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Racket had to do this to go from lGPL to Mit, it was a long process. But they did it to make the language more accessible to developers. Developers are scared away by lGPL.

Not all contributions were relicensed (resulting in code being rewritten), and we lost some code in the standard library (the csv parser).

Now Racket is trying to make it more friendly to people by created a new language (called Rhombus for now) that is Racket without the parenthesis.

They are playing the long game. But I hope these changes attract new Racketeers in the future

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> Developers are scared away by lGPL.

For me it's very much the opposite, I refuse to contribute code to anything licensed under the MIT/BSD/etc family of languages.

It makes me sad to see so much confusion, incorrect information, naiveté and paranoia going around regarding the GPL that it's scaring people off. I think that most of these people would feel differently if they understood better.

I think the systematic defanging and watering down of the free software movement is a great loss.

The number of people who refuse to commit to MIT/BSD/etc. code is almost not existing, the number of people who refuse or cannot commit to GPL is plentiful.

> It makes me sad to see so much confusion, incorrect information, naiveté and paranoia going around regarding the GPL

I agree, there are still too many people who think the GPL is _just_ another license. It's not and many figured this out the hard way after they already accepted contributions under the GPL and moving away has become hard to impossible.

Not being able to relicense code provided by other people without their agreement is definitely a feature of any license.

Let’s not kid ourself: the main reason companies don’t like the GPL is because they don’t want to share the code they actually use in their products. Making that impossible is an intended consequence of the license not some unforeseen flaw. If you are fine with companies profiteering from your work then choosing the MIT or BSD license definitely make sense.

The whole discussion really is about commercial interest in the end.

The biggest risk of the GPL is in fact not companies but to you as a creator. If you plan on commercializing your work in any capacity, accepting contributions under the GPL will be the end of that. Given the murky laws around copyright reassignment getting contributions in under a more liberal license so you retain extra rights yourself is tricky.

There are many projects which learned after a few years that their choice of license backfired on them.

> The biggest risk of the GPL is in fact not companies but to you as a creator. If you plan on commercializing your work in any capacity, accepting contributions under the GPL will be the end of that.

If you accept contributions, that’s not your work anymore. That’s your work and your contributors work. You are still perfectly free of removing said work and commercialise your own. You just can’t profite from the work of others without asking them. That’s a feature of the license not a risk.

> Given the murky laws around copyright reassignment getting contributions in under a more liberal license so you retain extra rights yourself is tricky.

You are misrepresenting the situation once again. It is not about retaining your own right. The whole issue is on the work of others.

Something does not stop being my work when it hat contributions from others but generally that’s besides the point. The main issue of GPL comes from the risk to the original creator itself. Others not using the software is less the concern.

> Something does not stop being my work when it hat contributions from others

Of course it does both from a legal and moral point of view. Composite work is the product of their authors plural. You are perfectly free to strip it from the contributions of others and relicense your actual work.

> The main issue of GPL comes from the risk to the original creator itself

You keep coming back to that but still have to explain what they are. Yes, the GPL prevents you from relicensing the work of your contributors. That's not a risk to the original creator itself.

> The main issue of GPL comes from the risk to the original creator itself

The risk of abiding by the license? The GPL ensures user have access to source code provided under the license, so I'm assuming by "commercializing" you mean hiding away source code that used to be public? The calculus is simple: if you want to make money by doing an open-source bait-and-switch, do not license your code under GPL.

Commercializing can happen in many ways. GPL code in itself can’t even be published on the app store without violating the license. If you are not the complete copyright holder you can run into issues very quickly.

> GPL code in itself can’t even be published on the app store without violating the license

Did you mean without violating the app store EULA? Because the GPL places no restrictions on how generated binaries are distrubuted, only that the source be transmitted to any user upon request.

If a single line was written and contributed without copyright assignment, than line is theirs. The project can be yours, but you no longer own 100% rights to it.

