Lock-in can certainly be problematic but with more open interchange formats that’s becoming less of an issue.
Saying proprietary licenses are deadly without explanation seems more like zealotry than reasoned consideration.
Thankfully we have alternatives to the GPL like MIT and Apache for people who want to share source but not force that choice on others.
Look I didn't come up with the analogy for the virality of the GPL. I don't think it's very illuminating. What the analogy says is that once you have GPL-licenced code in your code all of it will catch it and must be published under the GPL. Proprietary code is worse because once you have proprietary code in your code it becomes unpublishable. I call that fatal under the analogy.
> Thankfully we have alternatives to the GPL like MIT and Apache for people who want to share source but not force that choice on others.
Sure those are benign within the analogy. That's what the analogy is meant to convey. Funny thing though: MIT code can be made proprietary, I mean fatal, GPL code cannot.
I hope others on HN pick up on this and use the "proprietary is deadly" trope similarly (that is, only in response to casual uses of the "viral GPL" trope).
—
When others hurt me, I try to defend myself. But some tell me that this makes them sick. They tell me that I should permit people to rob me of my work. They tell me that I should never try to defend myself.
They tell me that I should stop using the GNU General Public License, a license that vaccinates me against hurt. Instead, I should adopt a license that permits other people to rob me with impunity. They want me to adopt a license that forbids me from fighting back. They want me to give up my right to benefit from a derivative of my own work, a right I possess under current copyright law.
Of course, the language is a little less feverish than this. Usually, I myself am not called “infectious”. Rather, the legal defense that I use is called “infectious”. The license I choose is called “viral”.
In every day language, words such as “infect” and “virus” describe disease. The rhetoric is metaphorical. A legal tool is not a disease organism; but it is popular to think of the law as an illness, so the metaphor has impact.
The people who want to rob me use language that says I make them sick when I stop them from robbing me. They do not want to draw attention to the so-called “disease” that makes them ill: my health and my rights, and the health and rights of other people. Instead, they choose metaphor to twist people's thinking. They do not want anyone to think that I am a good citizen for stopping crime. They want the metaphor to fool others into thinking that I am a disease agent.
The GNU General Public License protects me. The connotation of “virus” and “infect” is that my choice of defense gives an illness to those who want to rob me. I want freedom from their robbery; but they want the power to hurt me. They get sick when they cannot hurt me.
To use another health and illness-related metaphor, the GNU General Public License vaccinates me; it protects me from theft.
Note that the theft about which I am talking is entirely legal in some situations: if you license your work under a modified BSD license, or a similar license, then others may legally take your work, make fixes or improvements to it, and forbid you from using that code. I personally dislike this arrangement, but it exists.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. BSD is about freedom for the devs. GPL is about freedom for the user. Not all users are devs, but all devs are users, and users should take precedence. Proprietary doesn't give a crap about either, and its defenders are the ones most closely resembling religious zealotry... as in false in almost every way but clung to mostly because it benefits it's pushers.
Most users don't have time to do that; if the software of their phone doesn't work they'll get another phone, not another software.
The GPL does not on its own have the power to "infect" the rest of your codebase. You can absolutely decide you want to distribute GPL'd software compiled in with proprietary software for which you don't want to release the source. The owner of the GPL software still does not, at this point, have any right to your source. All they can do is say, since you have not obeyed the conditions, you don't have a valid license for my software, and I am now ready to sue you for infringement.
You can resolve this situation by relicensing the proprietary components under the GPL and distributing source, if you'd like. GPLv3 has an explicit provision that says, if you do this within 30 days of being notified of the problem, the license retroactively does apply to you and it wasn't infringement. Many major GPLv2 rightsholders have voluntarily adopted the same condition for their GPLv2 code: https://gplcc.github.io/gplcc/
You can also resolve the situation by settling with them out of court, going to court and paying damages, going to court and arguing it was fair use / de minimis / whatever, trying to buy them out, etc. If you're willing to do any of those, then you don't have to release your source. (If you go to court and lose, you will probably be ordered to not further distribute the GPL'd code in violation of the license.)
None of this is specific to the GPL. If you use proprietary code without a license at all, the rightsholders can still sue you. You can still negotiate with them. You can still fight it out in court. The rightsholder can even choose to say, "Hey, you know what? If you release the entire source code to your product publicly, we'll drop this case." They have the ability to negotiate that with you because that's the same ability GPL rightsholders have.
