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>depleting the community of improvements to the work they have made freely available under good faith What is this insane logic? If someone modifies my code a

>depleting the community of improvements to the work they have made freely available under good faith What is this insane logic? If someone modifies my code and doesn't give it to me, it doesn't deplete me of anything. For that to be true I would have to lose something I already possessed. You maybe meant "deprive," but at no time did I ever have a right to anything that they created. It seems you're asserting that because they used my code I suddenly should have a right to use their modifications. I think that logic is flawed. I do believe I should have a right to use anything I've created [1]. And if someone feels they've made changes that would be generally useful, and submits code to add to the code I've released, then I would be thankful. But I wouldn't feel that I had the right to something created by someone else just because I gave them a gift that didn't even cost me anything to give them (aside from possible opportunity costs). That's not to say that GPLv2 isn't useful for dual-licensing situations (like Qt), so as to convince companies to pay for full commercial use. But the latter situation does NOT guarantee user freedom (people will only pay if they AREN'T willing to release code, after all), and the pro-GPL arguments on this article seem to focus on user freedom, so you can't really have it both ways. [1] I would love to see a programmer's bill-of-rights that guaranteed a developer the ability to reuse any code that they'd ever written that didn't include any actual business or trade secrets. I once wrote an awesome string class for one employer that was even actually open source, but that was licensed in such an annoying proprietary manner that, even though I can still legally have and use the source code, I can never redistribute the source code. The company made games, so there was nothing at all about the string class that anyone would ever have cared about in a business sense.

baddox 11y ago
It's the same kind of logic that the RIAA would use to conclude that my downloading a terabyte of music is equivalent to my stealing x trillion dollars from the record labels, regardless of whether I ever would have spent money on the music (or whether I ever even listen to it). It is, simply put, the logic of intellectual property laws. It's why I don't like intellectual property laws or things that rely on them (like the GPL).
- marrs 11y ago
  All software licenses rely on them. Copyright and patents are the only provisions under the law for licensing software, and both are used.
chongli 11y ago
For that to be true I would have to lose something I already possessed. It's important to recognize that software -- all software -- is subject to network effects. The more popular a piece of software is, the more work is likely to go into it, more features added etc. If your favourite MIT-licensed software gets forked by a proprietary company and the proprietary version eclipses the original in popularity, you are very likely to be deprived of future support. In a way, software is analogous to a river: it's important to preserve everybody's access not just to the part of the river they live near but also its entire length upstream and downstream.
- SomeCallMeTim 11y ago
  The opposite has been the case, though, in practice: When using MIT-licensed software that's popular, proprietary software companies have been happy to contribute back upstream, because it reduces their maintenance requirements. And since when does a for-pay piece of software eclipse the original free version in popularity? If it did happen, then I'd assert that the "proprietary company" must have done a lot of work to make that possible. In that unlikely case, they must have invested a nontrivial amount in the creation of a powerful tool, and they deserve the profits it generates. A far more likely scenario is that a proprietary company forks an MIT-licensed project, does something creative with it, sells it to a few people, and then the open-source community would copy the cool features and add them to the MIT project. The actual code to a new feature is typically not as hard to create as the design of the feature, which has already been done by our hypothetical proprietary company. Then the company will need to innovate again to stay relevant, and the free project can copy those features as well. A healthy ecosystem can include some companies that don't share. It's all part of the network effect. If you can cite any situation where a community surrounding a free software library or other product has been killed or even harmed by a piece of proprietary software that is based on the same code, then you might have a point, but I don't think it's happened. It DOES happen that proprietary software runs circles around the equivalent free software (Adobe Photoshop, for instance), but that's not because the for-pay software is stealing free code. It's because when you have hundreds of full-time developers you can produce a lot more than the same number of people can do in their spare time. And when those full-time paid developers can contribute to open source (as is frequently the case with MIT/BSD licensed projects), those open source projects flourish as well. Again, see LLVM/Clang.

baddox 11y ago

It's the same kind of logic that the RIAA would use to conclude that my downloading a terabyte of music is equivalent to my stealing x trillion dollars from the record labels, regardless of whether I ever would have spent money on the music (or whether I ever even listen to it). It is, simply put, the logic of intellectual property laws. It's why I don't like intellectual property laws or things that rely on them (like the GPL).

marrs 11y ago
All software licenses rely on them. Copyright and patents are the only provisions under the law for licensing software, and both are used.

chongli 11y ago

For that to be true I would have to lose something I already possessed. It's important to recognize that software -- all software -- is subject to network effects. The more popular a piece of software is, the more work is likely to go into it, more features added etc. If your favourite MIT-licensed software gets forked by a proprietary company and the proprietary version eclipses the original in popularity, you are very likely to be deprived of future support. In a way, software is analogous to a river: it's important to preserve everybody's access not just to the part of the river they live near but also its entire length upstream and downstream.

SomeCallMeTim 11y ago
The opposite has been the case, though, in practice: When using MIT-licensed software that's popular, proprietary software companies have been happy to contribute back upstream, because it reduces their maintenance requirements. And since when does a for-pay piece of software eclipse the original free version in popularity? If it did happen, then I'd assert that the "proprietary company" must have done a lot of work to make that possible. In that unlikely case, they must have invested a nontrivial amount in the creation of a powerful tool, and they deserve the profits it generates. A far more likely scenario is that a proprietary company forks an MIT-licensed project, does something creative with it, sells it to a few people, and then the open-source community would copy the cool features and add them to the MIT project. The actual code to a new feature is typically not as hard to create as the design of the feature, which has already been done by our hypothetical proprietary company. Then the company will need to innovate again to stay relevant, and the free project can copy those features as well. A healthy ecosystem can include some companies that don't share. It's all part of the network effect. If you can cite any situation where a community surrounding a free software library or other product has been killed or even harmed by a piece of proprietary software that is based on the same code, then you might have a point, but I don't think it's happened. It DOES happen that proprietary software runs circles around the equivalent free software (Adobe Photoshop, for instance), but that's not because the for-pay software is stealing free code. It's because when you have hundreds of full-time developers you can produce a lot more than the same number of people can do in their spare time. And when those full-time paid developers can contribute to open source (as is frequently the case with MIT/BSD licensed projects), those open source projects flourish as well. Again, see LLVM/Clang.