Precisely. Which is why releasing code under the GPL requires a lot of up front consideration.

Moving away from any particular license is hard to impossible.

I don't think people who shy away from GPL are in favor of the free software movement. People who advocate for MIT like licenses like 'open source', but they usually explicitly reject the ideas from free software.

Some of these concerns are simply commercial, and some are philosophical. I think people might have been convinced to dislike GPL. But I don't think that was misinformation or confusion. It might be fear-mongering about the effects of a 'viral license', but we can only guess at their effects.

Personally I dislike GPL because it limits developers like me, and because I find the (roughly true) idea 'you can only use GPL code if you're own code is GPL' too coercive. I don't think that is a virtuous method for improving the world.

I have yet to see BSD / MIT meaningfully improving my personal life, quite unlike the GPL which pretty much made my career possible thanks to the wealth of GPL software under Linux

Have you ever used software linked against OpenSSL? It’s licensed under APL, which is very similar to the BSD family of license - it allows use in closed source projects. Or OpenSSH - it’s developed by the OpenBSD folks and licensed under a BSD style license. Or Firefox - licensed under MPL, very similar to APL. The rust compiler is dual-licensed under MIT/APL. Both ruby and python are dual-licensed with at least one license from the BSD/MIT group, the python license itself is similar to BSD as well. The Linux kernel allows incorporating BSD/MIT licensed code in the kernel itself and though I didn’t check, I’m certain there are examples.

> Have you ever used software linked against OpenSSL? It’s licensed under APL, which is very similar to the BSD family of license - it allows use in closed source projects.

well, if I could I'd definitely choose gnutls over it even before getting to licensing issues tbh. Also how much better did it being useable in closed-source projects (those I don't use unless there's really no other viable choice and doing it myself is not an option) make it ?

> Or OpenSSH - it’s developed by the OpenBSD folks and licensed under a BSD style license.

yes, though I'm not sure if I'm using any openssh-specific interface, ssh -X maybe ?

> Or Firefox - licensed under MPL, very similar to APL.

MPL is closer to GPL in spirit than MIT/BSD, no ? AFAIK you can't make a closed-source derivative of Firefox (which is what matters).

> The rust compiler is dual-licensed under MIT/APL.

I don't use it. The only Rust software I'm using is ripgrep I believe ?

> Both ruby and python are dual-licensed with at least one license from the BSD/MIT group, the python license itself is similar to BSD as well

I don't use either neither as a developer or a user, the huge majority of my direct interaction with my computer is through C or C++ software; mainly KDE stuff.

But all of this is besides my point - if there wasn't a big ecosystem of (L)GPL software existing when I was a teen (Linux, KDE, core/binutils, GCC etc) I'm not sure I could have taught myself enough computing to achieve what I seek to. If everything was BSD I doubt these software would have evolved into something good enough to make for a correct desktop experience (last time I tried a BSD it was deeefinitely not useable enough for me unless replacing most of the BSD base with the GNU one like I do on my mac machines for instance). I've also used proprietary software for instance, but I would not say they made my life "meaningfully better".

> and though I didn’t check, I’m certain there are examples.

The whole GPU driver subsystem for example.

It's debatable that most GNU stuff would be available if it were not for BSD.

> Personally I dislike GPL because it limits developers like me, and because I find the (roughly true) idea 'you can only use GPL code if you're own code is GPL' too coercive. I don't think that is a virtuous method for improving the world.

I have no idea what you're talking about. You can use gpl code without being the owner of said code.

You're thinking in very selfish terms. The gpl is bot about safeguarding rights for the developer, but instead it safeguards rights for the user. When code is licensed as gpl, it's a promise to the user that they'll always be able to get, use, and modify the code for the software. That comes at the cost of developers not being allowed to make the code private.

I think that safeguarding user rights is a virtuous method of improving the world.

> I have no idea what you're talking about. You can use gpl code without being the owner of said code.

