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Comment by eggy | Hacker News Reader

I don't really look at GPL too closely, since I do not code for a living, or make commercial products, but I have to say my superficial understanding of opensource and GPL was piqued by the statement from @jackhat above with the 'legal rights of the property creators as owners.' If I take this statement to mean that GPL is the mirror-image of proprietary license agreements in that it is not free to use, since the stipulation is that you must publish your source code as the cost, would my understanding be correct? I just tend towards MIT or BSD licensed software to avoid any potential issues or problems with my future endeavors.

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The GPL is essentially pay-it-forward; any rights you receive must be passed along to anyone who gets a copy of the work (or of a derivative).

That means it's perfectly fine to take a GPL work and modify it without giving the source to anyone, as long as you also don't give binaries to anyone. And if you're distributing binaries privately with just a few people/companies, you also don't need to publish the source publicly, only to those few who got the binaries.

EDIT: Of course, you can't prevent those few from redistributing it publicly themselves.

(IANAL)

This brings up an interesting point; which BMW might try to make if this ever goes to court.

There have been times when device manufacturers (and car manufacturers) attempt to prevent device owners from modifying the code on their own devices. I think once folks tried to drag the DMCA into it. There's a lot of muddling up of the ownership waters there.

This may mean that the ownership of the binaries can be similarly challenged. Somehow. A point can be made that a binary living inside a phone (or car) I have bought has not been "given" to me (and thus the source code need not be given to me either).

Granted, it's rather convoluted logic, but then again, this isn't the first time stuff like this has happened.

Would be interesting to see how such an argument actually pans out.

Using GPL'd source as the basis of your work (this is, creating a derivate of a work licensed under the GPL), and then distributing that modified work, saddles the author with the responsibility of handing over the code upon user request. The GPL also prevents changing the license if you're not the original author.

You can never change the license of a work, you can only distribute your own changes under a difference license.

If you own all of the copyright over a work, or if the license explicitly allows sublicensing (BSD and MIT), you can change the license of a work (or a fork of the work).

If I take this statement to mean that GPL is the mirror-image of proprietary license agreements in that it is not free to use, since the stipulation is that you must publish your source code as the cost, would my understanding be correct?

No. Your latter assertion is correct: GPL code is not free as in beer. How you contort that into a "mirror-image of proprietary license" is your own interpretation, and requires a lot more elaboration on your part.

To put it in the most simplest terms: the GPL is mainly concerned with the freedom of the source code, not the freedom of the developer.

> To put it in the most simplest terms: the GPL is mainly concerned with the freedom of the source code, not the freedom of the developer.

Freedom of the users. Source code is not a person, it cannot have "freedom".

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