terms which forbid you to ever share or modify the things I build on top of it." Don't be fooled: both attach strings. But which strings are worse?"
bcg1 11y ago
Christopher Allen Webber is a FLOSS hero and in my opinion deserves the utmost respect, although I suspect he is probably too humble to agree with that. I concur with everything he has written in his post... but one thing I'd add to the points he made is my annoyance with the implication made by many that proponents of permissive licensing care about freedom more than people who use copyleft licenses. People who really care about freedom care about it for EVERYONE, and licensing that maximizes freedom for everyone trumps the "strings attached" in that regard, that is such a simple thing to see that it challenges credulity to think that someone who cares about freedom could say otherwise. If you want everyone to use permissive licensing because you want to use free software inside of locked down programs you produce and are frustrated that great copyleft software doesn't let you do that, fine. I can respect that position because I've experienced the same problem. But please get over it and find some non-free solution to your problem, instead of trying to undermine the ideology of people who actually care about freedom just because you are jealous of the quality of software that has that ideology attached to it.
- sitkack 11y ago
  I personally would rather people steal GPL software than go an ideological rampage so they can safely subsume free software into proprietary products. Stealing would be a more morally honest action.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - ForHackernews 11y ago
    What? Why? So that future lawsuits can force the release of codebases including stolen GPL work?
    - sitkack 11y ago
      Because when they convince the world out of their own greed that authors shouldn't protect the users rights, and that the users (not creators) of MIT/BSD/Apache licensed software are free to subsume it without giving back, they hurt everyone. If they steal the software and use it in a proprietary product, they only damage themselves. Convincing everyone to not use the (L)GPL does more damage than just violating a license.
dzsekijo 11y ago
What bothers me both about the article and the comments here that they speak in the context of the pro-GPL/anti-GPL debate, but what actually gets discussed is lax vs. copyleft FOSS licensing. However, the two topics are not the same. I, for one, like the idea of copyleft licensing (for cases where its appropriate), but don't like GPL. GPL has taken the status of "the real copyleft license", but indeed it's an abuse of the idea of copyleft. Here's why: create the Merry Mermaid Public License (MMPL) as follows: take the text of the GPL and replace all occurrences of "GNU General Public License" with "Merry Mermaid Public License". Also remove all references to FSF and refer to yourself / another non-profit whenever a legal entity is to be named in the text. MMPL will be essentially the same as GPL, just called differently. However, GPL will condemn MMPL in the sense that the two won't be compatible. You can't mix and distribute code bits where one is GPL and one is MMPL licensed. An aggressive monopolist drive is built in to GPL as it decrees incompatiblity with other licenses not on base of licensing conditions, but on base of not being originated from the FSF.

286 points by paroneayea 11y ago

> there are very few permissively licensed projects which aim at end users. Lack of citation and data noted. I'm assuming good faith and going to approach this as I would a fellow colleague :) I'm also going to assume you perhaps haven't been introduced to the vibrant ecosystem of permissive licensed software. The article also doesn't mention how GPL is a show-stopper at some companies where we are building proprietary solutions. Oracle, IBM, Sony, Apple, Microsoft, Boeing all are monetized empires that profit not just from binary blobs, but from providing a superior product. Also, being the patent holder is lucrative. How do you intend on running a business and feeding your employees, let alone making investors happy following the virtues of GPL? Consulting and support only goes so far. > Most of them are stepping stones towards further software development. Ever hear of DragonEgg? (GCC was used to bootstrap LLVM/clang in it's early days.) Devs use GPL software to write permissive software. Sometimes they do so because they have no choice but to reinvent the wheel because of GPL's rules.

