The Linux Foundation: Not a Friend of Desktop Linux, the GPL, or Openness

Only unimportant scraps of code can be free, but the real code must remain secret, restricted, proprietary.

Clearly Microsoft missed this as they are open sourcing most (all?) of .Net?

AGPL is unpopular because the lawyers are afraid of it :(

But the way things were back then depended on peoples' attitudes, and those have all changed, for the worse. You might as well give up; those days are over. People don't care about FOSS, GPL, Linux, etc., except as a means to an end (more profits). The corporations have won, and we might as well get used to constant spying.

Also worth mentioning is that this is part of a bigger problem in society. Everything in western (particularly American) society is going downhill, and has been for the last 16 years. We just need to realize that this is inevitable and unavoidable: all societies collapse and fail at some point. The Roman Empire didn't last forever, nor did the British Empire. Internal stresses, corruption, etc. eventually take their toll and it becomes impossible to reverse course. Every big society has collapsed at some point, or at least turned into a has-been, and it's our turn next.

Edit: The best part was that we were using some of the libraries in a way that there was ambiguity over whether we needed to open source the application so instead, they paid the Qt foundation $5k for the enterprise licence instead of the GPL version...

The fact that these companies fear the AGPL so much is probably reason to start using it more. They won't respond to anything less at this point, they need to be dragged into it kicking and screaming. They have made it clear by now, there is no other way that they will even consider the concept of respecting users' freedoms. This will continue to be the case even with organizations like the Linux Foundation, which, if you look at who their biggest sponsors are, it becomes pretty clear which agenda they are going to be expected to push.

I really don't get where your coming from, having been a Linux user since the late 90ies i have seen nothing but progress for the desktop since the arrival of the commercial interest.

Yes the community lost some of it's cohesion but thats the consequence of going mainstream and achieving pretty much everything we were hoping for back then.

Listening to the FSF people today you often get the same paradise lost sense you get from old hippies who have forgotten exactly how bad the world outside of their bubbles were back then and how much have changed for the better in the meantime.

Open Source has been commodified into free-as-in-beer stuff to build the next product - that will spy on us.

That just seems like entitlement. "Home Depot released a really awesome free toolbox that has everything you need to build a house, but they didn't release the blueprints for Home Depot brand houses, boo hoo"

The fourth category is proprietary licenses, which do not allow you to distribute or redistribute software combined with software under these licenses at all. But weirdly, these are never described as 'viral'.

> These requirements present serious risks to the preservation of proprietary software rights.

Which is why the GPL can be called "more free" than the BSD licenses. Code licensed under it is not "appropriable". In my view, that's a feature. In their view, that's a "restriction". I don't see how I should want other people applying their proprietary (read: way more restrictive than the GPL) licenses or not share the code at all. They want to, I don't want them to. Different perspective.

It is clear to me that the GNU/Linux world would be very fragmented, if it existed at all, were it not for the GPL.

Myself, I like to see it with respect to what is protected by the license in terms of freedom.

- "Permissive" licenses (BSD-like) protect a single snapshot of the code, as it exists the day it is released. That version can be used freely by anyone, but the possibility to impose additional restrictions means that you won't necessarily be free to use the versions derived from that snapshot.

- "Protective" licenses (i.e. Copyleft) protect the whole project in the long term, whether it is the snapshot released under the license or any later modification of it. You are guaranteed access to any version that someone releases of that code, under the same terms that give you the freedom to use code.

If you don't want your hard work to be swallowed up into some company which profits from it, doesn't make its changes available and ultimately develops a competitor that the original cannot legally use improvements from, a BSD license won't help you with that. If you don't care, then there are any number of choices.

Other licenses you mention are also complex and haven't been tested. Licenses in general, not just GPL, are harder than people think. When it comes to lawyers, you get what you pay for.

It's revealing at the end that you say "no one wants their hard work to become a derivative of a smaller project they pull in." The size of the project doesn't give it special entitlements. Why are you pulling in someone else's code if you don't intend to respect the license set by the person who wrote that code? That sense of entitlement to exploit other people's work without reciprocation (because you're bigger?) is the problem creators use the GPL to address.

