I ask this because I think of the recent switch of Ubuntu to the Rust recode of the GNU core utils, which use an MIT license. There are many Rust recodes of GPL software that re-license it as a pushover MIT or Apache licenses. I worry these relicensing efforts this will significantly harm the FOSS ecosystem. Is this reason to start worrying or is it not that bad?
IMO, if the FOSS world makes something public, with extensive liberties, then the only thing that should be asked in return is that people preserve these liberties, like the GPL successfully enforces. These pushover licenses preserve nothing.
like the GPL successfully enforces
I’m not aware of the GPL being legally tested to where you can claim that; there are a lot of open questions, and it has failed to protect works from AI companies, for example.
GPL has certainly failed time and time again, openly in the case of FFmpeg and their clones all over Eastern Europe and elsewhere. FFmpeg made a lot of noise and resorted to “public shaming” mostly because the courts weren’t working for them. And they have a very visible product… so many GPL licensed things are lurking inside proprietary products where they’ll never be seen.
It’s like putting a license on COVID to prevent it from spreading… it just doesn’t work in the real world.
The original intention of public licenses was never to prevent code from spreading in any circumstance. Rather, that’s the “innovation” of copy-left. We just wanted a way to share our code without putting the people who used it into legal hot water. We didn’t want to control or manipulate people, using our code to extort a particular behavior out of them. We just wanted to share our code. I think copy-left makes sense in certain situations but I don’t think it should be the default option of a person wanting to contribute to culture.
We didn’t want to control or manipulate people, using our code to extort a particular behavior out of them.
The FOSS community, and even the community of developers on single large FOSS projects, is large and diverse… The royal “We” doesn’t really apply at all, even in the case of Linus and the kernel - sure, he’s a clear leader, but he’s hardly in control of the larger community and their wants.
I think the current state of open source licensing is much as it should be… MIT has its place, as does GPL, and if we’re going to pretend that intellectual property is about protecting creators, then it’s the creators who should get to choose.
In the world I live in, intellectual property is a barrier to entry that’s primarily used by organizations with a lot of power (money) to prevent others from disturbing their plans of making more money. MIT seems most appropriate for individual creators to assure that that world doesn’t come crashing into their bedroom with CDOs and lawsuits. GPL is “cute” - but I think most practitioners of GPL licensing don’t have any clue how far out of their depth they are if they should ever seek actual enforcement of their self-declared license terms. That’s not to say GPL is toothless. It gives small players a tool to amplify the trouble they can make for those who would violate their license (primarily mode of violation being by use of the code so licensed.) But, other than making minor trouble for the bigger players, thus discouraging the bigger players from entangling with them, GPL isn’t going to “make” the bigger players do much of anything other than stay away.
GPL does shape the community, it has its effects, I just get tired of hearing about the specific immediate legal language of it, because that’s far from the actual effects it has.
There was a “we” that produced the first public licenses – amateur and enthusiast software developers, who previously were simply publishing things to the “public domain”. And “we” had clear goals in doing so, which we often wrote directly into our ad hoc self-written licenses. They weren’t handed down by God, there is a mortal history, and living people here were part of it.
I agree that the GPL should be viewed as a cultural artifact, not a legal one. It’s just the spirit of shareware, but without money involved.
without money involved
Without money involved the court system is useless. The whole point of legal action around contracts is to determine what happens when the agreements of contracts have been broken.
I’m not aware of the GPL being legally tested
https://fsfe.org/activities/avm-gpl-violation/avm-gpl-violation.en.html
In context of the many failures, I don’t think this establishes anything.
GPL is the only thing standing between us and Embrace-Extend-Extinguish.
There’s a reason that “Stallman was right” is a meme in the FOSS world.
Do you think IBM wouldn’t make Red Hat completely proprietary if they had the chance? They already tried to use their customer licensing to restrict source access!
It only takes one successful proprietary product to gain mind-share and market-share and become a new de-facto standard, and then all of the original FOSS has to play catch-up and stay compatible to stay relevant.
See Jabber/XMPP for an example.
See Jabber/XMPP for an example.
