There's no loss of freedom with permissive licenses.
There's no loss of freedom with permissive licenses.
The eventual users of the hypothetical commercial OS lose their freedom. (Or don't get their freedom, depending on your point of view.) Permissive licences grant users freedom, but don't preserve those freedoms in derivative works, so the original work can end up helping derived software disrespect users' freedom. For those who believe that users' freedom should always be respected, this is a very bad thing that needs to be avoided.
No, but you arguing every FOSS project should be GPL3 does. You're arguing against alternative licenses here, meaning you're arguing against freedom of people to release software under a license they prefer.
The freedom I care about (because I think it’s very impactful and extremely important to preserve) is the freedom to use, know, share and modify software. Licensing is a useful tool to help ascertain that freedom, but beyond that, I consider the freedom to choose a licence nowhere near as important.
You were arguing the project should not be MIT but GPL3 though. Why can't this project use whatever license they like? If not all FOSS project need be GPL3 but this one should, what are some examples of ones that you would be fine with being MIT?
I was arguing generally against permissive licences and in favour of copyleft, without pointing out a specific one, but as a matter of fact I do think that GPLv3 would be a much better choice for this project. (The thread’s OP did name specific licences, though.)
> Why can't this project use whatever license they like?
Why they can’t or why I argue they shouldn’t? Technically they’re able to choose any licence they like, and I argue it should be a copyleft one because I think preserving the four user freedoms is important and not accomplished with permissive licences.
> If not all FOSS project need be GPL3 but this one should, what are some examples of ones that you would be fine with being MIT?
All of the various MIT licences are similarly permissive, right? In that case, I think they make a decent choice for small and relatively simple programs which do not present a great amount of work and could be replicated or imitated without much effort. Programs like True, Hangman, Cowsay or short userscripts.
But if you have a relatively large program, or a project where a great number of such smaller programs work together, I think they ought to be released under a copyleft licence. A new kernel is a good example of such a program, as are core utilities, terminal emulators, media players, web extensions, complex games, etc. So Maestro, seL4, Redox, GNU, Terminology, VLC, mpv, uBlock, Minetest and so on.
I think weak copyleft licences (such as the MPL or the LGPL) can make a great option for programs with a good ethical reason to maximise their usage (including by non-free software). In my opinion, there's seldom a good reason to abandon copyleft altogether. (And as that may imply, it is my view that copyleft should be the default choice. When in doubt, protect your users’ four essential freedoms.)
On the other hand, the scenario you describe where everybody wins is already proven to work with the GPL since that is the Linux story. That is the point of it - when everyone cooperates we all win.
There are already plenty of de facto proprietary forks of Linux. Practically every embedded SDK comes with one. Yes they have to publish the source because of the GPL, but they never bother doing that in a form that helps getting any of the work merged into upstream Linux. All those vendor-specific forks end up stuck at some random old kernel with dozens of known issues, effectively abandoned. This has effectively ruined the ARM landscape, and of the end-user visible SBC choices only RPi has a decent reputation for working well enough with upstream Linux devs.
Submitting your changes to upstream Linux is a competitive advantage. (With the trade-off that you can't hide your sooper sekrit hardware designs as well.)
Google/Android has put in a huge amount of effort to drag the hardware vendors out of this pit where they get stuck on old kernel versions...
It was specifically GPLv2.
I feel the GPL lost a lot of momentum with FSF's GPLv3 push.
Linus was publicly against it. Not only for Linux, but generally and philosophically against it. I presume a lot of others felt the same too.
In theory you could continue using GPLv2 for new projects, but given that FSF had basically deprecated v2 in favor of v3, it seems that the momentum for v2 just slowly died out, and v3 was too controversial to gain widespread acceptance.
Without a GPL default, the developers who didn't want to get too deeply involved in ideological questions probably just adopted MIT as the new default.
It ensures everyone benefits from improvements, not just users who are willing to pay bigco.
Even if it "takes off", how can a commercial entity extinguish a person's motivation to keep building something they want?