If you want to build a community that isn't based on the crumbs that some company (like Nintendo) allows to fall, and you don't want that to be subverted by free riders who use your code to compete with you without letting you use theirs, GPL is a better choice.

But if and only if it is your code, it is your choice what license you use. Note that in the real world, people are constantly attacking GPL and harassing people who apply GPL to their own work, but the other way is not happening. We should respect the licenses applied by creators to what they create.

You can take a quick look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_products_based_on_Free... for a non exhaustive list of products based on FreeBSD. Some of them are doing some contributions, maybe some of them are 100% open source (I don't know), but clearly some are not open sourcing their most added value stuff, even when it is a clear derivative of BSD code.

The rest of your reply reiterates the usual developer focused "open source" viewpoint while mistakenly suggesting that it's also the focus of free software. The goal of free software has always been user freedom. Source code in the hands of users. It's not about upstream contributions. Having a free library used in a proprietary program does not advance user freedom, though it may lead to a developer improving the library. All the upstream contributions in the world simply do not matter if the user is not entitled to the complete source code of the programs that they use.

[0]: https://reswitched.tech/software/os (Reswitched is the switch RE project) [1]: https://github.com/pkelsey/libuinet

These programmers, for consistency, should hate proprietary software even more, because it permits no mixing at all.

And yet, they tend to be the ones writing it.

People who use the GPL want an alternate ecosystem, away from that. Microsoft builds theirs, Oracle buys theirs, Google builds theirs; why should a band of programmers not organized under a brand name not have theirs?

Bluntly, don't like the GPL? That's totally fine; go build your own ecosystem with whatever terms you like.

I prefer to say it potentially frees the codebases it mixes with.

> a license that obligates reciprocity strictly, even punitively.

I cannot follow this argument. You got a whole codebase for free. Reciprocity would be if you gave your patches upstream. The GPL, while it doesn't enforce that, forces patches to be available downstream, where they can be taken back upstream. The GPL forces developers to be honest. Permissive licenses allow them to be honest, if they are so inclined.

GPLv2 is older than most of the other licenses listed. It is clear, simple, and the reason lawyers throw up their hands is because, if you want to do something sketchy with GPL'ed code, you will lose. There are no easy ways to attack it.

"No entity wants to risk their hard work to become a derivative of a smaller project they pull in."

But they are a derivative of any project they pull in.

If you go to any major conference now, you can't have a beer in peace without someone from one of these super-open companies trying to tell you how super-excited they are to drive innovation as part of a thriving community or whatever other cliche is popular nowadays. In the meantime, though...

Most companies that don't give a shit about community and openness can keep their BSD code tucked away. For most companies that try to make money out of GPL software, not giving a shit about community and openness is usually a bad PR move, so there's a great incentive for pushing as much of what you do as far upstream as possible.

You'd think really bad patches would get rejected (and more often than not I guess they do), but in many cases, the project leader(s) work for the same company as the guys sending the shitty pages, and of course they get integrated, because $company $qualifier Linux $latest_version + 1 needs to ship this June and the feature has already been announced. Whole projects, or at least major modules/sub-project, are effectively a one-company show or an internal playground.

This isn't bad because companies are scary, it's bad because, while the code is out in the open, the agenda and the planning processes aren't, and it fractures the community a lot. It's a good part of how projects like PulseAudio and systemd ended up with a bad name: everyone can agree that they at least offer some useful features (some people would go as far as to say they're "much-needed improvements", but that's far more debatable than whether per-application volume setting is useful), but they were pushed way, way before they were ready for production, and everyone saw this as Red Hat's attempt to enroll everyone into their beta testing program.

In many other cases, commercial involvement in GPL projects is pretty much of no value. They publish the changes because they're required to, but most of the code is so brain-damaged it can't be used upstream, or is just a GPL-licensed interface over a proprietary library, a la nVidia. I'm guilty of having written both types of code, on several occasions, so it's not like I'm really just a BSD user for whom the grapes are too sour.

