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Comment by _ph_ | Hacker News Reader

All users of an open source program would benefit, if more companies would contribute to that open source program. In that sense, encouraging companies to contribute is helping consumers.

A lot of companies are very open source friendly these days and consequently are happy to open source parts of their software stack. Using a BSD type license makes this very easy. GPL however, forces companies to open source the whole software stack and that is very often not possible for companies, be it that they need to make money by selling the software, or that some code parts contain trade secrets or that they do have some code parts licensed themselves.

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This is legitimately why we don't touch GPL code with a ten foot stick. BSD/MIT are awesome however.

GPL is about user freedom (you can access the code you execute), BSD/MIT is about developer freedom (you can copy paste the code).

This explain why developers tent to prefer BSD/MIT licences, they can use code without restriction and restrict their users to access it. It's just that GPL focus on protecting users, not developers.

Strategic reasons for choosing different licensing models exist. The Free Software Foundation itself reccommends using different licensing models for software libraries depending on the situation:

• No copyleft for libraries that implement proprietary standards competing with open standards, to further adoption of the implemented standard among proprietary software developers.

• Weak copyleft for libraries that implement the same features as existing proprietary software, to further adoption of the library among proprietary software developers.

• Strong copyleft for libraries that “do not face entrenched noncopylefted or nonfree competition”.

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-recommendations.en.html

> No copyleft for libraries that implement proprietary standards competing with open standards,

Shouldn't that be the other way around?

Yes.

Your first point is summarized the wrong way, it is "No copyleft for libraries that implement open standards competing with proprietary standards".

Indeed. Sorry!

That is wrong. As a user you can of course access any code distributed under BSD/MIT as well. Any user is free to refuse to install software which does not come with its code. GPL is the attempt of forcing developers to open source all their code. Even the one not built on top of open source software. But what freedom does the user have, if no developer had written the software in the first place? As a commercial developer, you most of the time cannot completely open source your software stack (you need to make money, trade secrets might be involved, third party licenses. However, recent history shows that many companies are willing to open source part of their stack using the BSD/MIT license.

> GPL is the attempt of forcing developers to open source all their code.

That is wrong. As a developer you can of course refuse to use any software distributed under the GPL.

Well, it forces to open source anything "linked together" with the GPL code, even if it has no relation to it and is in no way to derived from it. So in that sense, GPL tries to force the developer to release unrelated code under GPL.

Of course, as a consequence many developers refuse to use any software distributed under the GPL (as in using GPLed code in their software). I am not sure how this is a good thing.

The right to include other copylefted code is an incentive to copyleft your code. If a developer is shipping proprietary code instead of advancing the profession, I have no interest in helping them, I wish we could tell them to go to the beach and start making their own transistors.

No, it is not an incentive. As I cannot publish my full stack of software, GPL code is just no option for me. And why am I not "advancing the profession" if I open source as much of my code as I can? But for the license technical reasons not as GPL, but rather BSD?

Your last wish of "start making their own transistors" is really funny in the context, that some of my proprietary code is actually for making transistors.

All users of an open source program would benefit, if more companies would contribute to that open source program.

Trickle down freedom.

>GPL however, forces companies to open source the whole software stack

You can open-source any part of your stack under the GPL, just make sure that you get copyright from any open source contributers. Since you own the code, you don't have to adhere to the GPL (similarly the GPL doesn't prevent you to license the code to someone else at different terms).

The real problem is that most people won't use your shiny GPL project, because they can't properly integrate it in their stack without potetially having to open-source it.

And of course, if people contribute to GPLed software, its is difficult, if not impossible, to get a separate license, to include it into your closed software product.

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