Do you think this is why people are abandoning the GPL license in favor of MIT/BSD? Something about the fight the GPL aims to win being a hopeless fantasy? In the face of the sentiment you and OP express, I'd think GPL usage would be widespread.
This is a pretty cynical "assume the worst" outlook, and it badly violates Occam's Razor. I think a much more likely reason that corporate lawyers disapprove of the GPL is that one of their main jobs (in some cases their entire job) is to protect the company's IP, and the GPL is a huge threat to IP. Any lawyer who didn't advise avoiding the GPL would be negligent. I personally love the GPL and encourage its use whenever possible, but I avoid it in decisions for my employers and customers because of the risks. I think generally speaking the risks are not nearly as serious as most people I think, but they do exist (otherwise the copyleft philosophy of the GPL would be pointless!)
That said, I do wish people would be a little more nuanced about it. IMHO (generally speaking) make libraries permissive, make applications GPL
The purpose of GPL and Free Software (which it has actually had resounding success in) is to develop a free commons which will stay free and not be exploited.
It's not for you to exploit to make a buck, and if that excludes your project, that's fine.
There are lots of things I would never consider free-licensing, but I think people badly miss the point of free software because they are stuck thinking only in terms of their own needs and personal benefit.
Again, if you don't want to use or contribute to free software, that is perfectly reasonable. But just bear in mind that the Linux kernel and GCC are incredibly valuable tools which are firmly in the commons and will remain free, and which you have benefited enormously from the use and free availability of.
That said, do you think it is in fact protecting the user from exploitation, or promoting the health of a free commons, to use "free" software in nonfree products which do not provide their source code to the user nor guarantee the user's ability to study, extend, and modify the software that they are using?
I think the argument for Free Software is at the very least strong and good. There can be other approaches to solving the problems FSF wants to solve, too, but it is a totally valid and non-debatably historically useful position at the very least.
It's not for you to exploit to make a buck
The GPL is very ideological, and there’s nothing wrong with that but you can see the cost of that right here: where someone pointing out there is a hidden cost is shamed for doing so. Given the chance of contributing code or community to two similar projects, I prefer the one that’s more about building than it is about contracts.
Do you really think it's fine and good for Google to take work explicitly intended by its authors to preserve free computing and work around the licensing to make money without preserving the intent and purpose of its license?
Shaming would be much stronger. I even pointed out that participating in it is totally elective and I personally would not in many cases.
Framing it in terms of your own cost/benefit is missing the point, though, and there is a meaningful and valuable purpose to it outside of maximizing your personal benefit in the moment of choosing a particular library.
The freedom to deny other people the freedom you are enjoying is not compatible with the notion of freedom. It's hypocrisy.
That's not to say there is no place for MIT/BSD licenses, but it is not with general application software or libraries used to build such.
To me that is just wrong.
The farmers fighting for the "right to repair" their own tractors are the front of the battle now.
“You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License”.
That is pretty clear. If you distribute software that contains a GPL component, the whole lot is considered GPL. Whether the GPL is 20 lines or a million is irrelevant.
This is why the GPL and similar licenses are called viral. They infect other people’s code and try to impose license terms on it.
This is also why licenses like LGPL were created, to try to be a little more reasonable. But that seems to have failed almost completely.
Yes, you need to be careful when you integrate GPL and LGPL code into your proprietary code base, and in some cases you just cannot do it. But so what? You are not entitled to use of that code. If you can't use it because of its license, then that's life: move on and find something else that you can use, or write it yourself.
And you also seem to think that if you screw up, and do depend on a GPL library (for example) in a proprietary code base, then you're required to give away the source for your 20 million proprietary lines of code. But that's not the case. There are many different remedies possible. One (common) remedy might be to cease distribution of the infringing code, remove the GPL component, replace it with something else, and re-release.
I think there are very few copyright owners who release their code under the GPL who would immediately push for the remedy to be your company releasing all of their proprietary code under the GPL. At least certainly not at first contact, if the company is capable of acknowledging their mistake and working in good faith to correct it. And even if a copyright owner did decide to push for this, it is ultimately up to a court to decide, and it seems vanishingly unlikely that a court would order that remedy, especially if the company was offering less-extreme, good-faith options.
> It is trying to force my will on other people’s code
I just wanted to call this out specifically, because, again: absurd. Please look at it from the default state: you do not get to use someone else's code at all. That's what copyright law says, in the absence of another agreement. Even if you have the source code to my library (or whatever), you cannot use it in your product unless I have given you a license to do so.
If you are considering using someone else's code in your project, one of the first things you should do is look at the license. If you see GPL, and don't want to abide by the terms of that license, you move on and find something else. That code is not trying to "force its will" on you. You are free to use it and follow its licensing terms, or move on. You are no poorer because that code is there, as you are not entitled to use it without a license anyway.
Yeah, apparently people moved on and the GPL is loosing significance.
I think perhaps there's just a lot more open source out there these days than there was 10 years ago. A good amount of it was started by or sponsored by corporations, and sadly those types of entities are less likely to use the GPL.
