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iSnow

To me, that feels more like a hidden contract. Giving away for free a software only to require the user to do the same.

That's why I prefer BSD-style licenses - when they write "free", they mean "free".

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And that is why BSDs will never be as big as Linux, companies don't like to give free beer back to the tap.

Also why all new open source OSes done companies are all based on BSD/MIT licenses like Zephyr, RTOS, Fuchsia, ...

When we get back to PD, Shareware world, don't start complaining companies don't contribute back.

That's kind of the point though. BSD is truly free, and that means there are a lot of proprietary products which benefit massively from it and create worthwhile products with clear monetization strategies and thrive. Sure, they might not contribute back, but the point of the open source was often to share code to improve the state of the art and provide useful code for people so they don't have to start from scratch. Apple took BSD licensed code to make macOS, and it helped them, they contribute some OS code to Darwin, but there are probably lots of happy mac users who benefit immensely from that BSD code. There are lots of people who do BSD code and improve it, just as there are GPL people. Popularity is not always [i.e. almost never] a measure of correctness, principle, or goodness. I like BSD, because any code I release, I hope it helps someone somewhere to do something useful for the world [even when proprietary], and if it does, then great.

Apple isn't the best example. They generally do publish the modified source code to FOSS projects they do, and sometimes they don't add their own license clause, so the changes can get merged back.

It is a good example, because that’s exactly how the BSD license works - it doesn’t force you to give your changes back, but there are other incentives to do so, such as not having to maintain your diffs forever.

"Truly free" is in the eye of the beholder: is a country with laws against slavery more or less free than one without them?

I release my code as open-source because I don't want my end users to ever end up unable to fix bugs in the code they're using. I don't want my code used in something like macOS where users are stuck using what they're given; it might help those users in the short term, but I believe it leaves them worse off in the long term.

Yes, this is the sense of "truly free" that leads to people in the U.S. being able to marry children, not having healthcare taken care of etc. That's a true 'freedom' to go bankrupt, but am not sure that's a 'freedom' many actually want.

I think most of the commenters on my post misunderstood me very much. I think people should be free to license under GPL, AGPL, SSPL, VXMPL, or whatever the heck they want. I like BSD personally, and it meets my requirements, but someone who has a different need can do what they want. I think GPL has worked well for Linux, and I'm glad they did it the way they did; I think it is less free than BSD, but in a good way for their project and purposes. I think having both a GPL licensed OS and a BSD licensed OS is great. We have diversity of licenses for different purposes and different ideologies, and it enriches the market in a lot of ways. I think forcing everyone to use the same copyleft licenses for everything based on a radical ideology is a dangerous and useless endeavour; and that sort of ideology is completely _not_ free in every sense of the word. Do what you want, set your rules for your project as you wish, we are all better for it.

I guess it all comes down to whether one thinks free as in beer is "freer" than free as in freedom. Freedom has a price.

I don't think you were misunderstood. But, I think the way you think of freedom is that one has an absolute freedom do do whatever, including infringing on other freedoms whereas others disagree.

By analogy; if one is free to rob someone, they're more free in absolute terms than they're free if they can't do that, but then the person who is about to get robbed isn't free to feel secure. So in other words, the robber is more free, but at the expense of the robbed.

In that sense, the BSD license is more absolutely/selfishly free for the individual, whereas the GPL is more freedom-perusing for the entire community.

> the point of the open source was often to share code to improve the state of the art and provide useful code for people so they don't have to start from scratch

Was that the point of free software? I thought that the point was freedom: that users be permitted to use, modify & redistribute the software they use. Inclusion of BSD-licensed code in proprietary software fails at that: a macOS user is unable to use macOS without paying for it; unable to legally modify it; and even if he did modify unable to legally distribute those modifications.

BSD-licensed code is awesome for vendors of proprietary software who want a head start; it's not so great for users.

You're forgetting that those businesses that depend on your software are your users.