dublinben 11y ago
>providing the user with the best products You've completely missed the point of the article, and the entire purpose of Free Software, if you think this is about 'providing users with products' and generating a return on investment.
- gress 11y ago
  If you don't want to generate a return on the investment of your time, it means you have an alternate source of wealth. Most of us do not have that luxury, and therefore cannot share in the vision of Free Software.
- anon3_ 11y ago
  > if you think this is about 'providing users with products' and generating a return on investment. In who's eyes? Consumers want the best product. Investors want a payout. How does GPL satisfy either of these? GPL doesn't have the nimbleness to be viable with the market. It doesn't respect creativity and time of developers or investors - leaving consumers left to pick a proprietary / permissive alternative. You don't need to be GPL to be open: You can MIT/BSD/Apache and still volunteer to not give out binary blobs [1] [1] https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=491435 https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=491435
  - __david__ 11y ago
    > You don't need to be GPL to be open: You can MIT/BSD/Apache and still volunteer to not give out binary blobs That's fine but it's only one level deep. What about the people that download your source and accept the terms of your license? They are totally free to make binary blobs and refuse to give source to their downloaders or their changes back to you. The GPL directly addresses that and keeps the code free, no matter who gets it from who. It's really the only way to guarantee software freedom.
  - yarrel 11y ago
    Consumers get better software Investors want a quicker payout. That's basically the economic argument for Open Source. How does the GPL support this better than complicit licenses? You'll have to pay me to find out. Because market.
LoSboccacc 11y ago
even if I work at a startup and I can do what the hell I want, I still go with lgpl, mit or bsd and stay miles from gpl gpl is just annoying to deal with, especially v3. downvote edit: fanboy gotta fanboy. it's not like downvoting can change my previous experiences.
- JupiterMoon 11y ago
  Why is v3 more annoying for you than v2?
  - SomeCallMeTim 11y ago
    Can't speak for commenter above, but v3 has a "patent license" clause that is literally impossible for any large company to comply with. Not just difficult or undesirable, but impossible. GPLv3 requires you to offer a free license of any patent you have a license to that might apply to the GPLv3 software to anyone who might want to use that software. Almost any large company has at one time or another purchased broad patent licenses that cannot be sublicensed. So GPLv3 is an absolute non-starter for any large company. You want to doom a product, license it under GPLv3. It may not instantly kill it, but it will slowly strangle it.
    - LoSboccacc 11y ago
      it is also more difficult to demonstrate project independence. if two bits touch, GPLv3 spreads. v2 at least is worded in a way that allows non spreading if you can demonstrate the functionality can be replaced by a third party lib without altering the software functionality also it makes unnecessarily hard to comply. in GPLv2 it was quite easy to determine who was an user and who was entitled to receive the code. GPLv3 makes this unnecessarily difficult because it overreacted at previous GPLv2 shortcoming. Think for example deploying on a kiosk.
      - JupiterMoon 11y ago
        > Think for example deploying on a kiosk. I thought that it depended upon who owns the kiosk and if software upgrades are a normal part of its operation?
JupiterMoon 11y ago
> how GPL is a show-stopper at some companies where we are building proprietary solutions Is this not one of the the main purposes of the GPL? To prevent companies taking the users freedom by "building proprietary solutions". > It also fails to mention that sometimes providing the user with the best products means protecting the investment and creative effort painstakingly poured into development of a product. Nope it doesn't fail to mention this. Your opinion here is totally orthogonal to the original premise of the free software movement (and of the GPL). The GPL was written on the premise that users are better off with objectively worse performing software that maintain the four freedoms. You probably disagree with me on whether software freedom is more important than software quality but it is important to understand the basis of our disagreement first.
pwny 11y ago
> The article also doesn't mention how GPL is a show-stopper at some companies where we are building proprietary solutions. > Oracle, IBM, Sony, Apple, Microsoft, Boeing all are monetized empires that profit not just from binary blobs, but from providing a superior product. Also, being the patent holder is lucrative. I'm really not a huge fan of the GPL but you have to realize those are by design. To a supporter of the license, that's actually a plus. > How do you intend on running a business and feeding your employees, let alone making investors happy following the virtues of GPL? Consulting and support only goes so far. If the GPL doesn't fit your business plan, just don't use it. Do you see Open-Source projects using leaked closed-source code (or complaining that they can't do so)? No one is preventing companies from rewriting equivalent code and the authors had the right to select whatever terms they wanted when they created their project. It's their creative output after all.
- anon3_ 11y ago
  We also have lives to live - limited resources, money, and days on Earth. It's more intricate that the way you view it outside the world of academics, non-profits and eurozone states with social benefits that give you the freetime to do that. If you're open to knowing more, I could elaborate.
jessaustin 11y ago
> there are very few permissively licensed projects which aim at end users. Lack of citation and data noted. Four sentences later in TFA: But when I think of projects I use every day which are programs I actually run (for example, as an artist I use Blender, Gimp and Inkscape regularly), most of these are under the GPL. Those are three major data points. Do you have any data or citations to contribute?
ben0x539 11y ago
> I'm assuming good faith and going to approach this as I would a fellow colleague :) Wow, this is the most passive-aggressive display of good faith I've seen so far.

tdees40 11y ago

I work in industry. Anything GPL is a non-starter. I totally understand and appreciate the concerns, but at BigCorp GPL doesn't play. edit: I'm well aware that some people don't want industry using their code. Great! But that's really limiting the scope of who's going to get involved, and it's probably going to make it harder to get a sufficient community involved to help your project achieve liftoff.

TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
OK, so large companies won't extend your software. What's wrong with that?
- mhurron 11y ago
  Some people don't have a problem with that.
- jules 11y ago
  Maybe you want your software to be used? I wish people could be a bit less religious and moralistic about licenses, especially the GPL camp.
  - yarrel 11y ago
    People being less religious and moralistic about use at any cost would also be nice.
- maxlybbert 11y ago
  The argument in the article is wrong. The assumption is that companies want to extend the software and keep their extensions "locked down." That does happen, but I have seen companies willing to extend software, and make the extension public, as long as they didn't have to make the extension GPL. Whether this makes sense, or is a case of failure to understand the GPL, it does exist.
  - liviu- 11y ago

smhenderson 11y ago

There is no reason to pit permissive and copyleft licensing against each other. Anyone doing so is doing a great disservice to user freedom. Or, IMHO more likely, has an agenda that benefits from permissive licensing.

gress 11y ago
An agenda such as putting food on the table.
- theseatoms 11y ago
  A reason that can be used for literally any profit-seeking endeavor.
- indlebe 11y ago
  How does permissive licensing put food on the table for those who created the code? If anything wouldn't it have the opposite effect?
  - err4nt 11y ago
    I put a simple, self-contained HTML/JS/CSS scratchpad (think JsFiddle, Codepen) on Github without a licence. I was contacted because somebody saw the project and wanted to use it to help teach a classroom HTML, but only if the licence was good. I quickly put it under MIT, which means though I never saw changes back - something I did helped somebody else teach a class of people HTML. That's doesn't put food on my table, but the same effort from me under a bad licence would have meant that good likely would not have come from my efforts. If you can have passive income projects that sit there and generate revenue over time without further input, why can't you have passive charitable giving, where you put in effort once and others are able to get value from it over and over again as time goes on. Permissive licences pay it forward in a way that viral licences don't.
    - indlebe 11y ago
      That doesn't at all address or relate to the question I asked, but instead provides a completely different talking point supporting permissive licenses as a charitable act.

TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago

It's worth remembering why the GPL was invented. Stallman had a printer which had proprietary drivers, and he wanted to fix an issue with the driver. He couldn't. He created the GPL so that, in future, people wouldn't have this problem. Stallman created the GPL because he cared about user freedom.

angersock 11y ago
Our users are shittier than his users. I'm not sure their freedom is really worth caring about, after we've spent so long trying to help them. Our freedom, sure! The freedom of fellow hackers, sure! The freedom of people who give my email address to linkedin? Who tag me in photos on Facebook? Who use Google Voice and Amazon Echo around me? Who tweet photos of me without asking and thus put my likeness along with EXIF data of my position? Might as well monetize them.
- liviu- 11y ago
  If this is of any consolation to you, I'm pretty sure Twitter strips EXIF data on upload.
  - angersock 11y ago
    Why would they do a silly thing like that? That data has got to be worth a lot--imagine, for example, doing accurate brand spread analysis by searching for brand logos in photos and looking at where they're being displayed via that data. It'd be stupid not to hang onto that data.
- mwcampbell 11y ago
  The users you disparage are mostly good people who just aren't obsessed with technology, or its implications on privacy, as we are. They just don't know any better than to do what they do on LinkedIn and Facebook. I daresay you need to get out more; then you'll see these users as real people, and not one-dimensional subhuman things to be monetized.
  - 11y ago

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

gress 11y ago

This makes the usual false dichotomy between 'users' and 'developers' and positions GPL advocates as freedom fighters. Also as usual, there is no mention of how a GPL based economy can work. The reason the GPL is not loved by developers as much as the freedom fighters would like is because we need to earn a living. If GPL advocates can address that, they would be able to stop wasting time with these rants.

