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Comment by azalemeth | Hacker News Reader

I slightly lament the rise of MIT or BSD licensed middleware like this. It's undoubtedly great for the developers and organisations in question, but there's undoubtedly some societal good from having GPL or LGPL licensed products encouraging organisations to release their code under a similar license. This already exists for Go and Qt, and the competing library is "soon" to release a commercial license that would be available for those who do not wish to use the LGPL. Nevertheless, huge props to the author(s) for what undoubtedly is a vast amount of work.

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> the competing library is "soon" to release a commercial license

No, after many years this never became available, and the maintainer went missing, taking the copyright with them. If it was really possible to buy a commercial license it's possible I might not have bothered to make the binding.

My hope is that by choosing the MIT license for my bindings, one commercial app in the world will choose to use Qt Widgets instead of Electron, that does in small part something for the climate.

Isn't Qt still proprietary or semi-proprietary?

No.

(There might be side projects like the squish test framework or the MCU port that are proprietary, but Qt itself is fully free software)

This discussion is about the Qt binding library for Go, not Qt. The existing Qt binding they're talking about is LGPL and cannot be bound dynamically, and therefore makes the distribution of proprietary software impossible even with a full Qt license. This new binding alleviates this problem because it's MIT licensed. You still need to adhere to Qt's licensing, i.e., buy a commercial Qt license or bind Qt dynamically like most people do. Qt has a commercial and a LGPL licensed version.

No. Just Qt Company hides this as much as they can.

It is only proprietary if you are building proprietary code AND statically link to it but open source/free (LGPL) if you are building software with a compatible license or are linking dynamically. I think it is fair.

LGPL doesn’t forbid linking statically with proprietary code.

Qt Widgets is GPL since Qt 2.2 in 2000, and LGPL since Qt 4.5 in 2009.

Most of Qt remains available under LGPL, but the Qt company does their best to dissuade you from using it without a commercial license.

They have succeeded in convincing me, for example. I don't want to build anything on a platform where the vendor is trying to drive me away

I guess you were not serious about the climate, as this will have no measurable effect on it, and with things like Jevons paradox [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox] could even have the opposite effect (more people using the app more because it is more usable)

But yes, for the love of your users, don't make an app using electron :-).

Vacuous comment. What action that an average person can take will have a "measurable" effect on the climate (excepting eco-terrorism)? In aggregate this kind of stuff is still meaningfull.

> In aggregate this kind of stuff is still meaningfull.

No, I don't think it is. The scale is so small that even if every electron application was suddenly replaced by an equivalent super lightweight one, I claim it would make no difference for the climate.

Other things can make a difference in aggregate, like eat less meat, using better mode of transportations, ... But I don't think the CPU cycles wasted by electron makes any difference, even in aggregate.

Electron apps are probably responsible for multiple Gigawatt-hours of wasted energy annually.

> My hope is that by choosing the MIT license for my bindings, one commercial app in the world will choose to use Qt Widgets instead of Electron

I still do t understand this logic. When you combine MIT and LGPL you don't get MIT, you get MIT+LGPL so now you have to take care of both licenses. Electron's LGPL parts don't magically disappear - when you start an Electron app all the things that happen from main() up to executing the first line of your js app code are LGPL

Because this library supports dynamic linking, but can itself be statically linked, which is a default behavior for go. Trying to dynamically link a go library that dynamically links, or even statically links to Qt is just an extra level of effort for application developers.

This library will be easier for developers to create applications which comply with LGPL of the upstream library without adding additional burdons.

There's a whole handful of permissively-licensed, feature-matched alternatives to GNU Readline that I suspect only exist due to political aversions to its license. It saddens me that these people would rather waste time treading over the same paths others have just to increase the potential for nonfree software, rather than using that time to write free and useful things.

That's your definition of "useful", not mine. "political aversion"? We are talking about money and business here.

If a commercial company wants to ship a product without reinventing all the wheels, they are going to use code with permissive licenses, and skip projects with GPL license or similar in a heartbeat.

You could even argue quite the contrary -- when you make your project GPL/AGPL etc, and if it is big/impactful enough, people will inevitably create alternative projects with permissive licenses that tried to match the feature set, and it is you that is the cause of all this "waste of time". Not necessarily a good argument, but there is some truth there.

And thank god a lot of goodness actually comes out of it other than just reinventing the wheels. Apple "bought" LLVM due to gcc's copyleft license, and now we have a family new compilers based on LLVM for different languages and targets. Kudos to Apple.

Apple literally offered the clang/LLVM copyright to the FSF to be released under the GPL. This was basically just ignored.

https://gcc.gnu.org/legacy-ml/gcc/2005-11/msg00888.html

Furthermore there were real technical problems with gcc, certainly at the time. There were good reasons to start a new compiler project.

The license was always more of a detail, rather than the main thing.

I doubt licensing is a "detail" -- various comments say it matters a lot, e.g. https://stackoverflow.com/a/14488011/3831197

> The GPLv3 was the final straw that ended Apple's interest in contributing to GCC which is the reason Apple ended it at GCC 4.2.x.

I guess GPLv2 is still GPL, but here we end up talking about copyleft licenses (GPLv3) affecting business decisions anyway.

> If a commercial company wants to ship a product without reinventing all the wheels, they are going to use code with permissive licenses, and skip projects with GPL license or similar in a heartbeat.