There was a (short) time when I could chat with my friends on google hangouts (or whatever that was called back then) and facebook messaging via my own xmpp server. It was pretty cool and somehow felt like that’s the way things should be. Like email today (even if every big player is trying to destroy that too).
Maybe in some version of the future we’ll get that back.
You’re on the fediverse where that is a possibility.
It’s not really a same thing. I can’t reach my mother or neighbor over fediverse since they don’t know nor care what that is. But they use whatsapp, facebook and other stuff which are in their own walled gardens and there’s no option to communicate to those gardens with anything I self host.
And trying to convince everyone to switch is not a battle I’m actively fighting for multiple reasons. Of course I mention signal, fediverse and everything to anyone who’s willing to listen, but those encounters are pretty rare.
The problem you are describing in this comment is a social problem, not a technological one. In the previous comment I answered, a technological problem was described, and I offered a technological solution.
I am on the fedi, I do not proselytize to anybody that’s not on the fedi, nor do I interact outside of it. I am not fighting a battle, nor do I need to change people. There’s tons of people on the fedi that I can interact with. If people like where they are, they can continue to enjoy that, and I don’t have to bother them. I call my parents using the phone.
It’s kinda-sorta social problem, but originally not the way you intend. It used to be possible to self host XMPP and chat with people regardless of the platform since both Google and Facebook (it wasn’t Meta at the time) adopted the protocol. But then they changed their policy and created the walled gardens they have now and thus it’s a social and/or political problem.
They fully followed the playbook of Embrace-Extend-Extinguish which eleijeep@piefed.social mentioned few messages up the thread and pretty much devastated XMPP out of existence. Sure, there’s still handful of users and project itself isn’t dead, but before their policy change I saw quite a lot of servers around which are now either dead or forgotten.
On a previous comment I didn’t mean to describe that as a technological problem but a problem related to big corporations embracing FOSS projects/protocols and killing them by introducing their own walled garden variant of it.
https://matrix.org/category/dma/
There is work in progress to address this compelled by EU legislation.
See Google Chrome too.
Do you think IBM wouldn’t make Red Hat completely proprietary if they had the chance?
Adding to this, Google would make Android fully proprietary in a heartbeat if they could, given they’re already closing down more and more portions of the AOSP and trying to lock down app development and distribution as well.
And conceivably all it would take to turn Android fully proprietary ala Windows, is to hard-fork AOSP to keep the Lineage/Graphene/etc. users happy, and then rewrite main Android as closed-source.
Although, it’s kinda ironic that Windows, a fully closed environment, is less restrictive in terms of app dev and distribution, than Android, a supposedly semi-open environment, is. Like, MS isn’t mandating signed exes or trying to fully lock Windows into the MS Store, yet, while Google is trying to mandate signed APKs and also trying to lock Android into the Play Store.
And before anyone says, ‘But SmartScreen,’ unless that option is specifically disabled, you can just run unsigned exes by clicking ‘Run anyway’ still, Android doesn’t have a ‘Run anyway’ equivalent option AFAIK.
Although, it’s kinda ironic that Windows, a fully closed environment, is less restrictive in terms of app dev and distribution, […]
I think the reason for this is mainly historic.
Like, MS isn’t mandating signed exes or trying to fully lock Windows into the MS Store
I’m pretty sure this is changing too. Like the start menu deprioritizing the application menus vs the “app list”
Adding to this, Google created Android, wrote all the source code, and released it as Open Source.
By definition, Google cannot take anything here. It is only a question of what they give way in the future.
What Google wants is for people to use Google services. So they are making that less and less optional. There is no way for them to mandate this in Open Source and so they are shrinking the size of AOSP.
Online “services” are the greatest threat to software freedom. What kind of license is used has little to do with it.
Since this is a “GPL saves the world” thread, how would the GPL change anything? Android is mostly permissively licensed. But let’s assume that it is all GPL. Since we are talking about code Google wrote, nothing changes at all.
And the Linux kernel is already GPL licensed. Does that mean I can run whatever I want on my phone?
