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.
That’s good point.
Another thing that is dangerous are CLAs or “contributor license agreements”, like Google uses. Technically, it is GPL, but Google might demand to hold all the copyright, so as the copyright holder it can change the license at a whim.
Also like Ente uses: https://github.com/ente-io/ente/pull/7945#issuecomment-3538457041
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I’ve heard it mostly as Embrace, Extend, Extinguish
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.
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You’re the only user catching downvotes
Check the rest of the thread 🤣
People in here don’t work in the space, and are clearly not knowledgeable about the subject. They can downvote me all they want.
I did, twice
Code complete is arguably a myth when talking about security. You need to update when vulnerabilities are found at minimum. Sometimes, the changing software environment changes and so the software has to start adding features again or get replaced. Rarely old features are the vulnerability, and have to be removed.
What does security have to do with open-source projects succumbing to “corporate takeover”, which isn’t even possible?
If the code is of such a restrictive license that you aren’t able to fork and re-release it with changes, then it isn’t open-source to begin with.
To your last point about removing “old features”, this is done all the time, and this is why things use semantic versioning. Nobody wants to be forced to maintain old code into perpetuity when they can just drop large portions of it, and then just release new versions with deprecated backends when needed
Sorry, I didn’t explain what I was talking about.
The problem is that in the modern software environment there’s a constant need for updating and patching, and if a proprietary fork provides those updates and a free original can’t keep up for whatever reason, the proprietary fork (that could have contributed otherwise) gains inertia until the free original dies. This is admittedly harder to pull off in a mature and well maintained free software ecosystem, but I think you’d be surprised how many important free software projects lack needed manpower. It doesn’t help that MIT practically encourages people not to publish code, compared to GPL.
People make out forking like it’s a big protection against proprietisation, and it is, but it’s not foolproof. Good forks are usually founded by community members that already understand and contribute to the code, most forks actually die quickly. The fewer contributors relative to the project’s size and complexity, the more realistic it is to either be overtaken by a more competitive proprietary fork, or for the maintainers to sell out and relicense without anybody to fork it.
Realistically, I don’t know how likely this would happen to anything decently important, but it has happened at least a few times. I remember using Paint .NET while it was still MIT licensed years back, but nobody forked it. Since we’re on Lemmy, Reddit used to use a Free software license.
I suppose it’s true that neither would have been called feature complete by its authors, proprietisation is much more likely when there is still a lot missing. But I would still caution against thinking that having all the features you need means you’re immune to it.
There’s a few different things getting wrapped in here together, so let me break down my take:
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Licensing - if you intend to only use FOSS software, it wouldn’t matter if a corporate/proprietary version of something exists or not. If you intend to release something and make it free, you would need to include only license-compatible libraries. I don’t see why Microsoft having a proprietary version of something that is better would be a problem, because that’s not the focus of your goal of releasing something for free. Similarly if you start a company and bootstrap a product off of open libraries, you will steer towards projects that are license-compatible. Whether there is a better version is irrelevant.
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Scope of license - Your comments seem to focus on larger product-complete projects. You mentioned Paint.net as an example. So say Adobe forks GIMP, and drops a bunch of proprietary Photoshop libraries into it to make it beefier or whatever. Similar to the above, people who intend to only use FOSS software still wouldn’t adopt it.
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Death by license - there have been some cases where FOSS project maintainers get picked up by corporate sponsors and sort of “acquired”. This is on the maintainers to make that choice of course, not the community, and contributing members of that community have every right to be pissed about that. Those contributing members also have the right to immediately fork that project, and release their own as a competitive product. Redis vs Valkey, and Terraform vs OpenTofu, are examples. Some people flock away, some people don’t, but in most cases ts a guaranteed way to turn the community against you, and towards a fork of said project. Happens a lot.
I think what you’re not seeing here is that these companies buying out projects really don’t intend to put a lot of money back into them after they get their bags of money. Whether or not people continue to use the originals is less important than the forks being available and supported. If companies believe in the project, they kick in PRs to keep things rolling along because they need that particular part of their stack. I myself am a maintainer in multiple public projects, and also work with companies that contributed to dozens of different public projects because the products they make revolve around them: everything from ffmpeg, to the torch ecosystem. You find a bug you can fix, you submit a PR. That’s what keeps this ecosystem going.