The first step of making useful software is by having users. If nobody uses your software because of licensing reasons nobody will ever contribute to it and it might as well not exist. On the other hand if there are users then there is a chance that a subset of the users will contribute back voluntarily.

Trying to do business with desktop software proves otherwise regarding contributions.

Not true - if you compare various cases of GPL vs BSD, the theory of GPL helping the project just doesn’t hold. See MySQL vs Postgres, or GCC vs LLVM, or various MTAs.

LLVM in particular lacks many improvements done by embedded OEMs, one of them being Sony which has only contributed parts of the PS4 toolchain.

Perhaps. But GCC lacks those same improvements from Sony, simply because Sony went with LLVM instead, doesn’t it?

That is exactly the point, with GCC the community would have enjoyed those improvements.

With LLVM, Sony gets to cut down their compiler research budget, and the community sees whatever Sony feels like giving back, minor improvements without the juicy optimizer sauce that actually matters.

Personally I don't care, given I use mostly commercial stuff nowadays, but I do see the return of shareware long term.

Then MIT/BSD license advocates can consider how much those licenses are actually worth to the overall community.

No - with GCC those improvements never got written, because the license used by GCC prevented it from happening in the first place. The decision whether to share the code usually happens before choosing the codebase to build upon, not the other way around.

In this specific case, Sony would have been forced to actually spend money doing a compiler from the ground up instead of cutting costs down costs while giving a few crumbs back to keep the plebe happy.

What I find ironic with the current anti-GPL trend is the eventual return of the shareware model, then lets see how well the MIT/BSD folks will appreciate it.

Only if you assume the only choices were 1. using GCC or 2. writing from scratch. Thing is, this assumption obviously doesn't match reality. Absurd assumptions -> absurd conclusions.

And no, BSD has nothing to do with shareware. Shareware was never about sharing sources; meanwhile, BSD-licensed projects are fine with respect to sharing - just take a look at Postgres, LLVM, FreeBSD, X11, or Python. GPL is an attempt to protect from a threat which was never real, and by doing so it makes life harder for everyone.

I have plenty of crufty shareware CDs and most likely unreadable floppies with source code on those .zip and .arj files.

FreeBSD vs what Linux has achieved, LLVM still lacking many of the hardware targets supported by GCC don't seem to be doing that great in company contributions. The others I don't know well enough to comment on.

Lets check again in about 10 years to see how far they managed to develop themselves.

Maybe I will be wrong, maybe not.

There are many GPL-licensed operating systems. You could as well compare FreeBSD with Hurd and make the opposite conclusion.

Hurd is not a UNIX clone and that plays a big role in adoption.

How so? You mean the microkernel thingy? It somehow didn't hurt adoption of the most successful desktop Unix out there. The main thing that plays a role in adoption is whether something actually works.

> And that is why BSDs will never be as big as Linux, companies don't like to give free beer back to the tap

BSDs will (perhaps) never be as big as Linux because Linux had first mover advantage in the FOSS operating system world, and hasn't (yet) fumbled it badly enough to be displaced.

OTOH, Postgres and SQLite do quite well (with plenty of contributions from big downstream users and sellers), despite being permissively-licensed, and (in Postgres case) despite having a GPL competitor that used to be much further ahead of it in acceptance.

BSD was the first mover, getting contributions until the suit happened.

A suit that was settled in about 2 years, and Linux also had its own set of suits.

Most companies that use BSD seldom give anything back thanks to the license.

MySQL is not a competitor to Postgres when one cares about real SQL support.

> MySQL is not a competitor to Postgres when one cares about real SQL support.

Which almost no one does, at least not as the sole decision factor. Even while being recognized as better on that dimension, Postgres was far behind MySQL for a number of reasons and caught up because of much stronger contribution from downstream users.

Just to be clear with regards to BSD vs the GPL - the GPL "free" does not refer to cost.

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