When I use GPL code in my projects, that forces me to publish my projects under GPL. That limits my freedom as a developer. This is indeed thinking about my needs more than thinking about general needs.

> I think that safeguarding user rights is a virtuous method of improving the world.

I agree that the world would be better if more/all code were open source and user-modifiable. I do not agree that the ends (user freedom) justify the means (GPL or other copy-left licenses). I think the means are harmful because they are coercive. If we look at the effect of GPL on the ecosystem, e.g. ZFS, you see that people re-license to GPL because the alternative is untenable maintenance wise. This re-licensing is not happening because people agree with the license, but for practical reasons. Essentially a few people have decided "this is exactly how things need to be" and through copyleft licenses, they are twisting the arm of everyone else. That is not how I think it should be decided how intelectual propert rights should be improved.

In the ZFS case, essentially what GPL was meant to prevent happened. There was an open piece of software (ZFS), people were making improvements to that software (ZFS on Linux getting development), but they could not be used upstream.

GPL is a one-way street in the open source world. It sucks up code from other open source projects but it cannot give anything back. In some cases, I think this makes GPL a net negative for the open-source (using the wide definition) community. I think the only defense GPL can offer here is "but that part of the open-source community is wrong and harmful". I think it makes sense that the non-GPL parts of the open-source community are not happy about that stance.

In general "if you just do exactly as I want there is no problem" is not how we should treat each other in my opinion. We should leave room for different viewpoints and some form of discussion. Rather than saying "my way or the highway". If you take that stance, then don't be surprised people don't want to cooperate.

If those people are coherent I assume they are also contributing and running one of the BSDs as their main UNIX.

Huh? I would guess most people are pragmatic and are happy to use and contribute to any software licensed under OSD-compliant terms. You can do that while still preferring to contribute to permissively licensed projects. Of course that goes both ways, I don't see many free software purists that refuse to use permissively licensed software either.

> Developers are scared away by lGPL.

I see GPL as a sign of quality and am attracted by projects using it. It's a promise nobody will ever take that thing away from me once I've started using it.

I'm a developer, by the way. :-)

Edit: Not to mention that some people even using GCC, Linux and Java.

People can't simply take away MIT-licensed code either - it grants you the right to use that code, and does so irrevocably.

What GPL does is make sure that code that is built on top of that will also be accessible to you, if the product it's used in is made public. But your own contributions and anything MIT-licensed it is added to will never be legally taken away from you.

With software, we don't see any frozen particular version as the main asset, but the continuity of the project is the asset. Otherwise we wouldn't de-value unmainted software so much. (The code is there, the license is clear, it could be used).

GPL makes sure the project's main strand of development stays accessible to you.

Well, unless the copyright holder of that code decide to use another licence in the future — then the snapshot that was licensed as GPL will remain available to you, but the main strand of development may not.

But yes, if this copyright is spread over many people (as it is in this case), then re-licensing is a herculean effort that is especially unlikely to succeed if it's designed to take away user rights, so in that sense a GPL'd project is more likely to remain open.

Out of curiosity, how does the GPL promise that versus the other common open source licenses? E.g MIT, BSD or Apache?

As I understand it:

MIT code can be freely taken into proprietary fork, with software modified and sold and no patches contributed.

Not sure how often it happens? Has it actually happened and is it a plausible attack? Nowadays at least AGPL is needed to defang "and we will sell it as service rather than selling software" workaround for GPL.

Apple derived OSes, the Windows TCP/IP stack before Windows Vista, PlayStation OSes, Nintendo and Playstation SDK, the BSD stuff taken into commercial UNIXes, just from top of my head, there are surely other examples.

As a practical matter, it means you cant just copy the files into your sources to some subdir, or you cant just link it statically. So you cant release a single-exe version of your project.

These are things some projects like to do, and GPL blocks that. So all thing considered, it may be easiest to just not use GPL code.

you can't copy MIT-licensed files without crediting it either.