No. The threats to freedom in the Android space have literally nothing to do with permissive vs copyleft.
So far Google services aren’t being mandated on the desktop like they increasingly are on phones, yet, at least.
WEI threatened to push that once already, plus Google trying, again, this time with an actual chance of success given the Win10 EOL combined with the dumpster fire that Win11 is for the SKUs that normal people can legally access, to push Android to desktops in addition to mobile devices, certainly doesn’t help matters either, and if Google gets away with locking down Android successfully, that’ll probably embolden them to try to lock down the web at large with WEI again too.
Do you think IBM wouldn’t make Red Hat completely proprietary if they had the chance?
No. I don’t. For quite a few reasons.
1 - Red Hat has released new software (quite a lot actually) that they wrote, as GPL since the IBM purchase (rather directly refuting your thought experiment)
2 - A huge amount of Red Hat Enterprise Linux is permissively licensed. They have the chance every day to make this proprietary. They don’t. Again, answering your question.
3 - Red Hat is one of the most profitable parts of IBM.
4 - IBM has left the Product and Engineering teams independent. Because of #3 obviously.
5 - I use facts when forming my opinions
Red Hat is the most commercially successful Open Source company and perhaps the biggest proponent and prolific author of GPL software. They founded (created on purpose) one of the most successful community Linux distributions (Fedora)—a distribution with annoying dedication to free software (eg. codecs). Many of the “leaders” and “contributors” to Fedora are Red Hat employees. Red Hat of course does not make Fedora proprietary since having it be “community” led is a core part of their strategy.
Finally, you do not have to fear a Red Hat take over. Because it already happened.
Half the software (source code) you think of as GNU sits on servers Red Hat manages and controls. This is where that software is developed (not in Savannah—which is just a mirror). I am talking about GCC, Glibc, core utils. Etc.
Do you use systemd, pipewire, Wayland, Mesa, Podman, Cockpit, or Flatpak? Where did all this software come from? From the Free Software Foundation? University students? No, these are all part of the “Linux platform” as defined by Red Hat and they have swept us all along with them as they create it. You can probably add GNOME and GTK to the list at this point.
Has Debian moved to all these technologies? Why? Because of the FSF? No. Because of Red Hat.
Personally, I am ok with it. My core distro uses A LOT of software brought to me by Red Hat and I am thankful for it. But I avoid a lot of Red Hat software like GCC, Glibc, and systemd. But the replacements I use are also mostly corporately funded (Clang, MUSL, and dinit).
To quote Brian Lunduke, because the GPL is viral and functioning systems licensed under the GPL have been published, if a future Rust-based MIT version of Linux ever comes out, we can just “Fork it, then we’ll have our own Linux.”
To paraphrase Brian Lunduke: This software has gone woke! That software has gone woke! Boo woke software!
It is concerning, yeah. I usually license my own software with MIT, but, not all of it, and I think GPL is very important for Linux.
I gotta say I’m a bit concerned about this whole corporate takeover thing goin on in FOSS land. If companies start slapdin’ MIT or Apache licenses on GPL software that’s supposed to be all about freedom and whatnot, it does seem like a bit of a cop-out and it could have some pretty serious consequences for the community.
Here’s solution to problem https://lemmy.ml/comment/22277779
So switch to another gpl license OS is what you’re saying
either that or relicense Linux to GPLv3 which linus won’t approve.
If switching to a new OS there won’t be gaming capability. Linux finally got games working thanks to steam after 30 years. Can you imagine the time getting new drivers and game compatibility up and running.
I thought Linux was gplv3
Oh nope linux is not GPLv3 infact Linus is against GPLv3
Why is he against it?
https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/torvalds-no-gpl-3-for-linux/
There are many other articles and videos regarding issue.
Permissive license offer greater freedom to users of the code that already exists. The only benefit of copyleft is that it lets you demand future code that you did not write and that the authors do not want to Open Source. It is about restricting their freedom, not enhancing yours.
Permissive licenses provide all of the “4 freedoms” that the Free Software Foundation talks about. You cannot really talk about the differences between cooyleft and permissive as a “freedom” because they are not.