icebraining 11y ago
Hi! I, along with many other software developers, make a living out of developing GPL-licensed software. We build on top of an AGPL licensed platform (Odoo) and we offer both custom development and a SaaS hosting platform - and various services around those. We're not the next Microsoft, but we sell to some of the largest companies in our country (and many smaller ones), and make a comfortable living out of it. Proprietary licensing certainly makes it easier to build a moat, but it's certainly not required, there are alternative business models.
pknight 11y ago
You seem to be persisting the myth that developers aren't able to make a living under GPL. In the WordPress ecosystem virtually all products are GPL compatible and the economy is worth millions and millions. Developers are doing just fine under it, more than fine actually. I'd like to hear a single case where GPL licensing made a negative difference between financial success and failure (maybe they exist, but examples are never brought up, funnily).
- gress 11y ago
  You seem to be perpetuating the fallacy that because some software developers can make a living under GPL, all software developers can do so. Perhaps the market has already chosen the correct balance of GPL vs permissive licenses.
  - pknight 11y ago
    I'm not perpetuating this supposed fallacy. Software developers fail with their products for various different reasons, there just seems to be very little evidence that the choice of GPL has impacted economic viability. At least I can say that there is very little evidence of that in the WordPress ecosystem. If you complain about the lack of an example of how a GPL based economy can work, you simply ignore existing markets. The WordPress ecosystem (worth billions) is almost exclusively GPL and developers are succeeding with successful products and services, operating businesses in all kinds of revenue ranges. Many small teams and even solo developers are regularly netting 6-7 figures a year. They are doing so utilizing a variety of business models, proving that almost any kind of solution can be made to work in some format, provided it's something people will pay for. There has always been some push back for the GPL, especially by designers, in the WordPress space. Despite that things are working. We have an entire commercial themes market that is selling GPL based themes, with many successful authors raking in money. Some people thought it was crazy, but theme sales are sky high. The only reason some developers aren't making money there isn't because GPL, it's because the competition is strong and the work is hard and some people can't or won't adapt.

arunc 11y ago

Free as in "Freedom".

beering 11y ago

A few years from now, when you want to hack on some new gizmo and you find out that the toolchain is a pile of proprietary blobs that only work on Windows and an old version of RHEL, you can thank the "pro-user" supporters of clang and its non-copyleft license. (I think this is already happening with GPU toolchains but that's not my field.)

TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
I mistakenly downvoted you, FWIW. This is happening with Apple. Apple were so enraged about a GPL compliance lawsuit that they pored tons of resources into LLVM, perhaps just out of spite.
- spiralpolitik 11y ago
  They were so spiteful that they offered to license the whole thing under the GPL. But because RMS uses an e-mail client written in the last century he missed the offer. https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-02/msg00594.html https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-02/msg00...
- tzs 11y ago
  Nonsense. Since I've covered this before in detail, I'll just link to previous discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9737230#up_9740994 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9737230#up_9740994 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9474358#up_9475356 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9474358#up_9475356

smhenderson 11y ago

I feel like a lot of the comments in this thread are conflating permissively licensed software with closed source software. If you want to write software and keep it closed so you can make money off it I don't necessarily love the idea but I can respect it. But we're not talking about closed source here, just the difference between the GPL and permissive licenses like BSD, MIT, etc. I don't see how creating a killer app and releasing it permissively guarantees a developer an income. The opposite is the obvious effect. On the other hand using the GPL as your public license and negotiating a private license with a company like QT does seems like a logical way to provide user freedom, enjoy feedback and improvements from the community and still allow for a revenue stream. It's definitely a tired argument at this point so I was actually pretty happy when the author went out of his way to reiterate at the end of the article that there are benefits to both approaches, why can't we all just get along...

TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
> I feel like a lot of the comments in this thread are conflating permissively licensed software with closed source software. They're not. They're saying you can take permissively licensed software and make it proprietary.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]

amirouche 11y ago

BSD was not meant to shape a future, it was created to maximize the reach of its software through devaluation. GPL was created to shape our future and continue to do so. Not just the forseable reach of our little lifes and immediate surroundings (if any). I see a lot of people looking at their immediate needs. IMO We need need to give time to Time. The problem is not FLOSS licensing or software. This is mostly a solved problem.

asgard1024 11y ago

I sympathize with the author, even though I work at a corporation that doesn't like GPL. I think big part why the GPL has been lately out of fashion is that many developers work for (big) companies, which of course (as correctly stated) benefit lot more from BSD than GPL. These developers naturally want to use the great software at work they do or use as a hobby, so they are willing to compromise with the powers at be (business leadership) and release their software under a more permissive license (or pressure their peers working on OSS to release it under more permissive license). Of course, if these developers acted really rationally, they would collectively rise up against such demands; but then they could just establish some sort of anarchist/libertarian/communist (depending on your leanings) commune where everything is fair and just. So I think it's a lot of small pragmatic decisions that ultimately lead to irrational results.