And you can statically link GPL code, assuming you release the source to all app users. You might be confusing it with LGPL, which says you can link to proprietary apps dynamically, but have to release source in all other cases.

You can also link to proprietary apps statically if you provide the object files: https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/3127...

I thought useing GPL code without modifications was acceptable without any licensing, or is that a 'lesser GPL' license?

You can use GPL code however you want.

You have only obligations when you distribute the results. Whatever you do in your private basement is completely unaffected by that. The GPL gives you freedom to do whatever you please. That's the whole point of it!

When you distribute binaries resulting form work based on GPL code than the people receiving those binaries (and only them) are eligible to get alongside the source code which allows them to rebuild the binaries you distributed to them. That makes sure that those other people also have the same freedom as you to do whatever they please with the programs and code. So the GPL preserves freedom among users of GPL code.

You're thinking on the LGPL.

The GPL is the prototypical copyleft licence, designed to encourage the liberation of software, in part via its dependencies.

Apple's OS is a fork of BSD without the fork being open source.

It’s more complicated than that. It was not a fork, they just copied some parts of FreeBSD and OpenBSD. The kernel is XNU, and descended from Mach. Also, Darwin (the base OS, which includes the BSD bits) is open source. What isn’t is the GUI on top of it, which comes from OPENSTEP.

The open source part of Darwin/XNU doesn't deserve to be called a "base OS" since version 6, when Apple closed the sources of a lot of drivers. There's no hardware that will boot these systems if you restrict to what is available under the APSL.

https://web.archive.org/web/20091118172944/http://www.pureda...

https://github.com/apple/darwin-xnu

GPL software, and extensions to it, are free and will stay like that.

That can't be said about software under the above mentioned licenses.

I'm not sure how the GPL guarantees that it will stay like that anymore than those other licenses?

You can always relicense GPL content as long as everyone agrees. You can also change it to source on request versus always accessible.

If you wrote the code, you can refuse to relicense.

key is "as long as everyone agrees"

OP also said it was a sign of 'quality'. Not sure how GPL promises that over other OS licenses.

I'm the OP and I'm not a native speaker but to my knowledge "quality" denotes in English besides a few other things the meaning of "value" (in the sense of worthiness) or (related to that meaning) "excellence". Something being high-quality makes this thing valuable.

I didn't mean "code quality", or the like, as a license can not enforce that obviously.

> I see GPL as a sign of quality

Personal opinion is that BSD > GPL. Free as in properly free. I always donate to BSD license folks. When corporations use BSD software, they usually get engaged in the BSD community - under the stilts of management, suited lawyers and spreadsheet bean counters, it's just us programmer folk... you know. We like tinkering things and BSD software tends to have a different philosophy. Very welcoming to people who want to propel the world forward. Truly liberating, try BSD software.

This is a matter of hot debate, and I don't want to trigger such discussion. AFAIU it is a bit of perspective of where the freedom is. With BSD there's more 'freedom' to incorporate with proprietary code, which eases commercialization. Companies like it better because of that and are likelier contributors. With GPL, while you can still monetize your code, protects the freedom of the Commons better by preventing the proprietary commercialization of open source code. And that is a reason why many businesses shun it. Personally I am in favor of the 4 freedoms of open-source and like to use (A)GPL.

Yeah, agree it is hotly debated and not worth discussing further. I've recently been bitten by GPL and it's fresh on my mind how insidious it can be. That said, I work in commercial environment where BSD-licensed software is highly regarded.

Saying that corporations prefer something they can profit from without giving back vs something they can not is circular reasoning to me. Conversely if you look on the other side you'll see developers bitten by permissive software licences (MongoDB, Elasticsearch, ...).

"without giving back" is a bit of an exaggeration. You could have a giant 20M line proprietary codebase, and if you incorporate a 20-line function from a GPL source, GPL says you need to relicense the whole thing.