The name “permissive” kind of gives it away that permissive licenses offer more freedoms about what you can do with the code you were given.
Permissive license means that whoever (say a corporation) modifies some code and release a software from it, they are not obligated to release the modified code under the same license. Which means they can use Open Source software to make proprietary software, make money off it, and the community receives nothing back for their labor.
GPL forbids this. With GPL anyone can still modifes the code and release a software from it. But it obligates that the modified code must be released as GPL too. So GPL guarantees that the community benefits.
The act of choosing a license political one. Are you willing to provide unpaid labor for corporations? Or do you want your code to benefit communities?
Are you willing to provide unpaid labor for corporations?
When I release code as Open Source, I am providing unpaid labour to everyone. My work is a public good. Like science.
I welcome collaboration from everyone (including corporations). That is the spirit of Open Source.
I do not demand it. That is the nature of freedom.
they are not obligated to release the modified code under the same license
Agreed
the community receives nothing back for their labor.
The community has the source code that has been released as Open Source. That is what results from their labour. They can continue to collaborate and improve it. What they have “for their labor” is totally unmodified. Nothing has been lost. Possibly, nothing has been gained. This is not unique to corporations. The vast majority of the users of the code will contribute back nothing.
As it turns out, corporations are a major (majority) source of Open Source software and so it is their labor that we all benefit from. This is true for both permissive and copyleft licenses. And, true to form, few of us give anything back.
[the GPL] obligates that the modified code must be released as GPL
Agreed.
So GPL guarantees that the community benefits.
We disagree big picture.
First, I see a world with greater freedom as a benefit on its own.
Second, I think the GPL discourages corporate contribution. Corporations write most Open Source software. The GPL does not prevent natural monopolies in Open Source. Red Hat has enormous influence over Linux as a platform and all of free software as a whole. The GPL does not stop this and may in fact contribute. There is a reason it is their preferred license for the considerable amount if software that they write. In my view, better communities develop around permissive licenses. Just like, my opinion man.
Third, the GPL shrinks ecosystems and restricts my ability to build on and share code. I cannot combine ZFS and Linux. I could if either one (or both) was permissively licensed. That is a loss of freedom for ME.
The act of choosing a license political one
Totally agree.
I also think that the number one way that corporations profit from code without giving back is to sell it as a service. And the GPL does not help with this at all.
I welcome collaboration from everyone (including corporations).
With permissive license, corporations are allowed publish a modified version of the software while restricting their code modifications from release to the community. That is not collaboration. Permissive license benefits corporations more than the community.
corporations are a major (majority) source of Open Source
Which is why they choose permissive licenses for their projects. They receive code contributions from the community and then suddenly: rugpull! Starting from next version the software will be proprietary. The community contributors are of course having pikachu face when they realize the corporations are legally permitted to take the fruit of their labor from them because their contributions are under permissive license.
Nothing have been lost.
My time and effort has been lost. The fruit of my labor has been lost. When i contribute or make to a Free Software project, i wish for it to benefit the community the most. If corporations want to release a software based on modified version of my code, I want a guarantee that the modified code to be available to the community too. The corporations benefit from my labor, but the community receives the company’s modified code too. That’s collaboration. Copyleft licenses such as GPL guarantees this.
Of course, such guarantee is considered “restriction” if one never intends the community to be the primary beneficiary in the first place.
When I release code as Open Source, I am providing unpaid labour to everyone.
With permissive license your free labor benefits corporations the most. Corporations that take things and enshittify them and do not give back to the community, all the while they get rich. Your choice your prerogative.
We disagree and you have not addressed my points. So let me stress them.
corporations are allowed publish a modified version of the software while restricting their code modifications from release to the community.
Again, totally agree. Under a permissive license , they do not have to share their work if they do not want to.
Permissive license benefits corporations more than the community.
How? We both have access to the exact same code. We can license our modifications as we wish including GPL or proprietary. They can do the same. We mutually benefit when we choose the original license.
As I have pointed out elsewhere, permissive licenses tend to attract more corporate contribution (and collaboration between corporations). That benefits me a lot.