Did you know that there's no rule against commercializing or selling free software? The only reason that companies skip projects with copyleft licenses that's relevant in this discussion is because they intend to incorporate them into proprietary software, and this is because they are, by some deeply corporatistic scruple, incapable of conceiving of the idea of delivering free software (even if 90% of the heavy lifting in their services is done by free programs).

> You could even argue quite the contrary -- when you make your project GPL/AGPL etc, and if it is big/impactful enough, people will inevitably create alternative projects with permissive licenses that tried to match the feature set, and it is you that is the cause of all this "waste of time". Not necessarily a good argument, but there is some truth there.

Yes, it's not a good argument. The truth there is that if I develop a free program or library under (L)GPL or similar then I have made that thing free. If people want to write an alternative for technical reasons, then that's neither here nor there, but if people want to write an alternative because they don't like the license, then that's their own time they are wasting, because they would have no other reason to do it other than wanting to incorporate it into nonfree software.

> there's undoubtedly some societal good from having GPL or LGPL licensed products encouraging organisations to release their code under a similar license.

Undoubtedly is probably not the right words, since reasonable people disagree about this. Not everyone agrees with you that the GPL is an unalloyed good.

I honestly can't imagine any reasonable person arguing that GPL/LGPL have brought absolutely no societal good. Are you thinking of anybody in particular?

"no societal good" != "more societal good than alternatives"

The opposite of "some societal good" isn't "less societal good than other alternatives", it's "no societal good". The original statement didn't contain any comparisons. Even the worst alternative can still have some societal good.

The original statement is comparing against non-copyleft licenses like MIT. It is clearly stating the author's preference for the GPL.

It's not stating a preference - it's stating that, no matter what your preference is, there is some societal good from GPL/LGPL. Preferences don't change the existence of that good.

Not if you take "some societal good" to mean "some [marginal] societal good"

Sure, if you add words, the meaning changes. So what?

It's called nuance and context.

I honestly don't understand how you read this "nuance" into the original comment. They don't say that GPL/LGPL is absolutely better than MIT/BSD, and they speak positively about the project. There is no comparison here.

The switch from GPL/LGPL to MIT/BSD loses a specific set of restrictions that are "encouraging organisations to release their code under a similar license". This is a specific societal good that is being lost. Even if you don't think that it's a big deal, I can't imagine anyone reasonable saying "literally everything would be better GPL/LGPL" - objectively, the public wouldn't be guaranteed to have open-source-free access to so many products. You can argue that there would be more products or whatever you want, but unless you're taking an absolutist stance, some societal good comes from these licenses.

The only way to arrive at a comparison here would be to ignore the context and the chosen wording by the OP.

You're only seeing the alleged benefits from GPL, without factoring in its costs. Everything is a tradeoff. Some companies don't touch GPL code, which means those projects receive less support than they would with a more permissive license such as MIT/BSD. You're claiming GPL "[encourages] organisations to release their code under a similar license". I'm saying it often discourages organisations from ever touching GPL code and picking other libraries instead.

People have been writing about this in way more detail for a long time. If you're really trying to understand some position you can't possibly fathom and not just argue, then I'd point you to one post from 15 years ago: https://sealedabstract.com/rants/why-the-gpl-sucks/index.htm...

No, I'm not only seeing the alleged benefits, as I clearly explained in my previous comment. MIT/BSD brings their own societal good, but it's a different societal good, and it's not an equivalent societal good. Just because you gain some societal good doesn't mean you gain the exact same societal good. Unless you're trying to misunderstand OP, it's not a hard concept.

GPL/LGPL has advantage A. MIT/BSD has advantage B. A and B are different. Even if B is greater than A, it still doesn't mean that A is a subset of B. You keep acting like the only thing that matters is |A| and |B|, because you're somehow fixated on this being a comparison.

Try re-reading the original comment without adding in words like "marginal". You'll see that there is no comparison made between societal goods.

> there's undoubtedly some societal good from having GPL or LGPL licensed products encouraging organisations to release their code under a similar license

How often does this happen, though? I remember at my previous employer, there was a rule to never use GPL code in our projects.

Well yeah, that's the old "open source" vs "free software" schism: Go itself being permissively licensed, there's a lot of interest in having libraries that also come with "no strings attached".

This is not about "open source" vs "free software". This is about "permissive" vs "copyleft"

I'm probably oversimplifying things, but for me "permissive license" (MIT, BSD) is equivalent to the term "open source", and "copyleft license" ((L)GPL) <=> "free software". I know that the term "open source" also includes (L)GPL-licensed software, but the "free software" advocates resist being lumped together with software that they perceive to be less free, so they very much prefer "free software".

so less permissive = more free.

gives me something to think about.

All freedom is relative to the perspective you judge it. "Free" in this case is measured from the perspective of the software (and more specifically the source code), not the developer. The basic philosophy is that the easier it is lock up the source code and its development behind closed proprietary walls, the less free it is.

From the FSF perspective, your freedom to make the source code less free stands in direct opposition to the freedom of the source code.

The freedom prioritized is that of the user, not the developer working at a for-profit company. Copyleft software prioritizes users' freedom by attempting to prevent companies/developers from taking away their rights. (See also GPLv3's anti-Tivoization clauses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tivoization that restrict companies to empower users)

I don't know which advocates you have in mind, but the FSF does refer to MIT and BSD as Free Software licenses. For FSF, Copyleft is a desirable property (obviously), but not required by the four freedoms.

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