Smaller scale startups to mid-sized companies contribute all the time to public projects, though it may not be apparent. Larger corporations do as well, but it’s more of legal thing than an obligation to the community. Rewriting entire batches of libraries isn’t feasible for these larger companies unless there is a monetary reward on the backend, because paying dev teams millions of dollars to rewrite something like, I don’t know, memcache doesn’t make sense unless they can sell it, and keeping an internal fork of an open project downstream is a huge mess that no engineer wants to be saddled with.
Once a public project or library is adopted, it’s very unlikely to be taken over by corporate interests, and it’s been that way for almost fifty years now (if we’re going back to Bell and Xerox Labs). Don’t see that changing anytime soon based on the above, and being in the space and seeing it all work in action. Though there are scant cases, there’s no trend of this becoming more prevalent at the moment. The biggest threat I see to this model is the dumbing down of engineers by “AI” and loss of will and independent thought to keep producing new and novel code out in the world.
I suppose you’re right that copyleft is not the primary motivator for contributions.
I’m aware that forks happen often when a takeover is attempted. There are many big success stories in FOSS. However, my point was that most FOSS software isn’t that successful. There are plenty of projects out there with very few contributors, and it is those I’m saying are easy for taking over. Perhaps they get taken over because most of the community doesn’t care, but it still happens from time to time. I originally commented because you seemed to make out that proprietisation was impossible.
I get your point that it’s incredibly unlikely for anything that matters however.
Edit: I think I misremembered an example I gave of a successful fork after an attempted takeover, but it was something Oracle.
Just based on experience in the community and professional experience, I can solidly say that your take on FOSS not being successful is just wrong, and I don’t mean that like you’re stupid or I’m shooting you down, you just wouldn’t realize how huge contributions are unless you know where to look.
Here’s a big example: look how many companies hire for engineers writing Python, Ruby, Rust, Go, Node…whatever. ALL OPEN SOURCE LANGUAGES. You bootstrap a project in any of these, and you’re already looped into the FOSS community. 100% of the companies I have personally worked with and for write everything based on FOSS software, and I can tell you hands down as a fact: never met a single person writing in any closed source IDEs or languages, because very few exist.
If you want to see where all the community stuff happens, find any project on GitHub and look at the “Issues” section for closed tickets with PRs attached. You’ll see just how many people write quick little fixes to nags or bugs, not just on their own behalf, but on behalf of the companies paying them. That’s sort of the beauty of the FOSS community in general in that if you want to build on community projects, you’ll be giving back in one form another simply because, as my last comment said, NOBODY wants to maintain a private fork. Submodules exist for a reason, and even then people don’t want to mess with that, they’d rather just commit fixes and give back. Companies are paying engineers for their time, and engineers committing PR fixes is defacto those companies putting back into the community.
To your Oracle point, I think the biggest thing there you may have been Java. That one is tricky. Java existed long before it was ever open sources by Sun Microsystems, and was available for everyone sometime in the early '00s (not bothering to look that up). Even though it was created by an engineer at Sun, it was always out there and available for use, it just wasn’t “officially” licensed as Open Source for contributions until some time. Sun still technically owned the trademarks and all of that though, and Oracle acquired them at some point, bringing the trademarks under their ownership. There wete a number of immediate forks, but I think the OpenJDK crew was further out in front and sort of won that battle. To this day I don’t know a single Java project using Oracle’s official SDK and tools for that language aside from Oracle devs, which is a pretty small community in comparison, but you’re right in that was essentially a corporate takeover of a FOSS project. How successful it was in bringing people to bear that engagement I think is up for discussion, but I’m sure the community would rightly say “Fuck, Oracle” and not engage with their tooling.
Well, you certainly made me feel much more optimistic, thank you.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
Given the current world we live in I do not want anything that I create or contribute to itself contributed to an exploitative corporation’s bottom line (at best) without my consent or their assuredly begrudging reciprocation. This should not be controversial. The GPL accomplishes this. Nothing more lax or permissive does or will. You are not a cool or chill guy because you don’t care what someone does with the code you write. You are handing all of those who would sack you the keys to the castle, ushering them inside. That is not abstaining, it’s letting your opponents win. No thanks.