omouse 11y ago
>These developers naturally want to use the great software at work they do or use as a hobby, so they are willing to compromise with the powers at be (business leadership) and release their software under a more permissive license (or pressure their peers working on OSS to release it under more permissive license). The funny thing is that using the AGPL or GPL would benefit them; the company abides by whatever rules they want since they hold the copyright and the developer gets to use the code for their side projects. The only people who are out of luck are competitors who can't use the code unless they want to abide by the AGPL or GPL. Basically, using the GPL protects the company. The only concern you should have is if a competitor has enough resources and is unafraid of the GPL or you don't want users to self-host (supposedly eroding the revenue stream in a SaaS, though I don't see it since it takes effort to self-host)

lucozade 11y ago

I'm torn. I understand the benefits of enforcing user freedom. But it's not clear to me that users aren't better served by the ubiquity of re-use that the more permissive licenses have encouraged. For example, permissive licenses have helped with the walled garden that is iOS. But would end users be better off if we hadn't had iOS? If it were GPL'd, sure, but in reality it would never have been. So is its existence, and the competition it fostered with Android, net beneficial to users? Maybe more concretely, I feel that the deliberate hamstringing of GCC wrt a published IR to be, well, wrong. Again, I understand the arguments and I appreciate the reasoning but it's not clear that the end user is best served by this. For me, at least, it probably comes down to the simple statement that, as much as I value end user freedom, it isn't always the most beneficial thing for the end user. On a different day, mind, I'd probably argue the other way...

phkahler 11y ago
>> Maybe more concretely, I feel that the deliberate hamstringing of GCC wrt a published IR to be, well, wrong. I think hindsight has shown that strategy to be a mistake. But that's a separate issue from the license.

err4nt 11y ago

I'm very grateful the GPL exists, but I don't like the viral clause of the GPL. I find people sometimes aren't able to use GPLed code in their projects which defeats my purpose for putting it under an open licence in the first place. Lately I just release stuff under MIT which says you're free to do anything but remove the copyright notice, or sue me because you used my code. Other than that it's free for nearly any purpose.

belorn 11y ago
Its good that you have defined a purpose for why you release code. When I see people share a photo on a flikr, a video on youtube, or a song on a band/indy website they also have a purpose for that. Often it is not to allow companies to use it in their proprietary products or incorporate it into commercials, but sometimes they do allow it. Its their choice to decide how viral and restrictives they are when sharing to the public, even if they can't dictate how entitled the recipient will feel towards the conditions. The goal of the license is thus to define what the author will accept and what they don't. The more authors that actually make an aware choice, the better the result is.

yellowapple 11y ago

I think this article (and possibly the speaker the article responds to; I haven't seen any transcript or recording yet) misses one of the bigger poitns of permissive licensing: the ability for virtually any free software project to reuse your code. As a developer writing a library or somesuch, my concern is often whether or not I'm locking a large number of projects out of making use of my code. Yeah, this means that proprietary software can use it, too, but at least I'm credited for the work (as per the terms of most copyfree/copycenter licenses) and other FOSS projects have the same ability. This isn't to say that copyleft is automatically bad, but rather that consideration for the general development ecosystem is a worthwhile consideration. If you're a Perl hacker, for example, you're probably going to use "the same license as perl itself" (GPL + Artistic License) or perhaps the Artistic License 2.0 because those are the norms of the Perl community. If you're a Ruby hacker, you're probably going to use the MIT license because that's the most common. If you're writing an Emacs package, you'll probably release it under the GPL. If you're writing an Erlang module, I'd reckon the Apache license nowadays to be the new baseline. This is also affected by which operating system you're targeting. BSD folks will tend to lean permissive, while GNU/Linux folks will tend to lean copyleft. Windows and OS X folks will tend to lean proprietary or permissive. In other words, what license to pick really depends on the norms of the platform you're writing for. There's no "wrong" answer here unless the license you choose excessively impedes reusability by the broader community you're operating in, in which case you would be wise to adapt accordingly.

nickpsecurity 11y ago
Good point on how all OSS developers benefit rather than just FOSS. However, the author did address that by noting the permissive licenses goal was mass adoption and FOSS was pushing their notion of freedom.
- yellowapple 11y ago
  True. I got the impression that the specific nuance of benefiting FOSS as much as non-FOSS was being a bit glossed over, though. It's a little bit more nuanced than "mass adoption", too, though. For me (as someone who tends to lean permissive in his software projects), it's more about deduplication of work and making my things as useful as possible for everyone. I'd love for a GPL project or an MPL project or an Apache project or a BSD project or whatever to find enough value in the code I write to not feel that they have to write such code themselves.

