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Comment by jbk | Hacker News Reader

Yes, we have had some remarks.

VideoLAN usually does copyleft (LGPL) projects, so it needed clarifications for our community.

I don't understand how can someone argue "your licence is too free, you should make it more restrictive so fewer people can use your software", but what do I know

The concern is typically from developers (the copyright owners), not end users.

If your definition of a good license is "the terms are as unrestrictive as possible" why not release all software into the public domain?

There's legitimate arguments to be made for more restrictive licenses, even if I don't agree with them all the time.

IIRC, "public domain" means different things in different countries, and can make it hard to enforce as a software license. See https://opensource.org/faq#public-domain

A BSD-style license is probably the closest to public domain while still being easy to read/understand.

The choice makes no difference to who can use this version of this software, but copyleft protects users from future derivatives getting locked away in exchange for forbidding proprietary derivatives altogether.

In the case of popularising a video codec the rise of some proprietary derivative seems an acceptable risk but for some random program what's the upside?

The upside is us getting the iPhone or the PS4, for example.

I take issue with BSD/MIT because of situations like the PS4. Sony took FreeBSD, heavily modified and improved it to make it into the OS for their new console, and upstreamed (afaik) absolutely nothing, nor did they donate a cent. They were perfectly within their rights to do this due to the license, but holy shit it was a dickish move.

Linux would not be in such a strong position, IMO, if they were not GPL. So many companies have been forced to reluctantly release things like drivers for their hardware because they wanted to leverage the power of linux in their products. BSDs will never get contributions like that.

For video decoders though, contributions are less important and so I think BSD is a good idea. We desperately need AV1 to succeed, and that means everyone and their dog using it.

Why is that "dickish"? Was the FreeBSD team upset?

I have no idea. I'm talking about my personal judgement on the subject, not theirs.

Since they wrote software under a permissive license, they're explicitly giving anyone permission to do that. I would therefore assume that they're okay with it.

I'm not okay with it, so if I write something I default to licensing it under the GPL (and I recommend doing the same), but my opinions aren't universal.

When Apache board members were busy defending the fiasco that is OpenOffice a couple of years back one of the give away claims they made was that their big contributors abandoned the project because LibreOffice used code from it under the terms of the license and didn't give back.

Not being required to give back being the entire point of Apache's licensing versus LibreOffice.

They (board members) basically refused to make any connection between this obvious hypocrisy and the failure of their project.

But they followed the license. That's kind of the point, isn't it? That this license doesn't force you to push your stuff back out, like the GPL does.

Well, yes. I did say they followed the license. I think it's a bad license for an OS because it doesn't encourage/require bad community members to open their source. Companies like Sony have no excuse for not upstreaming their improvements. They didn't because they weren't required to.

I think it's a good licence for an OS or for any software because it gets more products pushed out there which all in all gives society more stuff to play with, which is kind of the point of writing free software, at least for me.

That's what the freebsd licence encourages...?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_products_based_on_Fr...

There's plenty of network vendors in the non free list. Are they also dicks for doing the same?

How about Apple using FreeBSD code?

Yes, it does, but I think that's bad. Any large company which takes freely available code and builds a commercial product with it without either upstreaming improvements or making significant donations is bad. Seriously, contribute or get out and write your own damn code. In my opinion.

Has everyone forgotten Heartbleed? Y'all are defending behaviour which got us all in that mess.

Copyleft does not restrict "use," only distribution. In the case of VLC, the only people who would be restricted are people who want to make proprietary versions of it, and I can see why VideoLAN aren't too concerned about these "users."

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