Google probably has an “extended” version of Clang internally. That is ok with me. I enjoy the substantial code that they do share with me. Same with Microsoft and Apple that collaborate in the same project. I enjoy innovations like Rust and Zig that get built on top. I enjoy FreeBSD that uses it and my main distro Chimera Linux that uses it as well.
I seem to benefit quite a lot.
pikachu face when they realize the corporations are legally permitted to take the fruit of their labor from them
Hard to know how to respond here. Corporations can use you code under any Open Source license, including copyleft (GPL). They do not get one line extra from you because it is permissively licensed.
I guess I will say “pikachu face” when corporations realize that I can take their permissive code and use it for free for any purpose or even compete directly against them! And I can combine their code with any code I want including proprietary and GPL! And I I think preventing this kind of thing is the main reason Red Hat likes the GPL (you know, the biggest Open Source corporation).
My time and effort has been lost. The fruit of my labor has been lost.
How? Real question. How is that statement accurate?
You put time and effort into advancing an Open Source project. All of that code is still there. It can be modified, studied, enhanced, and shared. What code is available to you and what you can do with it is entirely unchanged when a corporation adds proprietary code on top of it. You have not gained their code, true. But you have not lost yours. And you can keep anything they gave you previously (or in the future). Nothing has been lost.
When i contribute or make to a Free Software project, i wish for it to benefit the community
And it does. All “4 freedoms” for example. Permissive or copyleft the same.
If corporations want to release a software based on modified version of my code, I want a guarantee that the modified code to be available to the community too.
Ah. Ok. Ya, permissive licenses don’t do that. It sounds like you will prefer copyleft licenses if this is something you want. Fine of course. But it has nothing to do with your other points. As I said, I fully support the idea of copyleft licenses. You should be free to license your work as you wish.
Do what you want. That is not what everybody wants though. I hope you can respect that.
Corporations that take things and enshittify them
Well, if that is what they are going to do, thank God they did not contribute the enshitification to the Open Source repos. We can go on using the Open Source version because it is better and we like the freedom. Sounds like a point in favour of permissive licenses to me.
all the while they get rich
How does this happen unless their version is better? And how is it better unless it is their changes that made it better?
It sounds like what we are really upset about is companies making better software than us and not letting us use it. That sounds like the exact opposite of what you are trying to say happens.
But again, nobody can take the Open Source away. It is still there untarnished. It may not be enhanced by their efforts but it is not harmed either.
What you are saying is, if they extend the Open Source software, you do not want the Open Source version anymore. You only want theirs. Because only when you use theirs do you lose any freedom. That is true collectively for “the community”.
Your choice your prerogative.
Finally. We agree.
I am making an argument that copyleft licenses such as GPL are better than permissive ones because of the extra guarantees, primarily to the benefit to communities instead of corporations.
You on the other hand are making a false equivalence.
This is what i wrote:
If corporations want to release a software based on modified version of my code, I want a guarantee that the modified code to be available to the community too.
This is what you wrote:
What you are saying is, if they extend the Open Source software, you do not want the Open Source version anymore. You only want theirs.
The false equivalence is that because i desire communities to be the primary beneficiary of my code and its modifications, then i must also “… you do not want the Open Source version anymore. You only want theirs.”
These are not equivalent. You have begun using a logical fallacy. More elaboration of my arguments will be fruitless. Good bye.
Developers should choose a different license if they don’t want to free their code or go work on a project that’s inline with their values then. Poor them, I could care less. The GPL is made for YOUR freedom. Anything that allows a developer to not release their code because they don’t want to, well, that software becomes proprietary, which invades your freedom. Of course the GPL “restricts” those types of developers freedom to do whatever they want, how else would the software stay free? Don’t really understand what your arguement is here.
The GPL does nothing for MY freedom.
Freedom to have sex with somebody against their will is not a “freedom” for me. It is subjugation for them. Something does not become a “freedom” simply because it benefits me.
The right to eat crops grown by others is not a “freedom”. It is an entitlement.
