Hacker News Reader

Comment by _d7dt | Hacker News Reader

>when they allow private corporations to profit from the community’s work without recompense back to the community.

I'm not sure why this is frequently brought up in the context of the GPL. The GPL says nothing about that and has never held that as a concern at all. Communities who were using GPL with that intent have seemingly always been mistaken. From the text of the GPL: "the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change all versions of a program." It doesn't say anything about disallowing private corporations from profiting without recompense. If you want to force companies to pay you, you're better off with a closed source license.

View on HN

The spirit of the GPL is to create and maintain a thriving community around free software. Profit or not, when private entities are allowed to use free software without adhering to the tenets of the GPL, it is destructive to the free software community.

According to the actual text of the GPL, that is not the spirit of it at all. Sorry to disappoint but this is a common misconception that I see. The word "community" appears zero times in the GPL. The community aspect might be a side effect that happens in some cases with it, but trying to use a license of some kind of panacea to maintain a community doesn't make any sense. That's not how communities work. It's the people who maintain your community, not the license.

Edit: The lack of enforcement of GPL is a different story, but you can trace that directly back to the very same community, including the FSF, who seem to have decided years ago that enforcing the GPL is not worth it anymore for some reason.

Have you read Stallman’s essays on the topic? If you’re interested in this stuff, he goes very in depth on the goals of the free software movement: https://www.gnu.org/doc/fsfs3-hardcover.pdf The GPL was created explicitly to advance those goals.

From Wikipedia’s summary of the essays:

    The author proposes Free software licenses (mostly GPL) as a solution to social issues created by proprietary software and described in essays.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Software,_Free_Society

I am familiar with the various other things that are hosted on the GNU website. I'm referring to the actual authoritative legal text that gets copied alongside all the source code that you use, not any other essays on the subject. That text poses a different story than those essays. I'm also not sure why this is being brought up now, as the GP post you made acknowledged that the GPL was not even accomplishing that goal.

Edit: Since the license itself is vague on what those "social issues" actually are aside from sharing and changing the program, in my experience projects will tend to use it for whatever they feel like. Sometimes this is aimed towards community building but often isn't. To me the community building aspect mostly happens outside of these legal decisions, for example: closed source programs can have a community too, sometimes that community might even be hosted in the same places such as github.

> I am familiar with the various other things that are hosted on the GNU website. I'm referring to the actual authoritative legal text that gets copied alongside all the source code that you use, not any other essays on the subject.

you know that in case of actual litigation, judges will not only look at the actual text, but also at the intent surrounding it, right ?

Sure, but the "intent" in question would be the intent of the copyright holder that chose to use the GPL. My point is that the intent in a lot of cases is NOT to do what is being suggested.

Almost every person involved in Free Software knew that the movement was about building a community and a software ecosystem since day 1.

It's absurd to expect the word "community" to appear in the text of the GPL: it's a legal document, non a manifesto.

>It's absurd to expect the word "community" to appear in the text of the GPL

I'm not sure why you're saying this? I don't expect that word to appear in the text.

It also seems mostly not possible to prove or disprove that "almost every person involved knew." Did you mean this as a personal anecdote with the people that you knew? If so, that's probably great for you and your community, but apparently those who were writing the legal document that governs said community didn't agree. Sadly it is possible for there to be oversights from day one.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com