hasenj 11y ago

I think the GPL is a little outdated in that it misses the point on what really matters to ensuring the user's freedom. I think having an open source application is useless to the end user. I mean really useless in and of itself. What really matters is standarizing the data format and providing tools to convert/export to various other formats. Say I'm using application X as a free-software word processor. Two years later I decide I'm done with it, for various reasons it's annoying. I want to migrate to some other application Y. Also suppose that X hasn't been in development for over a year and no one is maintaining it. Also suppose X is very complicated and no one understands how the code works. What do I get as a user? What benefit do I get from X being open-source? Almost nothing. On the other hand, if X came with tools to "liberate" data from itself, and had its data format extensively documented, then I could get some real benefits. The only thing open source does is allow developers to collectively work on infrastructure tools. Such as git, etc.

yarrel 11y ago
As a user, you get an application that uses the library that application X used to export its files. Or you get a version of application X compiled for your new platform, that can save to an intermediate format loadable by application Y. Or you get application Y with an implementation of the file format for application X because the developers were free to study application X's code. Those are the benefits you get as a user. Better code, usable in more scenarios, that better supports your freedom to use it. The GPL ensures that freedom.
vezzy-fnord 11y ago
I think having an open source application is useless to the end user. I mean really useless in and of itself. It's not useless. The end user does benefit from it, just not directly. They benefit from the various modifications and enhancements under copyleft that are either integrated upstream or make it to other projects that they may use. They're also unhampered by usage or redistribution restrictions that may potentially get them into legal quagmire from more zealous vendors. What really matters is standarizing the data format and providing tools to convert/export to various other formats. Data formats are software, too. Other than the spec that standardizes them, there is a reference implementation which should preferably be free. In fact, being free is crucially important here: it means any extensions to the format are sent back, instead of a vendor pulling off an "embrace, extend, extinguish" by adding non-standard features to their proprietary implementation which they then lock other software to. Also suppose that X hasn't been in development for over a year and no one is maintaining it. Then the project is orphaned. Someone may or may not step up. The good thing is they can. Also suppose X is very complicated and no one understands how the code works. And yet the code is there, so it's not insurmountable if the utility is high enough to get past the bus factor.

0xdeadbeefbabe 11y ago

If you want freedom don't involve any lawyers. 's why the Trex ate the lawyer first: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMzfrod7hcE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMzfrod7hcE

zobzu 11y ago

My name is zobzu. I fight for the users, and I'm standing up for the GPL. (seriously tho, same license by default, same reasons - feel free to downvote, it won't change my licensing choices)

jbandela1 11y ago

I think the GPL license actually makes user freedom worse by encouraging developers to release software as web apps instead of as client applications. This is because a web application that uses GPL software is not required to release its source code whereas a client application would be required to release its source code. The difference in user freedom between web apps and client apps is much bigger than the difference between a GPL client app and a proprietary client app. With a client app, even a proprietary one - the user at least in theory can see exactly what the application is doing and what data it is transmitting where. So for the average user - GPL has encouraged loss of user freedom. Of course this doesn't affect Stallman because he does not use any web apps.

Tyr42 11y ago
I also feel the the GPL Affero licence (the GPL response to this, by re-wording it so that you still have to share the source if it's a webapp) is not very clear. I know the company I'm working at is willing to be a good GPL citizen, but refuses to touch GPL affero'd code with a 3 meter pole. I like it in principle, but I don't feel like it's a good solution in practice, at least until we get some cases going before a judge to see how it gets interpreted. http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-affero-gpl.en.html http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-affero-gpl.en.html
- quadrangle 11y ago
  AGPL is perfectly clear: if you make source available under AGPL, you are in compliance. There's nothing to worry about. Plus, nobody ever sues you initially over (A)GPL compliance, they just ask you to come into compliance and only sue you if you refuse. Just release the source initially, and you're all set. Why is this hard?
nickpsecurity 11y ago
Ironic and interesting point. The client applications also had more efficiency, reliability, and security when set up right. Really hard to do that with web apps to the point that it took a lot of work by smart people to get it working this well. So, we loose across the board.