That said, there is nothing immoral, unethical, or wrong about me growing crops and providing seeds to others on the condition that they share the resulting crops with me or even with everyone. This is a contract and hopefully a mutually beneficial one. All good as long as the terms are known up-front and all parties consent.
In my view, that last paragraph is the GPL. There is nothing wrong with it at all. However, it does not make either party to the contact “more free”. In fact, you a bit less free in the future when you agree to a contact, because you have to abide by its terms. But at least you got there freely.
Permissive licenses are not a contract. They are a gift. They make no demands. They take away no freedom at all.
Both are valid choices. I have no quarrel with somebody choosing the GPL.
I do not agree that permissive licenses are less free or that the GPL is moreso.
If it was truly about MY freedom, choosing a permissive license would not upset you.
I like non-copyleft licenses for one reason. Imagine if ffmpeg devs were like:
so many security vulnerabilities, your free labor is bad
thanks for pointing that out, it’s not longer free
Most devs (including me) want to have some control over what they made. Permissive licenses allow rugpulling project if someone is using it while making YOU do stuff. ffmpeg is a great example. You may not like it but that’s how it is.
I’m not sure I’m following. The owners of the code can re-license anytime they want, and even dual-license or license on a case-by-case basis. Would require a contributor license agreement to be practical though, and it looks like ffmpeg may not have one.
A little bit.
A lot of the Rust remakes are being made by morons who have no problem using weak licenses that favor corporations.
We should hold them accountable and avoid using/contributing to their projects until they switch to a free license.
Yes.
Anyone who cares about user freedoms is not choosing a permissive licence.
The problem is developers only caring about themselves and other developers.
When I talk to devs I know who like FOSS, they are always focussed on their needs as a dev when it comes to licences. The real concern was, and always should be, for the software user’s freedoms.
God forbid developers earning something for their work
Developers should absolutely get paid for their work, but as @mina86@lemmy.wtf said, that is is a different issue. There are plenty of companies that employ developers of FOSS code, both copyleft and permissive licence.
uutils developers aren’t earning any more than coreutils developers. This is an orthogonal discussion.
How does permissive licensing lead to corporate takeover? Companies can do proprietary forks of permissively licensed foss projects, but they can’t automatically take over the upstream.
A company can throw so much manpower at the project that by adding more features and marketing the proprietary fork heavily (Extend) users start moving from the free fork to the proprietary one, and when the users are gone, the devs leave also. We end up with the original project dead(Extinguish).
I think that’s a misunderstanding of how software works. More features != better. I’m aware that many users think that, but it’s not a common view in the foss community. People in the foss community largely hate corporate enshittified bloated software and won’t use a proprietary fork that some company has added an LLM to. A project doesn’t need mainstream appeal; think about all the foss utilities written for Linux and BSDs where the target audience is “nerds”/enthusiasts/etc. These projects maintain themselves and their popularity just fine with a limited target audience. Besides, most foss isn’t for the average computer user. There’s a lot of foss that isn’t user software (libraries and OS/kernelspace software), and then there’s software like curl which can be for end users but is mostly used as a library, and the end users who use curl directly are a more technical crowd who most likely care about foss. The mainstream crowd that wants their iPhones and copilots are not making decisions between a foss option and a proprietary option.
Permissive licensing can create what is effectively “software tivoization” (the restriction or dirty interpretation of distribution and modification rights of software by the inclusion of differently-licensed components).
The Bitwarden case is a good example of how much damage can be done to a brand with merely the perception of restrictive licensing. obviously, bitwarden has clarified the mess, but not before it was being called ‘proprietary’ by the whole oss community.
So I don’t think op is referring to direct corporate takeover, but damage caused by corporate abuse of a fork.
I’m going to continue releasing my software with a license that I deem appropriate.
For things I’m building only for myself or that I have no interest in building a community around, I couldn’t give a shit what people do with it or if they contribute back. My efforts have nothing to do with them. I’m releasing it for the remote chance someone finds it useful, either commercially or personally. Partially because I’ve benefited from others doing the same thing.
