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Comment by nextaccountic | Hacker News Reader

> I think that alone makes this project unusable in non-open-source projects?

I hope so. I mean, that's the only reason for GPL to exist, right? There's quite a few proprietary programs that decided to relicense as GPL in order to use a GPL library.

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IANAL but you don't need to relicense your program to GPL just to use a GPL library. You can relicense to something that is compatible with GPL, like say the MIT license. Then the combined form has to be distributed under GPL terms. But when you one day replace the library with something not under GPL, you can distribute combined forms of those under MIT.

This must be why so many proprietary apps require you to manually download FFmpeg binaries during runtime. Thanks for the explanation!

That is correct. If you want to redistribute a mixture of different program components as one program, all the pieces have to have licenses that are compatible. If any of them are GPL, then the whole thing will be GPL; all the other licenses have to be cool with being part of a whole that carries a GPL umbrella license. MIT and BSD pieces are this way.

Yes, that's true. I mean the whole work to be under GPL. The exact terms of your own code is less important, as long as it is GPL compatible.

I think the original point of GPL was to incentivise companies/developers to contribute changes back to GPL licensed project. What is clear is that, minus a few exceptions, most large open source engaged companies avoid GPL because of the risk of compliance [1]. And many authors that originally licensed their projects as GPL see this and regret their choice [2][3]. This is why there is a trend away from copyleft licenses [4].

[1] https://opensource.google/docs/thirdparty/licenses/#restrict...

[2] https://lwn.net/Articles/478361/

[3] https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/1412271091393994754...

[4] https://opensource.com/article/17/2/decline-gpl

No, that was the point of LGPL (Lesser or Library GPL)

The point of GPL software is that it's to be used in a GPL system, where users retain modification rights to the system they've acquired, and to prevent proprietary systems from free-loading off of GPL work.

Yep, it's funny to see people complaining about it when it is literally working as intended.

Even LGPL seems to have quite some FUD around the compatibility with distributing resulting software in app stores.

This seems to be quite at odds with the (maybe mistaken?) idea of a license that allows embedding a component without "license contaminating" the entire project, but still requires publishing changes to the component itself.

I wonder if there is a license that actually achieves that, without restricting the ability to publish to app stores?

That's not the only idea behind the LGPL (v3 especially), so it's not surprising it doesn't fulfill that without restricting other things.

MPL might be more what you are looking for.

The original point of the GPL was to ensure that end-users retained their rights to the source code. See https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html#four-freedoms.

There’s the philosophical intent of the FSF and then there’s what individual project authors intended by adopting GPL.

I think OP correctly explains the perspective of some/many/or even most authors.

Arguably, given the decline of GPL as the de facto license for OSS might indicate this viewpoint is at least an accurate perspective today and may have been the underlying truth all along. Certainly growing up I think I cared more about the concept of contributing improvements back than necessarily being able to have source to all derivative products and didn’t trust corporations to give back (I still don’t, but the situation doesn’t seem quite so serious for most projects).

That's just one point; but note that the LGPL also ensures that users retain those rights.

Yet here is a difference between the GPL and LGPL.

A GPLed piece cannot be mixed together pieces that have incompatible licenses.

This is true even if the pieces are mixed together in a dynamic way that respects their boundaries, so that users can rebuild the GPL-ed piece from sources, make modifications, and slide the modified piece back into the combination.

This is part of the point of the GPL, and specifically that point which is relaxed by the Lesser GPL, which is called "lesser" for some ideological reason.

This is a bit reductionist but a fun story for those that haven’t heard it. The GPL was created so rms could modify his printer driver: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/rms-nyu-2001-transcript.txt .

Inspired by that situation, at least

Most "most large open source engaged companies " want to leach off open source and do not want to create end user products that are open source.

They focus on open source development tools, and libraries. Not end-user software products.

This is why they reject GPL because they want to be able to use the Tools and Libraries to package up a commercial software to sell to end users.

They do not actually support the principles of Free Software, it is simply away for them to lower development costs and off shift capital expenses while getting some good PR about being "open source engaged"

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