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.
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.
GPL makes sure the project's main strand of development stays accessible to you.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
The GPL is the prototypical copyleft licence, designed to encourage the liberation of software, in part via its dependencies.
https://web.archive.org/web/20091118172944/http://www.pureda...
That can't be said about software under the above mentioned licenses.
You can always relicense GPL content as long as everyone agrees. You can also change it to source on request versus always accessible.
I didn't mean "code quality", or the like, as a license can not enforce that obviously.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A philosophical disagreement with the license’s intent shouldn’t be overlooked just because the license might not actually be enforceable.
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.
> 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.
Copyleft software therefore guarantees more freedom than permissively licensed software.
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.
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.