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Comment by AWildC182 | Hacker News Reader

Absolutely giddy that a multi billion dollar company is profiting massively off of the generosity of an individual without contributing anything back!

Edit: And this is somehow controversial! Do tell me more!

GPL your shit people.

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When licensing with a permissive license, YOU (as open source developer / contributor) are being generous, you're giving your code away expecting NOTHING in return other than (in most cases) a copy of the license with the finished product. That's open source, the rules or license does not change if it's used by another OS developer, an indie startup, a charity, or a multi billion developer.

It'd be interesting to see a license that's permissive for non-commercial use and copyleft for commercial use. Or maybe the copyleft kicks in when the commercial derivative work starts earning a certain amount of money. It would be kind of like dual licensing under CC BY-NC and CC BY-SA.

I think it would still count as a free and open source software license, and it would allow small and independent developers to use the software without worrying much about the license, while requiring big companies to release the source of the derivative work.

It would not count as free or open source

It goes against freedom 0, and criteria 5 and 6 of the open source definition

https://fsfe.org/freesoftware/freesoftware.en.html

https://opensource.org/osd-annotated

What I'm thinking of would affect freedom 3 more than freedom 0. I guess by "use" I meant "incorporate in another program". But I still think it counts as free and open source because it doesn't actually prohibit commercial redistribution, it just switches to a different license type.

It's GPL plus an additional permission that noncommercial derivative works don't have to share the source code.

Anyway it's probably not actually a good idea.

The BSL strikes a good balance there: https://perens.com/2017/02/14/bsl-1-1/

As it always resolves to an open source license after a set amount of time + is always free in many other ways.

Kindof like Qt? They have it set up so you can use it under the LGPL terms, but if you pay them, you can negotiate a proprietary license (for example: if you wanted to statically link[a]).

[a]: The LGPL allows proprietary usage, but only when the LGPL library is dynamically linked in. The reason being that if it’s a separate binary file (.so, .dll, etc.), the user can replace it with their own version. If you statically link it (embed it in the program binary), the full GPL kicks in (IIRC).

Whoever owns Qt now is so threatening (I suppose they think of it as "aggressive marketing" but it's really threats) that it looks safer to treat Qt as GPL, or avoid it entirely.

Whoever owns Qt is: Qt. They were spun off from Digia (the company that bought them from Nokia) in 2016.

It felt like Qt was (relatively speaking) all over the place when they were owned by Nokia, but have been in a slow decline of mindshare for years. Of course, that's concurrent with the rise of Electron as the cross-platform app wunderkind.

When they were owned by Nokia you knew Nokia wants Qt to be used everywhere. Now it's not safe to use it without a lawyer on retainer.

Plus, from my friends who still do Qt, they're trying to turn it into an Electron-like platfom with Qt Quick and QML and the result isn't exactly the dependable platform that we used to know and love.

That doesn't really surprise me. It's not really a bad idea, but it's also probably an idea that they should have been able to deliver five or six years ago, and maybe had something better than Electron by now. (And of course licensing that didn't scare people off seems like it would have also been a good idea...)

I think this is more likely to hurt a project than to help it. Companies will avoid it entirely, putting work into something with a more permissive license. If there isn't an equivalent, they might implement one, open source it (a lot of tech companies have open sourced some big things), and that will be the one that gains popularity.

As long as as developers are willing to develop something 80% as good or a company open sources something that good, the one with the messy license will never get the same traction.

Like the BSL? The Business Source License: https://perens.com/2017/02/14/bsl-1-1/

Looks like for a lot of companies putting in a paragraph of text acknowledging they used the MIT-licensed work is a mission impossible. A short paragraph of text, come on!

I think the controversy with this comment is that if people want to "GPL their shit," nothing is stopping them. Personally, anything I've open sourced is under MIT, because I don't care if it gets used. And that's my choice

Interestingly most of the anger was before I added that.

I agree it's your choice. I will say, however, that we need to band together as a community. This of course depends on your views on the future of OSS but if you want corporations to also participate and maybe have a chance at a completely open source future, we need to collectively insist on GPL. Doing otherwise minimizes the efforts of those who want more OSS participation from corporations.

One other thing I want to point out - when using OSS at a corporation, I have sometimes contributed back to the project as an individual. Sometimes that's because I've done it after hours, and sometimes it's because contributing back as a "representative" of the company would have required going through red tape

I, too, am a GPL fan. But come on, who are you or I to dictate what the author of a piece of code does? This guy seems genuinely happy that Nintendo used his code. What's the problem?

It's controversial because your tone is childish and condescending.

Then why the hell call it open source and contribute code to society? Work as a freelancer and ask money for it.

word

You're welcome to GPL your code, if you want to be sure that nobody is ever going to use it.

You mean like that guy from Finland that created this Linux thing that nobody ever used?

The guy who wrote a program, not a library. GPL in a kernel doesn't contaminate the way it does in a library.

Doesn’t it affect kernel modules though? The whole “free” vs “non-free” module thing?

The one who refuses to move to GPL3?

My understanding is that even if the man at the top wanted to, Linux is copyright all it's contributors so all would have to agree to a relicense. This would be significantly more effort than it's worth given there is no shortage of contributors happy to use GPLv2.

It's legally complicated. In the past, Eben Moglen has said that he thought it would probably be possible under some sort of collective work theory. But certainly others disagree and Torvalds was not a particular fan of how GPLv3 skirted close to usage restrictions anyway.

There’s also the problem that many of the older contributors probably aren’t reachable at the email address attached to the commit. They may even be dead in which case you’d need to find who the copyright transferred to (next of kin? Did the will give it someplace else?), and get their permission.

They certainly could mandate that all new contributions are licensed as GPL2+, not the GPL2-only a lot of it is under. Then, after an eternity, when every bit is now GPL2+ (either by relicensing or rewriting), mandate all new commits are GPL3+. Then the only way to use it would be to rip out the GPL3+ parts (if you want GPL2 terms) or to use the GPL3.

Simple!

Except not really...

This was something I wrote at the time. https://www.cnet.com/news/linux-to-gplv3-a-practical-matter-... (Unfortunately, the original article referenced seems to be lost to the mists of time.)

The theory I guess is that, even absent a contributor license agreement, contributors to the kernel are effectively contributing to a collective work and that the project as a whole could make changes even if individual contributors did not agree.

Besides the technical difficulties, Linus is very outspoken against the GPL3

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