nickpsecurity 11y ago

The first half of the article was good and balanced. I especially like the distinction in lay terms: copyleft to push freedom; non-copyleft to push adoption. That's a great way to describe it to a person contemplating what license to choose. Then, the article goes in a different direction that embodies negative qualities that author critiqued in the related presentation. Let's address a bit of this from my pro-consumer, pro-security/quality, pro-OSS, anti-copyleft perspective. Mentioned that just so my bias is clear upfront and why I push adoption-oriented licenses (esp for open hardware & high assurance). re stepping stone. Yes, this is the common goal of proprietary use of anti-copyleft software. IIRC, copyleft software got its start using the architecture, languages, tools, and platforms of BSD and proprietary offerings. So, even GPL proponents build on existing work. Anyone wanting an open, free version of a given enhancement can similarly produce it starting with the same stepping stones. re open to closed. We saw this happen with Apple App Store, the QNX source reversal, attempts to combine open code with DRM, and so on. This is bad. However, it almost exclusively happens with companies whose licensing, TOS's, SLA's, etc allow for this sort of thing. That's where the problem is. Avoiding such companies, selecting safest licenses, and/or ensuring certain conditions are perpetual in contracts/licenses are easiest solution. GPL is actually a successful implementation of my claim, although it wasn't good enough. Affero corrected a major deficiency and more evolutions will probably follow. Many more licensing schemes can happen to reduce negative impact of business participation while empowering users. The common theme in most gripes is what the companies do. The reason we have this problem is that users almost exclusively do business with scumbag companies. They don't care about terms. They don't care about its ethics. Prior abuses rarely make them change companies (see Microsoft and Facebook). They don't try to leverage their buying power to force (existing) or incentivize (startups) companies to negotiate something that's favorable to them and future-proof in main risk areas. Like the old saying, the only thing that was necessary for triumph of evil was that good people did nothing [while evil kept its eye on the ball and its hands/feet in a sprint]. A lot of these problems can be avoided by simply investing in the right organizations. People who pick up Microsoft's server operating system are in for more schemes than those that used FreeBSD with commercial support. Certain small companies behind IDE's and libraries have had great terms for their users for years with minimal hassles unlike the mess that's Microsoft's development tools. Services provided by non-profits, cooperatives, and companies simply focused on customer satisfaction have done great compared to race to bottom in cost or highest shareholder earnings that get many others scheming on customers. Pick the right people/companies/tools, maintain an out to avoid lock-in (open formats/API's help), and invest in that. Double down on it if they use permissive licenses and re-invest back into their communities. In the end, this is more a problem of incentives than purely a legal one. People trust companies that don't care about them. They get screwed. Stop doing that. Do plenty more of the opposite. On top of it, explore alternatives [1] to popular source-sharing models in case business opportunities arise. Get momentum going in directions other than companies that do lock-in and lock-down. After all, I've done a lot of business with proprietary companies and have mostly avoided being boxed in. Same goes for FOSS use. Imagine that... All about what you use, how, and from whom. Sacrifices will need to be made, though, and now we're getting back to user demand (incentives) driving the negative practices. Outside a niche, I don't see it happening because market as a whole won't take responsibility to make it happen. The problems are market's fault, as usual. Good that niche commercial, OSS, and FOSS have given us plenty of good stuff to work with. I encourage all of them to keep at it without a need to fight with any. I avoid GPL strictly for economic reasons: certain investments don't happen, esp high assurance or ASIC development, unless they can recover the cost somehow. Additionally, companies adopting high quality components makes stuff more robust over time. Finally, making money allows them to fight inevitable patent suits that will attempt to put them out of business and create more patents for defensive use. So, for economic reasons, I oppose the GPL in some spaces while respecting it and being neutral in others. My OS is GPL, for instance, and I'm grateful to its developers & community. :) [1] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/05/friday_squid_bl_424.html#c6051639 https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/05/friday_squid_...

ggreer 11y ago

The author gives good reasons for preferring the GPL to BSD-style licenses, but it seems to me that there's an even better license for his ideals: the AGPL.[1] It fulfills the same purpose as the GPL, but it fixes loopholes such as running code on remote servers (most website back-ends). I've yet to hear a good argument from ideals that prefers the GPL to AGPL. The latter really does give people more freedom over how they can use and modify software. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affero_General_Public_License https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affero_General_Public_License

