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Comment by woodruffw | Hacker News Reader

Who is MIT a turnoff for? It’s strictly more permissive on the consumer side than GPL is.

Which isn’t to say anything about how a project ought to be licensed; just that MIT enjoys overwhelming popularity with newer projects.

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> Who is MIT a turnoff for?

For me, for example. I personally prefer my foundations on xGPL (preferably V3 and later), because some company or set of companies just can't fork and run away with it.

I personally consider computing utilities and compilers essential infrastructure and their sustainability while being completely transparent are critical for me.

I'd argue the opposite. xGPL makes it easier for the founding company to just run away with it. We saw it with MongoDB, where it being AGPL means one company can control and unilaterally relicense it. Other examples I'd see of being GPLed doing little to nothing to prevent such shenanigans are any Oracle owned GPLed properties -- Java, MySQL, and VirtualBox all have user-hostile projects and misfeatures added even with the GPL. Conversely, permissive Free projects like LLVM and Postgres have had a lot harder time with one company controlling, because its non-copyleft nature means that everyone has a fair footing in controlling the direction.

The problem is not xGPL, it's the copyright transfer. If you don't force copyright transfer on the patches you accept, you can't relicense a code overnight.

All "xGPL to shenanigans" incidents have underlying copyright transfer problems. Recently, an emulator had gone the same way. They asked for copyright transfer to be able to relicense from GPL, and some folks here have used derogatory adjectives for people who didn't want to transfer their copyrights.

Ah that is why clang in now loosing the race to being C++20, while two of its major founders are more than happy with C++17 for their OS stacks and main languages on those stacks.

So where are the others stepping in to fill the void reaching C++20 compliance and catching up to GCC and VC++?

Java -> OpenJDK

MySQL -> MariaDB

OpenOffice -> LibreOffice

Chrome -> Chromium

VSCode -> VSCodium

and so on.

GPL protects my rights.

But I work for a company, and I want to run off with these things.

Why obeying GPL and sharing your improvements is bad?

RedHat built a company on that model? Provide value and GPL won't threaten your business model.

It’s not bad, it’s just that I’m not allowed to. I don’t like to inflict that on others.

Seeing something useful and then having to do it myself anyway because I cannot use it due to the license is painful.

What I know is if projects use permissive licenses, the software end users getting is usually proprietary. Copyleft is designed to prevent that from happening.

It doesn't matter if some other project is proprietary. The proprietary company's proprietary product was always going to be proprietary.

What matters is whether they contribute back anything to open source. And it's a hell of a lot easier to get Legal to sign off on contributing back bug fixes and enhancements on a piecemeal basis rather than adding a recurring obligation to the books.

> The proprietary company's proprietary product was always going to be proprietary.

A lot is companies would have preferred to have proprietary operating systems, but the Linux license prevents them.

Plenty of companies aren't hindered by the Linux license as they are not required to give you the source most of the time, they just point you to their SoC vendor. Or worse, they just don't use Linux and use BSD or Windows Embedded instead.

I don't see this as a valid point.

> The proprietary company's proprietary product was always going to be proprietary.

The point of copyleft is to make this not true. Most companies don't have the resources to reimplement Linux from scratch, so they won't be allowed to make their drivers/kernel modifications proprietary.

I know that's the theory, but I don't see that happening in practice. See, e.g., TiVo, Android, NVIDIA drivers...

> Who is MIT a turnoff for?

For me. I want my software to be as much gplv3 as possible. Not trolling. Also not arguing, it's just the way I roll.

I would honestly like to understand why the downvotes. I am giving a blatantly honest answer of a case of people like me who would be turned off by a licence. I don't expect anyone to necesserily agree but I don't get why my opinion is being downvoted. Is it insulting or irrelevant to the issue or what?

I think it is a valid answer to a question that has been posed. I think the reason for the down-votes is that you did not elaborate on as to why MIT is a turnoff for you, and/or why you would rather prefer GPLv3 over MIT.

...or perhaps they did not like the last part of your comment, the "it's just the way I roll" one.

Maybe you're right. I thought it is understood why pro-gplv3 people like the licence.

Just to elaborate then, I personally want my software to use gplv3 because I side with the ideological/ethical aspects of free software. I want to support projects/teams/orgs that build this future. An mit licence would allow a company to capitalise on the community's effort withought giving nothing back. Or even worse, make modifications and deliver closed source blobs to users. I personally do not like that. Thus, I wouldn't support/use this library.

To be clear, I am not running 100% gpl software atm, but I see it as a journey going there, slowly transitioning.

> Who is MIT a turnoff for? It’s strictly more permissive on the consumer side than GPL is.

well, ever wondered why router vendors include GPL license paper in the box? this [1] is why...

[1] https://www.crn.com/news/applications-os/205100091/busybox-s...

Didn’t they just switch to toybox? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toybox

Apple, Sony and Nintendo are quite happy with it.

FreeBSD and clang communities, maybe not so much.

MIT is a turnoff for potential contributors, not for users. A lot of people don't want to see their work that was done without compensation end up in some company's proprietary fork.

Is it much better that they just credit them in some obscure notes nobody reads?

The major issue is that the companies don't want to, in CC terms, "share alike". Attribution is a lesser concern.

Wouldn't you run into the same problem with a company that runs linux computers and never contributes back?

> It’s strictly more permissive on the consumer side than GPL is.

You have been misinformed. The GPL is a much better license for users. MIT is arguably better for the authors because they can deny certain freedoms to their users (the ability to change the code on a system, for instance).

GPL3 or GPL2? After what github did with copilot, Chinese companies that don’t release source code, or western companies that do the same I don’t see any ways to enforce them, you just need to trust the authors or the users. Has there been a landmark case that solidifies any of this? Chinese companies don’t follow US IP either so I find it hard to believe they can do anything.

Again, not interested in arguing the actual ethics of the licenses. But I think most people would consider a license that allows modification without demanding redistribution to be more individually permissive than one that requires redistribution. Companies love MIT and it’s ilk, because it’s more permissive of their (arguably poor) behavior.

The fact that you need to add a specifier for that 'individually' permissive says everything about the difference in the licenses' goals.

It's more permissive, true, but it's not more free. As an analogy, consider that taking away people's permission to own slaves didn't make society less free.

How does MIT prevent users changing the code? They have explicit permission to take the code and change it however they want.

Not if you don't get the source with the binary.

It doesn't prevent that directly. What it does is allow proprietary forks, and those proprietary forks prevent that.

MIT vs GPL brought up again?

Flame war! Flame war! Flame war!

Ok, let's go!

You're stupid and probably ugly for wanting a flamewar!

No, he's right. We're rubber and you're glue!

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