I’m not anti-copyleft, but the only time I actually care to use something like the GPL is for projects that would be obviously beneficial to have community contributions. Things that require more effort than I can put in, or that needs diverse points of views.
I use permissive licenses not because I’m a pushover, but because I really don’t care what you do with it.
I use permissive licenses not because I’m a pushover, but because I really don’t care what you do with it.
The point of all of this is that you really should, no matter what it is. I’m sure there is something you would object to having been a part of; protecting your labor from contributing to that only makes sense. If you really have no problems with that, then that is simply terrifying.
The point of all of this is that you really should, no matter what it is.
That’s like saying: I have a pecan orchard, I like my trees and I don’t mind if people collect the nuts as they walk by. Oh, but the point is: you really should, those are your nuts, you pay the taxes on the land, you care for the trees, YOU should be the one to sell them, not give them away to some randos passing by.
Yeah, sure. You do you.
Headline 1: mangocats supports local drug dealers by providing free-to-use property under the guise of free pecans to hide young adults that indulge in drug use, promiscuity, and other acts on mangocats pecan orchard.
That’s the most obvious and potentially PC way that predators can overreach on someone’s generosity and turn a “awwe” thing (the free pecans) into people getting in trouble or hurt.
The worst is some legal jujitsu of your signage “free pecans” implying tacit and potentially unrestricted use and/or terms of use to the orchard. Now some asshole subsumes your free pecans into the bottom line of their criminal enterprise, and you’re the longest running connection providing a financial bedrock for their blah blah. Now you’re in Rico. Pecans to uncle without even hitting the blunt.
I don’t speak from experience. But I was a young adult, I do by the book things, and I also developed an imagination of what can and could happen.
Then I tried magic cigarettes and got paranoid and now all I do is cross my Ts because therenare real good people to become better from. And there’s the other kind too and they love slipping people up.
“Free nuts”
Of course, shit-for-neighbors can make all kinds of trouble out of anything. I was thinking more along the lines of MIT free nuts, take 'em, eat 'em, sell 'em, just don’t sue me over 'em. As opposed to GPL “free nuts,” must be consumed on the property. If you take a dump while you’re here be sure to bury it at least 3" deep along with any TP used. Bring your own privacy screening.
My labor is done. I’ve already made the product. I have nothing to protect it from. Someone copying the product deprives me of nothing.
Also, you seem to be moving into another topic of controlling how software is used which is rarely ever addressed in licenses.
There is a reason nearly every software corporation out there is allergic to GPL code, and similarly why they love MIT/BSD/Apache code. I urge you to consider why that is. Licenses do affect how software is used, that is literally the purpose of them.
There is a reason nearly every software corporation out there is allergic to GPL code, and similarly why they love MIT/BSD/Apache code. I urge you to consider why that is.
I’m well aware. Are you assuming that people using permissive licenses are somehow incapable of understanding the implication of their license choice?
Licenses do affect how software is used, that is literally the purpose of them.
You implied that I would be “contributing to something” I would object to. I’m left to fill in the gaps. Maybe be more direct in your comments.
One side community wants total GPL take over and one side they don’t support total GPLv3 licenced Operating system like
Also on that topic, very interesting read:
Interesting, but ultimately a roundabout justification for why the author chose a non-FOSS license for their startup Slack-clone built on ATProto.
They talk about “pro-labor licensing” but what they mean is pro- their -labor, not pro- anyone else’s -labor.
GPL is already the most pro-labor licensing since it respects the work of anyone who contributes in equal measure, and does not hold the “original” founding author in higher regard.
It’s really quite something to rail so unequivocally against the “fascistic mega-corps” and “autocratic corpostates” in your licensing justification blog post and then build your commercial product on top of Bluesky .
Let’s see how this goes then revisit the question.
Why are they pushover licenses? Because they don’t force people to contribute back? Because a lot of companies aren’t doing that for GPL licensed software either.
Also not really sure how this would allow a takeover, because control of the project is not related to the license.
It’s not so much about forcing to contribute, but rather keeping companies from selling commercial forks/having checks against profiting from work that happens to be freely available.