Gregordinary 11y ago
The author actually uses the AGPLv3 for MediaGoblin: http://mediagoblin.org/ http://mediagoblin.org/
- ggreer 11y ago
  Thanks for the info. This confuses me. He knows about the AGPL. He uses it for his own code. Yet he doesn't even mention it in a post about his favorite license. Why?
  - Gregordinary 11y ago
    I found that odd as well. He mentioned using the AGPL for MediaGoblin at LibrePlanet a couple years ago. Not sure why no mention now.

awinder 11y ago

> To return to the arguments made last night, though copyleft > defends source, in my view this is merely a strategy towards > defending users. And indeed, as in terms of where freedoms > lie between those who make use of the source and code side of > things vs the end-user-application side of things, one might > notice a trend: there are very few permissively licensed projects > which aim at end users. Most of them are stepping stones towards > further software development. And this is great! I am glad that > we have so many development tools available, and it seems that > permissive/lax licensing is an excellent strategy here. But when > I think of projects I use every day which are programs I actually run > (for example, as an artist I use Blender, Gimp and Inkscape > regularly), most of these are under the GPL. How many truly major > end-user-facing software applications can you think of that > are under permissive licenses? I can think of many under copyleft, > and very few under permissive licenses. This is no coincidence. > Assuming you wish to fight for freedom of the end user, and ensure > that your software remains free for that end user, copyleft > is an excellent strategy. This was the key paragraph from my reading anyways. This is not an argument for / against whichever license, it's an argument that different types of code and projects have different licensing trends, and those probably align with how the code is going to be used and the audience that it's targeting.

llllllllllllll 11y ago

I think this quote from the article is what is all qbout. "In Shane's talk last night, he argued against copyleft because software licenses should have "no strings attached". But the very strategy that is advocated above is all about attaching strings! Copyleft's strings say "you can use my stuff, as long as you give back what you make from it". But the proprietary differentiation strategy's strings say "I will use your stuff, and then add terms which forbid you to ever share or modify the things I build on top of it." Don't be fooled: both attach strings. But which strings are worse?"

bcg1 11y ago

Christopher Allen Webber is a FLOSS hero and in my opinion deserves the utmost respect, although I suspect he is probably too humble to agree with that. I concur with everything he has written in his post... but one thing I'd add to the points he made is my annoyance with the implication made by many that proponents of permissive licensing care about freedom more than people who use copyleft licenses. People who really care about freedom care about it for EVERYONE, and licensing that maximizes freedom for everyone trumps the "strings attached" in that regard, that is such a simple thing to see that it challenges credulity to think that someone who cares about freedom could say otherwise. If you want everyone to use permissive licensing because you want to use free software inside of locked down programs you produce and are frustrated that great copyleft software doesn't let you do that, fine. I can respect that position because I've experienced the same problem. But please get over it and find some non-free solution to your problem, instead of trying to undermine the ideology of people who actually care about freedom just because you are jealous of the quality of software that has that ideology attached to it.

sitkack 11y ago
I personally would rather people steal GPL software than go an ideological rampage so they can safely subsume free software into proprietary products. Stealing would be a more morally honest action.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- ForHackernews 11y ago
  What? Why? So that future lawsuits can force the release of codebases including stolen GPL work?
  - sitkack 11y ago
    Because when they convince the world out of their own greed that authors shouldn't protect the users rights, and that the users (not creators) of MIT/BSD/Apache licensed software are free to subsume it without giving back, they hurt everyone. If they steal the software and use it in a proprietary product, they only damage themselves. Convincing everyone to not use the (L)GPL does more damage than just violating a license.

dzsekijo 11y ago

What bothers me both about the article and the comments here that they speak in the context of the pro-GPL/anti-GPL debate, but what actually gets discussed is lax vs. copyleft FOSS licensing. However, the two topics are not the same. I, for one, like the idea of copyleft licensing (for cases where its appropriate), but don't like GPL. GPL has taken the status of "the real copyleft license", but indeed it's an abuse of the idea of copyleft. Here's why: create the Merry Mermaid Public License (MMPL) as follows: take the text of the GPL and replace all occurrences of "GNU General Public License" with "Merry Mermaid Public License". Also remove all references to FSF and refer to yourself / another non-profit whenever a legal entity is to be named in the text. MMPL will be essentially the same as GPL, just called differently. However, GPL will condemn MMPL in the sense that the two won't be compatible. You can't mix and distribute code bits where one is GPL and one is MMPL licensed. An aggressive monopolist drive is built in to GPL as it decrees incompatiblity with other licenses not on base of licensing conditions, but on base of not being originated from the FSF.