What's the issue with GPL here?
I hate the whole idea of intellectual property, so the less time I (and everyone, really) have to spend caring about it, the better.
MIT and BSD licenses allow everyone to care as little as legally possible about copyright, so in that regard any other choice is inferior.
And the "companies will be forced to give back to the project" argument never made sense to me.
Hating the idea of intellectual property doesn't make it go away. Neither do permissive licenses. Which is why your "ceteris paribus" statement is effectively worthless.
> And the "companies will be forced to give back to the project" argument never made sense to me.
Care to explain where you think it falls apart?
So far, it simply seems like you're fed up with the system and would rather rage in denial than try to improve the system or use it to your advantage. That may give you some degree of satisfaction, but it's silly for you to assert that everyone benefits from the same. And if you really just want to stop caring about copyright, I don't see why you'd bother advocating for MIT or BSD over GPL instead of just turning to casual piracy like most people who can't be bothered to respect software copyright.
The GPL license is the only license which protects end-user rights to see and modify source code of the software they use.
Unless that person is in receipt of a binary, in which case they are SOL.
The purpose of a copyleft license is to encourage derivatives that don't come with such restrictions.
Copyleft therefore helps reach a local maximum of freedom for everyone as a function of restrictions on redistribution.
Enter GPLv3 which wasn't even compatible with the unmodified GPLv2 and to Landley this made it no longer a universal receiver. Couple that with his disagreement over using the GPL in BusyBox to leverage source code from vendors, he created ToyBox and the 0BSD license. He sees the 0BSD license as a universal donor since GPL is no longer a universal receiver.
I mean for now there is a fashion among contributors to keep software open-source, but they don't like it as obligation. (Where "contributors" include ICs, but are really mainly businesses these days.) And the notion of "universality" is in fact more about forsaking my right to require the software to remain free. Why would I need that again? It seems that when thinking about progress/ROI open-source turned out to work very well as a fashion, what's wrong with it being a legal obligation then?
List of variants of BSD: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing:BSD?rd=Licensing/BS...
The weird argument above was that there are apparently too many variations of the GPL (even though there are many, many more BSD and MIT variants). So I said, stick to a single GPL variant. And then you ask if you can mix GPL versions together.
Similarly, Apple has a policy against shipping GPLv3 code. When bash upgraded to GPLv3 from GPLv2 ~10 years ago, Apple stopped upgrading it, and then eventually migrated to zsh, which is MIT licensed.
The issue is that GPL is a "viral" license, which hasn't been tested all that much in court, but they're erring on the safe side. They don't want to mix their proprietary code with GPL code.
Google LLC v. Oracle America, Inc.
The code in question was Java code, which has been licensed under (among possibly other licenses) the GPL. The terms of the GPL has not been an issue in the case, but GPL's "virality" AFAIK is premised somewhat on things like API copyrightability.
https://lore.kernel.org/all/20031206211900.GA9034@thunk.org/...
Quoting from Theodore Ts'o in 2003:
But that aside, does the Open Source community really want to push for the legal principal that just because you write an independent program which uses a particular API, the license infects across the interface? That's essentially interface copyrights, and if say the FSF were to file an amicus curiae brief support that particular legal principle in an kernel modules case, it's worthwhile to think about how Microsoft and Apple could use that case law to f*ck us over very badly.
So one motivation for creating toybox was apparently that he wanted it as a busybox alternative for users afraid of lawsuits.
Bottom line is if you're shipping software with your phone that you didn't write, maybe spend the really minimal amount of time to make sure you're in compliance with the license, especially when the license (GPL) makes no onerous demands at all except you might need to put up an apache server somewhere with the source on it.
Unfortunately many companies seem to think that because they downloaded the software for free from the internet, they don't need to care about what the license text says. And if they disregard what some random person on the internet whines about them not following some license, a lawsuit seems perfectly in order.
Now one could argue, as Landley seems to be doing, that a permissive license is more attractive to corporations as there is less risk that some mistake somewhere along the way gets them sued. Then one can of course counter that argument by asking whether such users are beneficial to open source in the longer term, or is the open source community just a bunch of suckers doing free work for corporations without getting anything in return.
any business that wants to use gpl software has a problem.
It's not that gpl is bad either, or that it can't be used for commercial purposes, it's simply that the traditional business model doesn't include giving anything to anyone else.
So like I said, google "mit vs gpl" to get countless articles and discussions explaining all about that. That is the answer to "what's the problem with gpl here?"
This project is 0bsd not mit but mit will yield more hits, and is the same fundamental issue.
Can you name the problem, please?
Amazon "commoditizes their complement" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25476266) by making open-source easy to use, and hopefully you'll exit through the gift shop and drop some chunky spend on their hosting services.
If your code is the actual valuable thing (for instance, a spreadsheet program that makes Excel look like a joke), then giving the code away for free doesn't give you any path to make money.
Sure thing. I guess you missed where I already said: google "mit vs gpl"