But that's fine, no skin off anyone else's back.
Unfortunately you've fallen victim to years of anti-GPL propaganda and FUD. A 10-liner GPL Python script is not going to "infect" an org with 20 million lines of closed source code. Suggesting that it's possible, even "in theory", is absurd.
The GPL purposely weaponizes source code in a way that other open source licenses do not, and personally I would rather hope that people decide on their own to release their changes than invite the lawyers into my code. Using code licensed this way is okay for projects that are already 100% GPL or aren't worth owning.
I've made lots of money and I publish every piece of code I've ever written to do it.
What you are describing must have been written by someone who does not believe in software freedoms.
Software freedom is an ideology, not a license. If you license part of your software as free software but not other parts of your software, you do not believe in software freedoms for the users of that software.
It's sort of like a factory that only uses slave labor for one step of production. Does that factory operator believe in human rights if their line is 90% respectful of the dignity of mankind?
I'm curious to know what your personal method is. Consulting, paid support, proprietary dual-licensing maybe? There are indeed many ways to make money and still publish code as FOSS; the tricky thing, as always, is to work out which way is the right one for you.
What you are describing must have been written by someone who does not believe in software freedoms.
I've made lots of money and I publish every piece of code I've ever written to do it.
It is not that simple. The GPL "takes away" some rights of the distributor of the software (their ability to restrict redistribution for example), but grants rights to the end user (the ability to modify and redistribute) of the software.
It's all perspective. As the developer the GPL may feel limiting, but as a user it is liberating.
I'm not saying that's a bad trade off to make, but it is absolutely a fact that the GPL takes away some rights. Or, since it is a copyright license, where the default in copyright is you get no rights, you might instead say it does not give all possible rights. I think it's important to recognize that sometimes "the greater good" comes at a price.
Expressing it like you did is misleading. One man's freedom is another man's restriction. It's two sides of the same coin.
It is absolutely a fact that laws against murder take away some rights. Suddenly you are not allowed to kill other people. You do not have that "freedom" anymore. Flipside is that others now have the freedom to walk around without fearing that they can lawfully be killed by others. You pay for granting one "new" freedom by removing another, opposing freedom.
The GPL grants new rights for a party by restricting rights of another party. Just like all licenses do.
GPL's freedom is not about you as a dev, it's about me as a user.
This is not true. What is harmed (and has effectively been destroyed) is the market to make money from selling libraries.
Many might be too young to remember, but it used to be that one could make a nice living selling libraries to companies.
In 1990 (just to pick a year) when BigCo Inc was developing a software project and needed library foo, they generally had two choices: build it internally or purchase one for money from a third party. This meant there was a nice market for small software houses to sell all kinds of libraries to BigCo.
Imagine for a moment a world where all open source is GPL. BigCo wouldn't touch the GPL libraries so they still either build or buy and we (developers) can continue to make money from our work.
Unfortunately it is no longer possible to make money from libraries because anything BigCo wants can be had for free in a BSD/MIT license so they get to take all the volunteer work, profit from it and give nothing back.
While that's certainly capitalism at its finest, I don't think that's a good outcome for the user base as a whole, or of the community.
This is true for you, now. But that's not to say it does not increase freedom over time, over a couple of generations of software enhancements.
This is why I do both. I copyleft some projects. Others, I don't. It all depends on the balance of needs.
Although, for me, the issue isn't releasing source code at all. That's orthogonal to the issue of whether or not to use an open source license. I have yet to release software, open source or otherwise, where I haven't made the source available. For my non-OSS projects, that source is only available to people who have purchased the software, though.
To put it another way, as a software developer I would personally like to make a living analogously to how a successful book’s author makes a living. Such an author can make a living primarily or even exclusively from writing each book, not from giving away the book for free and making custom versions of that book for individual readers, or by offering and charging for live, public readings of the book, or by asking for voluntary donations from those that download the book, or by selling merchandise related to the book.
I personally want to make a living making software products, not services. GPL doesn’t seem to offer me a way to do this.
If you don't feel right for open sourcing software you wrote for someone else, you could always offer your client a discount to let you open source the software. There are quite a few companies that now make their money supporting open source software, even when they aren't writing it themselves. I've done this myself, and I think it's a lucrative business model that still gives everyone involved freedom.
It's exactly the opposite!
If you want to make a living making software, you make it GPL. Any corporation that wants it will need to pay you for a commercially licensed version they can use (it's your code, you can license it in as many ways as you want). The hobbyists can use the free GPL version and the companies can pay you for your work. Win-win.
If you make your software BSD/MIT licenses you can't make any money, every corporation that wants it just takes it for free so you can't make a living out of it. You could try selling support but if your library is great and easy to use, not much money in that.
Unfortunately for you (and me) even if you make a really awesome library and license it as described above, you still can't make a living because there are other similar libraries with MIT/BSD license and the corporations will use those (even if they are inferior to yours) to avoid paying you. Thus, the market for selling software like this has been eliminated and we're stuck selling subscription services.
These two things are pretty unrelated.