GPL is considered "viral" because, for most people, releasing the rest of your source code is preferable to losing in court for regular copyright infringement. With proprietary software, if it's found out that you've misused someone's code, they probably will not offer you that viral option - they'll go straight for the monetary damages. If you don't consider that fatal, then you shouldn't fear that situation with the GPL, either.
The reason some people specifically want to avoid enhancing GPLed software is because they want to be able to modify software without the condition of releasing the source for their modifications. The fact that the alternative to voluntarily releasing the source is being sued doesn't make the situation any less burdensome.
> With proprietary software, if it's found out that you've misused someone's code, they probably will not offer you that viral option - they'll go straight for the monetary damages.
And this rarely happens in practice because people with proprietary software guard the source and don't intentionally let others have it.
All three options (proprietary, GPLed, permissive open-source licenses) serve different purposes and will be chosen by different entities based on individual circumstances.
None is a one-size-fits-all, and I think we've seen over the last decade or more that the size that fits many corporations is the permissive open-source license model which allows them to contribute back what they'd like without being forced into the choice between contributing back everything or being sued.
Most free software licenses? Sure. Most Proprietary software licenses? I don't know about that. For example from IE 5:
> 6. EXPORT RESTRICTIONS. You agree that you will not export or re-export the SOFTWARE PRODUCT, any part thereof, or any process or service that is the direct product of the SOFTWARE PRODUCT (the foregoing collectively referred to as the "Restricted Components"), to any country, person or entity subject to U.S. export restrictions. You specifically agree not to export or re-export any of the Restricted Components (i) to any country to which the U.S. has embargoed or restricted the export of goods or services, which currently include, but are not necessarily limited to Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria, or to any national of any such country, wherever located, who intends to transmit or transport the products back to such country; (ii) to any entity who you know or have reason to know will utilize the Restricted Components in the design, development or production of nuclear, chemical or biological weapons; or (iii) to any entity who you know or have reason to know has been prohibited from participating in U.S. export transactions by any federal agency of the U.S. government. You warrant and represent that neither the BXA nor any other U.S. federal agency has suspended, revoked or denied your export privileges.
I have seen similar clauses in a lot of other software in the past (such as itunes, Adobe programs, and Norton I think).
This is technically true, but practically getting a proprietary license for some GPLed programs would be obscenely difficult. How many authors are there of GNU Bash? GCC? Would all of those authors accept money from Apple to allow them to ship a proprietary version of their code in MacOS? Are they all even still alive? And I bet some people would demand obscene amounts of money for tiny patches they made decades ago, just to spite Apple. And they'd probably write scathing blog posts about how apple hates free software just because they were asked. Then what would apple do? Strip out random chunks of code from archaic codebases like bash and hope for the best? Ugh.
This would be fine if there was a central owner to whom copyright has been assigned, but opensource programmers aren't in the habit of doing that. So there's no central body with whom Apple can negotiate (and even if there was, would the FSF sell a proprietary license to apple?). Under RMS? No way.
Your second point seems incoherent in its own terms. You say:
> You can absolutely decide you want to distribute GPL'd software compiled in with proprietary software for which you don't want to release the source.
... But then you say:
> GPL is considered "viral" because, for most people, releasing the rest of your source code is preferable to losing in court for regular copyright infringement.
So you're saying that the GPL only applies if you don't want to get sued? I mean, sure, but spoilers: Apple doesn't want to get sued for GPL violations. They have deep pockets, and they'd lose, and they'd get really bad press for it which might hurt their ability to hire good programmers in the long run. They don't want the reputation Microsoft had in the 90s.
There is a view that the GPL is more dangerous than proprietary code. This is untrue: it is strictly less dangerous. If you are somehow not worried about being sued over proprietary code (which, to be clear, seems like a bad approach to me), you shouldn't be more worried about the GPL.
You also have no guarantee of negotiating a license from the owner of proprietary code, and such owner is way more likely to have lawyers than someone who posted a patch to bash 10 years ago and them disappeared from the internet.
(Also, for GNU projects, GNU has a policy of requiring copyright assignment to the FSF, mostly because the FSF does have lawyers and are unlikely to be willing to negotiate a private license. For non-GNU software, agreed, but, "This vendor went out of business and we have no idea where the copyright ended up" isn't unheard of either.)