There's also the fun crowd that's using outdated, unsupported stuff on their rootfs because the project switched to GPLv3 six years ago. They really, really like not having to pay money for 99% of the software on their device, but they really, really REALLY like making sure you can't flash their devices with your own firmware, so they can't do GPLv3. Of course, the old branch no longer gets bugfixes or security updates, so their flashy gadget will fall flat on its head as soon as it's exposed to an Internet, but that's ok, you'll buy a new one next year anyway.

20 years ago I was really, really happy when I heard that some company was licensing something under GPL, or contributing to a GPL project. Nowadays, frankly, I'm more scared than happy. There have been success stories, but they're getting fewer and fewer.

Your project respects user freedom? Okay, we're working under a common cause. Take my code (and my axe!).

You want to exploit my software for private profit? Fine, that's the reality of the capitalist society we live in. But you'll have to pay me. By demanding a "permissive" license, you're valuing my labor at zero while valuing your own above that.

About tainting, if I use some source available but not free code in my code is that tainting my code? I used the code against the license and I may have to pay damages,same as GPL you violate it then you may have to pay. Maybe some companies are afraid the developers will use GPL code, you need to train your developers on what licenses are allowed. It is easy don't use GPL mixed in your code, you can link to LGPL. My last point is that the terms viral and taint are negative but better words would be protective,freedom and not words created by MS.

The GPL doesn't "taint" anything. You're complaining about how Free Software supporters argue but you don't seem to understand what those arguments are. You would have the same problem if you mixed proprietary software into you codebase, because copyright "taints" derivative works.

> Can't remember the last time I heard ... complaining about freeloaders.

Why do you feel entitled to free (as in beer) code?

> No entity wants to risk their hard work to become a derivative of a smaller project they pull in.

Yes, including GPL licensed projects. If you don't like the price of distribution license, you can always ask about licensing the code under other terms.

> Which could cause them to look elsewhere

Yes, that's the goal. Using community code is very inexpensive when you accept the GPL's terms, but the low price requires a payment where you are required pay back to the community in a similar way to what you took from the community. This is a protection against freeloading. If you don't want to participate, that's fine, but you get to pay the financial, legal, and social costs of using a proprietary solution.

> Nintendo

> the potential reciprocity from a big player

Good luck getting much out of Nintendo. They are famous for their iron first attitude regarding copyright. A current example is their abuse[1] of YouTube's contentID system. While there have been occasional exceptions, it is incredibly naive to expect voluntary altruism - which almost always has some costs and little profit potential - from profit-focused corporations.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlzEr10NY3M

Sr. Director Open Source Consulting Services

And they're posting on the Linux Foundation's site so that's a bit more than just some random person writing an article for the site.

Also the term "viral" comes off as an insult to the licence, I think the term GNU Public Virus used to be a common descriptor.

I think that's why the term Copyleft was introduced.

> I didn't read an ounce of contempt

I disagree. Calling a grant of permissions "restrictive", or calling it "viral" has as much contempt as calling a offering of proprietary licensed software toxic. Its insult flinging, plain and simple.

...there are a lot of people involved with the Linux Foundation, what didn't help in this case is that the one person involved with the Linux Foundation who came up with this piece of Ballmer-era nostalgia is the Linux Foundation's Senior Director of Open Source Consulting.

It's a pretty major PR blunder. It rubs people the wrong way because it basically repeats the anti-Linux arguments which used to be promoted by a lot of companies that were heavily-invested in proprietary software -- some of which are Linux Foundation members today.

The terms aren't exactly innovative. 20 years ago or so they were used liberally (and, I think, coined) by a particularly disliked company from Redmond, and their marketing material (thinly-veiled as whitepapers, sometimes from partner companies) read pretty much like this guy's piece.

This is basically a blast from the past, except 20 years ago we'd see it on Microsoft's website under some Get the Facts stamp, not on the Linux Foundation's website.

Anyone who expects to copy-paste other people's code into their own code and change the license is just fighting the legal system. You're still going to have to follow the terms of the license, whether that means sharing changes or including attributions.

Could you elaborate on that ?