Your opponents. You do not get to decide who my allies and opponents are.
I agree with everything you are saying “for you”. It sounds like the GPL is the perfect choice for code that you wrote (assuming you wrote any).
But stop telling me what to think and do. Or, at least stop using the word “freedom” while you peddle your authoritarianism.
My philosophy is single. Those that wrote the code should get to choose the license. Many people prefer the collaboration that permissive licences allow. I do not oppose that.
without my consent or their assuredly begrudging reciprocation. This should not be controversial. The GPL accomplishes this
In legal theory. In corporate practice, MIT and similar “pushover” licensed software, especially FOSS libraries, is more readily adopted by corporate users - and through this adoption it is exercised, tested, bug reported - sometimes the corporate trolls even crawl out from under their rocks and publish bug fixes and extensions for it. By comparison, GPL stuff is radioactive, therefore less used.
Then we can talk about how successful you are likely to be in enforcing GPT on any large entity, particularly those in foreign countries.
If it’s radioactive, that’s because of a fundamental assumptive imbalance in the contract between the author, the community, the users, the stakeholders, and the parasitic lawyers and their overlords.
If they don’t like it, pay/license and/or contribute.
In the corporate world, they have a lot to lose. So, they have lawyers - expensive lawyers - who, in theory, protect them from expensive lawsuits. One of the easiest ways to stay out of lawsuits over GPL and friends is to not use GPL software, so… that’s why it’s radioactive. Just having the parasitic lawyers review possible exposure is hellishly expensive, better to re-develop in-house than pay lawyers or even begin to think about the implications of entering into an agreement with a bunch of radical FOSS types.
It sucks, but it’s also how it is. Some corporations (like Intel) do heavily support and contribute to FOSS, when they feel like it.
Yeah this happens when the wrong kind of professional reviews exposure, which happens a lot.
Lawyers reviewing the licence terms will absolutely flag stuff that’s realistically a non-issue.
People that do threat risk assessment, (insurance type of thing) can view FOSS and other open standards as a reduction in risk across the board, and when these kind of professionals are tendering the creation of systems they specify open APIs and access to stuff. (At least in the projects that I’ve worked on, security systems in Toronto.)
This isn’t a hard rule, kinda a spectrum.
The whole legal/courts system is pretty dysfunctional at the low end of the economic spectrum (like: license fees that a group of 10s of developers might charge…) We have a shared well with our neighbor, put there by the previous owner of both properties. When he tried to sell to a previous potential buyer, they tried to hammer out a legal agreement around the shared well, and it just wasn’t feasible. The cost of anything approaching a legal agreement about sharing maintenance of the well cost more than putting in two new wells.
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 .
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.
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.
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.
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.
Don’t whip out “logical fallacy” if you cannot follow basic logic.
If you want to talk about false equivalence, it is that you are equating “corporations not giving you something” with “corporations taking something from you”. These are NOT the same thing.
The code that the community has access to and the benefits that the code offers the community stand alone. If you write code and contribute it to an Open Source project then the “community” around that project is the primary beneficiary. No other facts are required to support this statement. It is self-evident.
You seem to be suggesting that “your work” and “the benefit” disappear for the community when a corporation writes code that they do not give you. If you did not know that the company did this, would all “the benefit” still disappear? What is the mechanism for that? Is there a disturbance in the force that you are sensitive to that I have not experienced?
The only “benefit” that has been “lost” is the benefit that the corporation added under a non-free license. And it has not been “lost”. It was just not contributed.
I totally get that you do not want companies to benefit from your work and that you want to force contribution from them. That is super fine with me. I get that you think the GPL helps further your goals. Great. Use the GPL. But why do you have to make factually incorrect arguments about permissive licenses in the process? Why not just promote what you think is unique and good about the GPL?
People fall for this shit. I have spoken to so many people that think “they took it proprietary” somehow means the old Open Source code ceases to exist or was somehow taken away. And they think this because of comments like yours. But all the code is still there. It is still as available and useful as it was before. You can still do everything and anything with it that you wanted to do previously. It is still “free”.
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.
One side community wants total GPL take over and one side they don’t support total GPLv3 licenced Operating system like
Let’s see how this goes then revisit the question.
