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Comment by _ph_ | Hacker News Reader

The concept of a corporation using your code for their profit without giving back is mostly just an imagination. Todays reality has Microsoft and Apple sharing part of their codebase under permissive licenses. If a corporation uses your code, chance is, they want to give back any modifications to reduce their maintenance load. If GPL prevents 1 out of 10 corporations from misusing of your code, it also probably prevents 8 out of 10 corporations of using (and donating back) your code.

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> Todays reality has Microsoft and Apple sharing part of their codebase under permissive licenses.

In that case, they should have no problem sharing it back under a copyleft license either.

Well, there is a huge problem - copyleft does not only require you to share changes to the source you used and modified, but also to unrelated source of your own. Which kills it for most corporations. Some of their code might contain trade secrets or just isn't freely relicenseable by them as it might involve third party rights. Which is why LGPL mostly works for corporations but GPL not.

Can you elaborate on this? What exactly do you mean with unrelated source and might you give a concrete example what a company could NOT do if this code would be GPL'ed.

The readline library for example. If I want to use it, I have to GPL my whole program. I probably might not have modified readline at all. Or any other GPL software which gets somehow linked together with my code. Just watch the controversy whether ZFS kernel modules may be delivered as pre-compiled binaries (sources are fully available). The output of compilers and parsers which are GPLed, also are implicitly covered by the GPL, unless there is a clear exemption, like with GCC.

While GPL software which is used as an entity, like Linux itself or applications like Emacs are fine, any closer contact to the software you are trying to sell is problematic.

Yeah if you link libreadline you have to GPL your source, but why do you consider that bad? Isn't that in the interest of the general public?

It is in the interests of a minority of programmers, themselves a tiny minority of the general public. Let's not get completely overblown about the stakes here.

The only reason I use the GPL is to safeguard the general public's rights to modify and distribute my software. If anything, I'd argue that releasing GPL software works against the author as it makes making money off it substantially more difficult.

The general public still retains the right to modify and distribute your software with a license such as MIT. Your software does not cease to exist once megacorp uses it for a product. The guarantee of GPL is that megacorp is now obligated to share their modifications (but practically, to go find another library or write their own).

You're missing the forest for a single tree. The obligation to redistribute changes under the same license is not the only reason to use the GPL. The license's safeguarding of end-users' right to fix and modify GPLed software is a far more important reason, and is the reason why I and many people like me choose the GPL.

I don't want to restrict developers and corps. After all, I am a developer who wants control over my hard work. However, I also don't want to erode the rights of end-users - of whom I also am. I don't want to end up in a situation where I can't fix a bug in my own software because a corporation wont let me.

It's a trade off. I choose end-users.

> The concept of a corporation using your code for their profit without giving back is mostly just an imagination.

One of the authors of the Python requests HTTP library has called out Uber for using Python, and almost certainly using requests, and not paying any money

https://lukasa.co.uk/2015/08/Funding_OSS/

There are quite a few questions open here

- are they proven to use the library?

- did they modify it? - you can submit changes back only if you changed anything

- as it is server-side software, GPL had not changed much here, you have to provide the source of your program only to those who got delivery of that program, but that is not covering running on your servers.

- none of the licenses discussed require to donate money back, only source code changes.

So, yes, I think more companies should fund open source efforts when using open source software. The attention to OpenSSL and its security problems also showed how little funding that development got despite running most of the https on the internet. That indeed is scandalous. But this is covered by none of the current popular licenses.

> as it is server-side software, GPL had not changed much here, you have to provide the source of your program only to those who got delivery of that program, but that is not covering running on your servers.

This is exactly the reason the Affero GPL was invented.

And, yes, there is no legal requirement to donate money. However it shows bad faith and it shows that "a corporation using your code for their profit without giving back" is a reality.

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