I prefer the MPLv2, it lets commercial users actually use the code, but they still have to contribute back any changes they make.

> I prefer the MPLv2, it lets commercial users actually use the code, but they still have to contribute back any changes they make.

Sure, but how is this verifiable? Not verifiable = not happening.

Anyway, the idea of using a 20 line function in a 20M line codebase is a total strawman. Think of it from the 20 line function author's point of view - free money for corporate? They lack the expertise internally to write this function?? It's crypto code and getting it 100% right is extremely valuable? Then they need to be licensing it from the author.

It sounds like the idea you have here is that someone has licensed their code under the GPL but "didn't really mean it"? I think you should flesh out that side of your argument... why should corporate be permitted to use this code? Authors who are worried can release their stuff as MIT or CC0.

Companies have a legal department to make sure this kind of thing is followed, otherwise they have potentially huge liabilities.

For things that have a single author, the relicense option is possible, yes. But how about projects that have several?

To me the great thing about software is that other people can use the code I wrote without it costing me anything. I understand the various attitudes of wanting others to be bound by some terms of sharing the work they do too, or paying for a license, but at least from my experience it limits the adoption of my code, and I'd rather my code be useful in as many places as possible, with the only requirement being that if you fix any bugs or extend the functionality in a deeply intrusive way, you contribute that back.

Or lacking adequate case law, that's what the FSF et al. would want you to believe, anyhow. Although a bit vaguely drafted in this respect, the copyleft effect of GPL depends on the concept of a derivative work under copyright law. It would be a bit far-fetched to claim that in your example, the combination of the function and the codebase is a derivative of the function you incorporated.

Anyway, because the fact that people think GPL is that extensive is enough to create unnecessary problems, I too prefer MPL, where the copyleft scope is defined very clearly for its use case.

I don’t think it matters whether the GPL can successfully be enforced against the example you describe. The license’s author intended that it could be, and that is what matters.

A philosophical disagreement with the license’s intent shouldn’t be overlooked just because the license might not actually be enforceable.

So you would be actually fine with GPL if excerpts up to 1000 lines were not covered by copyleft?

No, the GPL is for what it's for, large codebases like Linux where you want to make sure it doesn't fragment too badly. Most code isn't this, though.

Not all corporations are assholes. Many give back, many people contribute code often becomes the reason for the project to exist. They give life to open source projects by buying support and sustenaining their livelihood.

I am sick of this constant myopic view that all corporations are evil and people working there have no regard for open source development.

The truth is probably closer to being opposite than the anti-corporate crusader zeitgeist of HN. The point of the original comment was to express that behind all the corporations, there are just real people like you and me.

I was only commenting on the reasoning. It's not a question of evil, just of basic business incentives.

> The truth is probably closer to being opposite than the anti-corporate crusader zeitgeist of HN. The point of the original comment was to express that behind all the corporations, there are just real people like you and me.

I'm a (small) business owner so I'm fully conscious of that. But it's a reality that past a certain size a corporation will optimize for its best interests given the current set of rules (law). If a company contribute to open-source it's not because they are nice, it's because the added value in marketing/hiring/commoditizing their competitors makes business sense, otherwise no matter their convictions people would get punished in their performance review, and the stock value would tank. Only specific corporate structures allow people inside a company to go against the baseline.

With few exceptions, I generally view the purpose of permissive licenses as "encouraging derivative software with EULAs and other restrictions", and the purpose of copyleft licenses as only allowing derivatives that don't restrict such freedoms.

Copyleft software therefore guarantees more freedom than permissively licensed software.

The choice often isn’t between having a given derivative work be permissively licensed or copyleft. It’s between having the derivative work exist at all or not.

As a software author, choosing a license that requires people to be subject to more conditions to use my software is giving them less freedom, not more. If someone makes a derivative work with a restrictive license, that doesn’t make my software any less free.

> that doesn’t make my software any less free

You might say it makes your software less yours, though.

