Hacker News Reader

Comment by observationist | Hacker News Reader

Stallman's principles should be directional - an orientation, aspirational, not something to cling to with bitter insistence. It's the equivalent of screaming "why can't we all just get along" into the Matrix.

Copyleft isn't how the world works. MIT and Apache and liberal licenses liberate ideas for reuse and practical application in the real world. If you want your project to be a quirky curiosity visited and abandoned by people searching for some better solution for their problem, use copyleft.

If you want your idea to make the world a better place, use permissive, liberal licensing and move on.

Forking something from MIT to GPLv3 is disappointing, from this standpoint.

View on HN

> If you want your idea to make the world a better place, use permissive, liberal licensing and move on.

Most examples of this directly contradict what you say. Whilst Apple has contributed somewhat to BSD, the vast majority of their work is closed up and sealed off. It's not making the world a better place.

GPL3 and AGPL are really the only defense against the tragedy of the commons.

> It's the equivalent of screaming "why can't we all just get along" into the Matrix.

You have it the wrong way around. MIT is screaming for people to place nicely and work together. GPL sets a strict contract and rules for playing, there is no screaming and there is no room for people to create their own forks and not work together.

While I favor BSD and MIT licenses myself that's all I will use, obviously we've had very successful software that is copylefted.

There are people who won't contribute to your program if it's BSD or MIT. There are those who won't contribute to your program if it's GPL.

A program with any license is at risk of being abandoned as a quirky curiosity, if it, doh, is a quirky curiosity.

so you don't use Linux?

Copyleft licenses like GPLv3 and AGPL make it slightly harder for tech monopolists like Google and Amazon to take over the project and profit of your work.

And contributors have the security that the project will stay free and will not do the classic MIT switch-and-bait to a commercial license.

How do A/GPL provide security against the IP owner switching to a commercial license?

If anyone contributed to the project under A/GPL, they cannot switch to a commercial license without removing all contributions first. Because they are not the sole IP owner any more.

But if you contributed under the MIT license, you allow them to re-license as whatever they want.

I thought contributions-relicensing has to do with a CLA, or lack thereof, and not the project license per se. Happy to learn I’m wrong on that point, which sections of A/GPL cover that?

EDIT: having thought about it again, I realized that I was bringing strong assumptions about a CLA being in effect, regardless of the specific license. So, without a CLA in consideration, relicensing is more viable (or more of a danger depending on your specific concerns) with MIT. If a CLA is in play then MIT and A/GPL are likely on equal footing, depending on the jurisdiction.

CLA doesn't matter too much.

If you want to contribute to an open-source project, you can just work on your own repo and can work together with other people just like it was a real open-source project.

The good part is, you can pull any improvements from the original repo that they publish under A/GPL, but they can't pull from you if they want to re-license their code later. So the community fork will always be ahead in features and bug fixes compared to the CLA-crippled repo.

Which is to say they can still profit from the work. It's there for them to benefit from using exactly the same as it's there for everyone. They just don't get a better deal or more rights than their own users or a homeless kid in Uganda or anyone else.

> Copyleft isn't how the world works.

How do you explain the success of software projects such as the Linux kernel?

> MIT and Apache and liberal licenses liberate ideas for reuse and practical application in the real world.

No. The likes of MIT and Apache allow for royalty-free commercial use of third party software. Aka free labour.

The likes of GPL arguably have a greater impact on the whole concept of reuse because they require consumers to also be reusable by third parties.

It's ok if your goal is to just use someone else's projects for your own commercial benefit. I do that all the time. However, it's not right to try to frame it as something else.

> Copyleft isn't how the world works. MIT and Apache and liberal licenses liberate ideas for reuse and practical application in the real world. If you want your project to be a quirky curiosity visited and abandoned by people searching for some better solution for their problem, use copyleft.

Outside of software, copyleft is much closer to how the world works. In the real world, nothing is free, but reciporical agreements are common. Something like a free trade agreement is kind of like a copyleft license.

> Forking something from MIT to GPLv3 is disappointing, from this standpoint.

How can you both find that disappointing and support MIT licenses at the same time? Feels like contradiction. The entire premise of a BSD/MIT license is that people should have the right to do this.

> Copyleft isn't how the world works.

One way to think of copyleft is it neutralises copyright. Permissive licences do not do that. People who support free software do not believe software copyright should be part of the world.

This is ridiculous. Copyleft is just a gimmic pun word not an actually different thing or a negation of anything. GPL and copyleft ARE copyright, exactly the same as all other copyright.

The GPL depends on the the validity of the premis that the creator of something gets to set the terms for how they give it to anyone else.

The terms just happen to be something other than the usual cash.

Anyone who doesn't think copyright should exist at all, doesn't even specify any licence or they specify public domain or mit or similar. By specifying GPL, you declare your right to set the terms of copying.

Sigh... Your confrontational tone tells me you won't care, but I'll give the benefit of the doubt (plus maybe someone else will).

You can't just "not copyright" something nor can you "opt out" of copyright. Many countries don't even have a concept of public domain at all. But even if you could, if someone takes the work and alters it in any way it is immediately under copyright again.

Copyright came from a different time. It was invented due to the printing press around 500 years ago. Its purpose was essentially to protect authors (the many) from the owners of printing presses (the few). Now it's used by a few to extract money from the masses.

So, the only tool we have to effectively "opt out" of copyright is copyleft. This stops copyright being able to attach itself again, which can and does happen to public domain or permissive works. It's a funny twist, but that's the way it is. Silly laws require silly solutions.

Sigh... I did not say anyone could actually opt out.

I said what someone who did not accept the very premis of copyright would or should logically be expected to do.

They would not participate in the thing they don't recognize. If everyone else gives their works a default copyright, that's everyone else's problem, they didn't do it.

But GPL is ver definitely not that.

It is not subverting or perverting or sabotaging copyright, it IS a bog standard employment of the right to set the terms over a thing that you believe you have the right to set the terms for, and you have very definite ideas about what you want and don't want other people to be allowed to do.

When I choose GPL for something, make no mistake that the reason I do so is because those are the terms I want to enforce. I want to impose exactly the limits it imposes. That is my payment for the product. I am using copyright for it's intended (or at least advertised) purpose, not trying take a notch out of the concept of copyright because I don't believe in the validity of copyright.

Why are people downvoting your comment? It's not against the guidelines, is it?

I strongly think you are wrong, and I strongly disagree with your points, but I don't see why your opinion should disappear, lest this thread turn into an echo chamber.

Perhaps because arguing over bsd vs gpl is a never ending flame war that people are tired of.

I downvoted because it's a generic complaint about licensing that could be posted anywhere - only the last sentence is related to the topic.

You're confusing HN with Reddit. There is such a rule on Reddit, but not on HN. It's not against the guidelines.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com