The GPL doesn’t place any restrictions on selling or profiting from GPL licensed works. It only requires that anyone distributing the work provides the recipients with the same rights under the GPL, ie. the right to view, modify and redistribute the source code.
This means that a company cannot take a GPL licensed work and turn it into a proprietary product.
I’m thinking of the Apache project, and all the important projects it covers that are under an Apache license and I’m not sure where the sudden worry comes from.
HTTPD and Nginx have had very permissive licensing for years and seem to do fine.
You can profit from GPL software. The only restriction is if you distribute it you also need to distribute modifications under the GPL.
GPL also does nothing for software as a service since it is never distributed.
GPL even explicitly allows selling GPL software. This is effectively what redhat do. They just need to distribute the source to those that they sell it to.
Prograns like that are usually distributed under AGPL which protects server side software
And RHEL bit-for-bit compatible gratis alternatives exist, which is because of the GPL
The GPL doesn’t force to contribute. But if you make changes to it, you need to have these changes reflect the liberties you yourself received. Megacorporations use the so-called “Explore, Expand, Exterminate” model, the GPL stops this from happening.
I’ve heard it mostly as Embrace, Extend, Extinguish
You can just wrap the software in a binary and interact with the binary and you will likely elude the GPL terms. This is kinda grey area but it would be hard to win against it in court. (I am not a lawyer)
I mean that broadly because nobody will make proprietary Coreutils or sudo as someone already pointed out.
You should look into the origins of OS X and CellOS.
Your pathetic rhetoric actively contributes to making people richer than you even richer.
Stop selling yourself out just because it’s easy.
Funny you say that because OS X shipped (and probably still ships) plenty of copyleft licensed software such as Bash. The Linux kernel is used in Android and ChromeOS.
If you want to stop corporations from profiting off your work, putting a GPL on it isn’t gonna do it. In fact no free software license will do it, because by definition they allow anyone to use and ship your software.
You don’t understand.
It’s not a problem if corporations profit off of it. It’s a problem when they extend a program without giving the public access to those changes.
Sure it’s a problem when that happens. It’s not the only problem, and honestly in the case of coreutils it’s not really the most relevant one.
Do you think it’s likely that corporations will take over UNIX-likes with proprietary coreutils extensions forked from uutils? Because that’s the one thing that is legal to do with an MIT/BSD licensed coreutils but not with GPL licensed ones.
Tell me you don’t understand how GPL works without telling me how GPL works.
GPL has been battle tested in court and has the most precedence than any other license. Hell I’d even include proprietary licenses.
Core Android and ChromeOS are FOSS because they have to be. But because Linus Torvalds didn’t want to move Linux to GPL3, we have proprietary bootloaders with free software.
THAT’S how we have corporations profiting from GPL. Not because GPL allows anyone to use it.
Core Android and ChromOS don’t need to be FOSS because they use the GPL. You can use the Linux kernel without having to make everything that runs on it GPL as well. Things that run on the kernel are not derivative works of the kernel. These projects are FOSS because google at the time thought it would give them an advantage to make the FOSS.
If you add too many restrictions to a license it does not force companies to give their stuff away for free, it just means they wont use your project which can drastically stunt the growth of your project. If Linux had a more restrictive license to start with all that would of happened is no one would have heard of it today as companies would have created something else that they can use.
GPL has been battle tested in court
Well… parts of it have been. Others have not. Notably the FSFs view on whether or not linking to a GPL-licensed library constitutes a derivative work (and triggers the GPLs virality) is not universally shared by legal scholars. In the EU in particular linking does not necessarily create derivative works, despite what the FSF says. This has not been tested in court.
Some other parts like the v3 anti-tivoization hasn’t gone to court either, but that has lesser ramifications (assuming you’re not TiVo).
THAT’S how we have corporations profiting from GPL. Not because GPL allows anyone to use it.
What distinction are you trying to draw here exactly? They can do it precisely because the GPL (v2) allows it. The GPLv3 has some extra restrictions but doesn’t do anything about closed source drivers (beyond the linking thing) or the Google Play Services type of proprietary extensions.
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