For Android apps, a common model to have a paid version in the play store and still publish the source code on github with GPL. Here the GPL actively protects you against somebody coming, doing some minor modifications and then pushing their own paid-for version to the app store while not publishing the source code (which they could easily do with other licenses).
This creates an interesting and important second-order effect that allows it to accomplish its goals without needing to boil the ocean by ensuring every user has the same ability to develop the same software, blurring and reducing the line between user and developer, creator and consumer. Practical considerations often prevent the expression of this effect but the opportunity doesn’t even exist in most other situations, particularly when you get to web services.
I didn’t reply to the important issue of money, the fundamental developer problem, because I’ve never been in a situation to sell my own code: my own projects have zero to do with my rent work.
From my POV the GPL certainly seems alive and well, and the ideology of the Free Software movement remains sound and strong.
What I'm alluding to is the wider public. In <podcast-i-dare-not-mention> we literally walked around town interviewing young and old. Soon as I can, I'll share the results in a HN submission.
Please do!
I once inherited a GPL project, but I couldn't muster any community interest in working with it. Plugin authors would have been compelled to use GPL and no one seemed interested. We had to burn the project to the ground and start over with a new MIT licensed project. Now there's a flourishing community of plugin authors working with it.
GPL being a viral license is the core problem, I think. I get the intent behind that clause, but developers tend to not enjoy being mandated to like that.
I don't think GPL is bad, but it's not exactly pleasant either.
Most people want to write software, not worry about licences. MIT seems easier, so people use it. For commercial as well as pure hobby projects.
The FAQ also says that if "establish intimate communication by sharing complex data structures, or shipping complex data structures back and forth," then the that is essentially the same thing as dynamic linking, and so the GPL applies to your program as well.
Link to the FAQ: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html
The relevant FAQ questions:
----
> Does the GPL have different requirements for statically vs dynamically linked modules with a covered work? (#GPLStaticVsDynamic)
> No. Linking a GPL covered work statically or dynamically with other modules is making a combined work based on the GPL covered work. Thus, the terms and conditions of the GNU General Public License cover the whole combination.
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> When is a program and its plug-ins considered a single combined program? (#GPLPlugins)
>It depends on how the main program invokes its plug-ins. If the main program uses fork and exec to invoke plug-ins, and they establish intimate communication by sharing complex data structures, or shipping complex data structures back and forth, that can make them one single combined program. A main program that uses simple fork and exec to invoke plug-ins and does not establish intimate communication between them results in the plug-ins being a separate program.
> If the main program dynamically links plug-ins, and they make function calls to each other and share data structures, we believe they form a single combined program, which must be treated as an extension of both the main program and the plug-ins. If the main program dynamically links plug-ins, but the communication between them is limited to invoking the ‘main’ function of the plug-in with some options and waiting for it to return, that is a borderline case.
> Using shared memory to communicate with complex data structures is pretty much equivalent to dynamic linking.
----
> Where can I learn more about the GCC Runtime Library Exception? (#LibGCCException)
> The GCC Runtime Library Exception covers libgcc, libstdc++, libfortran, libgomp, libdecnumber, and other libraries distributed with GCC. The exception is meant to allow people to distribute programs compiled with GCC under terms of their choice, even when parts of these libraries are included in the executable as part of the compilation process. To learn more, please read our FAQ about the GCC Runtime Library Exception (https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gcc-exception-faq.html).
If your program can fork and exec another GPL-ed program, and exchange complex data structures with it, that is neither here nor there.
All that matters is whether or not you are redistributing the program, and if so, whether that is in accordance with its license, which restricts the manners of redistribution.
If you are not shipping that program, but your own GPL-incompatible program needs it (your program cannot be used unless the user has an installation of the GPLed program) then you're likely in infringing waters, because it could be seen as redistribution anyway. Though it you aren't physically redistributing the GPLed program on the same medium, redistribution of that GPLed program, carried out by someone somehow, has to take place for your program to work. It's as if you are redistributing it "by proxy". If the user doesn't have that program, you have to instruct the user on how to obtain it, thereby turning that user into an agent of redistribution, acting on your behalf.
But if you ship another program which is drop-in compatible with that the GPLed one, which allows your main program to run, then in all likelihood the GPL doesn't have a leg to stand on against you.
If you don't redistribute a GPLed program, in any manner, whether directly or "by proxy", you cannot be infringing on its license.
A GPLed program being combined with yours by the user, in their installation, has nothing to do with you, if that combining isn't a condition of your program being able to usefully execute. That is not redistribution but use, which the GPL does not restrict.
And before anyone says "someone can make a closed fork of your code and then charge for it", I am aware of this. I also don't see the problem. My goals when sharing code are to share my work and help others by doing so. If some company uses my work to profit, I still have accomplished my goals. Moreover, others can still download my original code if they wish and reap the same benefits as the for-profit company did. This is a great outcome. Everyone benefits, nobody is harmed. While this scenario is often used as an argument that permissive licenses are bad, I think it is a very poor argument indeed.
For user-facing software, GPL is fine, but fewer people actually want to write that.