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Comment by belorn | Hacker News Reader

If you want to combine viral open-source code with toxic proprietary code, sure. Proprietary code is toxic by nature, so why should we not use that term?

> 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.

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I'm not sure I want to wade into this religious war, but you can surely agree that the GPL is more restrictive (as in, it adds restrictions) than say the BSD or MIT licenses.

When you rent a hotel room you get permission to enter and sleep there, but are also restricted to not destroy the room. However the restriction already existed before you paid, so the change between the owner and you only exist in added permission. No one is allowed to destroy property of someone else so those restrictions are not additional part of the transaction.

GPL do not add restrictions. It is purely permissions given over what already exist. In theory one could rewrite the GPL license text to be lines of "I grant you permission to do X", and it would still have the same effect.

So, to bridge the analogy, what would be the "before paying" state of a GPL'd work? The GPL does not, to my knowledge, clearly define this, and there's disagreement among the experts.

> what would be the "before paying" state of a GPL'd work

Whatever the law is for copyrighted but unlicensed code.

What I'm asking is, at what time is someone bound by the terms of the GPL? See for example the IPC loophole, dynamic linking, etc.

Any time that you want to use the software and you're not the copyright owner. The terms of the GPL grant you permission to use it under some circumstances that you wouldn't have otherwise.

It is true that sometimes it is not clear when you are satisfying the conditions in the GPL that allow you to use the software, since there is no case law. But the constraints that forbid you to use the code all come from copyright law, not the GPL itself.

You are bound mostly when you distribute GPL covered works or derivative works. The licence is a-priori unconcerned whether such derivative work involve IPC or dynamic linking or anything else. There is no trivial relationship between the technical kind of SW interaction and if it constitutes a derivative work or not. Sometimes projects clarify their interpretation, e.g. Linux telling (with much reason!) that merely using standard syscalls does not per-se constitute a derivative work - (and note that this is a quite stronger form of interaction than most IPC, however this does not intrinsically prevents some IPC usages to be considered as derivative, maybe especially if such IPC are added after the fact in a vain attempt to circumvent the GPL with a meaningless technical trick)

Let me give an example of how to rewrite part of the copyleft concepts as pure permission rather then term and conditions.

"I here grant permission to distribute source code of the unmodified complete work"

"I also grant permission to distribute a binary version together with the corresponding preferred source code of the unmodified complete work"

"I also grant permission to distribute a compilation of a modified version of the source code with the source code of all dynamic linked software that it depends on"

Of course, to match a license like GPL you would need to make precise wording to get the permission to mean exactly one and only exactly one permitted action (lawyers, interpretation and loopholes), but they are just plain permissions. You can use one, two, or ignore any number of them and mix and match. Since they are isolated permission they hold no state and there is no "I agree to all terms".

This is also the main argument behind the concept of software license not being contracts. A contract goes beyond permissions and binds two parties together in one document, while permissions just exist regardless if anyone accepts it.

The GPL protects freedoms of users by placing restrictions on those that would do harm---developers (by ensuring that the code remains free) and distributors (by ensuring that the user has access to the source code).

If someone is hostile to restrictions on those two groups, then copyleft is undesirable, at the expense of the user, who has fewer guarantees of freedom.

The preferred term nowadays is "protective". You are given some constraints, but those are intended to protect the ability of people to keep using software from the project in the long term for any purpose.

If the net effect is to increase the overall freedom that people have for using the project, that is not necessarily more restrictive, other than in a local way. Metaphorically speaking, being able to sell yourself into slavery is not something that increases your freedom, and forbidding it isn't "more restrictive".

When you use the word restrictive without any other context to describe copyleft licenses, as you just have, it only serves to intentionally make the license look bad/unappealing, which is disingenuous at best. It's only restrictive in the sense that it restricts others from profiting off the hard work of the author without having to contribute anything back in return. For the author, the word restrictive is about the last thing I'd call it.

All I hear when I see people describing copyleft licenses as restrictive or viral is self-entitled whining that people can't do what they want with other people's work.

Edit: To be clear, I think the parent made their point in good faith and this is not meant as an attack on them.

It's it less restrictive in some ways, and more restrictive in others.

GPL offers protections for the users, so it prevents developers restricting the users freedom, GPL prevents restricting users so ONLY developers that want to restrict users freedom feel restricted. It is like in society where your freedoms are limited to prevent removing the freedom from others, like you are not free to kill people because you teke the freedom to live from them. So killing is illegal is protecting freedom not removing freedom.

> If you want to combine viral open-source code with toxic proprietary code, sure.

Even the Linux kernel qualifies as toxic proprietary code for the simple reason that GPLv3 is not backwards compatible. If anything the GPL is toxic to any other open source license including itself. Others at least try to play well with each other.

What is the point of GPLv3 if it is not allowed to have any difference from GPLv2?

That would be my question? It introduces an incompatible split with existing code that cannot be re-licensed by hand wave of the FSF for purely dogmatic reasons.

> Even the Linux kernel qualifies as toxic proprietary code for the simple reason that GPLv3 is not backwards compatible.

That is not true. Being "GPL compatible" is not the golden rule by which software is considered Free Software; granting the "4 user freedoms" is.[1] Since the GPLv2 grants those freedoms, it is Free Software.

[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html.en

Now mix GPLv3 code with the Linux kernel without violating an FSF license. Of course that you cannot release the result just means that there are also zero users, so the freedoms of those zero users are preserved.

Edit: I am not arguing from an ideological standpoint, just from the resulting compatibility and usability issues. The GPL 2 and 3 were both written to protect the four freedoms, that they are incompatible and that we now have to invest time and effort work around that even for free software is just ugly.

Yes, but that's also true for any non-GPL compatible license, not just the GPLv3. And it's a result of Linus Torwalds not using the GPLv2 as intended by removing the "any later version" clause.

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