A restrictive license protects your interest in the code. After all, that's why companies are releasing their code under restrictive licenses.

100% agree there's a tradeoff of this with popularity, and it will never matter for almost everyone. But the people for whom it does matter get upset sometimes --- licensing is a choice that needs to be made with eyes wide open.

That's a different situation, because the LGPL is not a problematic license in terms of drafting.

With LLVM, the license isn't really changing in spirit. The concerns seem to be more practical — my understanding is that they're trying to get out from under a poorly drafted patent clause and also unify the code under a single license so they can move stuff around more easily.

Many major corporations (like, say, IBM) have no problem with LGPL. Where did you find a bunch of developers who thought it was a problem?

It's not the developers who are afraid, it's the companies who want to use the code for free, for proprietary purpose, and redistribute it. They want to take as much as possible but don't want to give anything.

I would rephrase to "they want to take as much as possible but don't want to give back the entire codebase using the free software".

LGPL doesn't require to make the entire codebase free software

(GPL does. It is part of the contract: get some, give some.)

Without GPL, people wouldn't be enjoying their Linux distribution, but naturally this is a moot point given how the BSD distributions have taken over the UNIX world.

Commenting on BSDs losing out to Linux seems like a weird dig in this context, considering that a large contributing factor to that was legal threats from AT&T.

Something that keeps being forgotten, those legal issues were settled in 1994, after USL also getting a counter lawsuit for their own use of BSD code, while Linux itself was a target of a lawsuit a decade later thanks SCO.

It's not forgotten, it just doesn't matter in any meaningful way. We're talking about two years of legal issues that took place during one of the fastest moving eras in computer technology. In Linus' own words at the time that this was happening:

"Actually, I have never even checked 386BSD out; when I started on Linux it wast available (although Bill Jolitz series on it in Dr. Dobbs Journal had started and were interesting), and when 386BSD finally came out, Linux was already in a state where it was so usable that I never really thought about switching. If 386BSD had been available when I started on Linux, Linux would probably never had happened."

The SCO lawsuit that happened a decade after this is pretty much irrelevant.

And a couple of years later everyone turns their back to the license that made Linux and its userspace in two years happen in first place, it is forgotten.

I think there are many reasons for Linux 'winning', and it's not easy to attribute weights to each one. GPL is probably one, Linux having a better development model more open to outsiders is another, arguably more important, one.

> Linux having a better development model more open to outsiders is another, arguably more important, one.

Not to mention being easier to try out (the path to becoming a developer starts with trying it out). Back when Linux was growing, it was very easy to install, to the point of not even needing to repartition the disk; through the magic of UMSDOS and LOADLIN, you could install it to your DOS partition and treat it as if it were a DOS program (with the only difference being that you couldn't "exit" Linux back to DOS without rebooting). From what I've heard, not only was that not possible with the BSD distributions, but also they were more picky about the hardware. That was the path I took: when I wanted a true Unix-like (instead of just playing with DJGPP), I did some research, and concluded Slackware was the best option, mainly because it had UMSDOS and so if it didn't work out, I would just have to remove its directory (of course, once I noticed I wasn't even using DOS anymore, I dedicated a full partition formatted as ext2 to Linux, and later started installing Linux exclusively).

Walnut Creek CD-ROMs also provided a way, including live CDs.

>while Linux itself was a target of a lawsuit a decade later thanks SCO.

The dust was settled then, Google and all were on linux. Compared to BSD era. Not to mention the legal threats were not in the same order of magnitude.

Yet the licence that provided an escape route gets bashed, so much gratitude.

> lGPL

I was googling "I" GPL. Maybe consider upper-casing the L next time so it's not as ambiguous?

Thanks, I was just thinking this month how I would like to write lisp without parens.

>Racket had to do this to go from "lGPL"

Is that a typo of LGPL or does lGPL means something else? I even had to google it to make sure it was a "L" and not an "I".

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