Rewriting GPL software under the MIT license is a terrible thing to do. The GPL is meant to protect and preserve what should be basic human rights. So-called "permissive" licenses are meant to provide big tech with free labour.
I wonder, to what extent is the Linux Rust effort "generously subsidized" by corporations?
> He is thinking about ""what we are going to leave to the next generation"". Developers starting out don't want to use COBOL, Fortran, or C, he said. They want to work with fancy stuff like Rust, Swift, Go, or Kotlin.
Oh, think about the children! The wolf in sheep's clothing.
Almost wonder when spyware will be added and restrictive DRM.
Yes, some people do believe liberal licenses are free-er. Corporations certainly like the freedom to not contribute back.
Corporations do not like the GPL on its merits, but it's also worth remembering that the GPL is also not that popular compared to MIT among developers. Developers have not been choosing the GPL for new projects.
See: https://github.blog/open-source/open-source-license-usage-on...
Why?
But let's assume you're correct. What better metric do we have about which license OSS projects are using?
And who cares about those ad-hoc metrics? GNU/Linux is the most successful free software project in the world and that is in part thanks to the GPL. That alone is a good metric. Blender and OBS are also heavy hitters. It is easy to take these things for granted, and anyone seeking to rewrite GPL software under a liberal licence (whether it is in Rust is irrelevant) would benefit from reading a little history.
I don't disagree, but you're missing the point which is -- the reason why the GPL is not popular is not only because corporations disfavor it, it's because devs disfavor it too. You might ask yourself, "Why?"
> Blender and OBS are also heavy hitters.
And so is Firefox which is MPL2, etc. If your point is -- OSS can't be successful (or successful and copyleft) without the GPL, then you're obviously wrong.
> It is easy to take these things for granted, and anyone seeking to rewrite GPL software under a liberal licence (whether it is in Rust is irrelevant) would benefit from reading a little history.
Is this meant to be maximally patronizing? I am old enough and I was there. It is also fair to see the world differently than you do, and to appreciate different things (as others do and will do.) Some may say, "More than 25 years have passed since the Halloween documents and I am no longer on a jihad."
What I am saying is not that the GPL is not good, only that the GPL isn't the highest good, and more important than the GPL (or the MIT license for that matter) is my freedom to reimplement any software in whatever language and under whatever license I choose.
If you don't get it, then, it's not for you.
The reality -- the project became a way for new Rust devs to get their first Github commit. It became popular. MIT/Apache 2 is the default for new Rust projects.
But I think you need to also consider the downside risk. Because I don't see one. uutils are valuable only because they exactly replicate the GNU version. You'll always have GNU!
I would hazard that extent is strictly less than Linux itself.
It’s been my daily driver for 20 years. That it has an open license is a good thing.
Don't get me wrong, I very much like FreeBSD, but I believe a liberal licence on critical infrastructure like an OS is detrimental. Of course, FreeBSD folks will argue the opposite.
1. Code copyright has devalued a lot in general, as you can code significantly faster with LLMs and use them to launder GPL'd code into whatever you want.
2. Big tech seems to be getting away with most other forms of abuses these days, GPL wouldn't really stop them from doing anything important.
To the extent that code is being devalued, I would say that these LLMs are a benefit to open source overall, as devaluing of code also reduces the opportunity cost of open sourcing software. They also somewhat level the playing field between single-contributor open source projects and companies with teams of developers, because an individual is almost always limited by the rate at which he/she can write or architecture code, whereas teams have significant non-code overheads (meetings, reviews, bureaucracy).
I see no real evidence this is the case. Can you provide examples?
For instance -- do you see many Linux clones right now? Ask yourself: why might you not? Perhaps it's because it's almost impossible for an AI to rewrite Linux.
Which will happen with these tools, anyway.
IOW, this is de-facto closed source distribution.
What happens when a company decides to add their own secret sauce and release that version only, or what happens tons of slightly incompatible, closed source variants pop-up, what happens upstream decides to not release future versions' source code.
We have seen it all, and we'll see all of them again.
But what has once been licensed under a permissive license, will remain free forever.
Only the changes will be affected.
No! Sublicensing simply means that there can be a chain of licensing, e.g. author —— Linux distribution —— end user. Not that the middleman can change the license.
(It's actually irrelevant in Germany, because consensus in our legal community seems to be that there is a direct licensing relationship between author and end user, even if they don't know each other and never interact)
If I own the code, I can redistribute that code under a non-GPL license any time I want to (or not release changes at all). The GPL license that I grant to you on my code only affects what YOU can do with it. Consider the common practice of dual-licensed GPL code (a very common strategy for FOSS libraries to extort license fees).
And yes, an MIT license permits sub-licensing. Which is a good thing. (So does GPL). Maybe that word doesn't mean what you think it means. Perhaps you meant re-licensing.
> What happens when a company decides to add their own secret sauce
Then you use the old code without the secret sauce.
> what happens tons of slightly incompatible, closed source variants pop-up,
The same thing that happens when tons of slightly incompatible GPL-licensed variants pop up.
> What happens when upstream decides not to release future version's source code.
GPL does't help with that either.
> We have seen it all
To be perfectly honest, coming to Linux world, I find the various creative strategies to extort license fees for GPL code to be extremely distasteful. Off the top of my head: Juce: three dozen dual-GPL- and GPL-incompatible (not-for commercial use without paid license) libraries and tools with no upfront documentation on which libraries and tools are distributed under which license. You have to download them one by one to find out which license they are distributed under. Ubuntu: withholds (currently) 21 security fixes unless you pay for a license! Reaper, which is GPL-licensed, but demands that you purchase a license when you run it; sources are available but are impossible to build. GPL libraries that require use of non-GPL services in the cloud. Seems much more like a dystopia to me.
All I want is for people to be able to use my code. For whatever. And I am grateful to those who have provide code that I use under equally generous terms. And not at all impressed by somebody who added four hundred lines of code to a huge MIT-licensed library, and licensed them under a GPL license. (It took me less time to rewrite from scratch than I spent trying to get a fix pulled into the GPL project).
There's a term for that: Embrace-Extend-Extinguish
Because "monies".
What would motivate a company to fork and keep private changes to a core GNU utility like chmod?
They don't need to make extensive changes. Pull the latest, patch, compile, burn to FW. TaDa!
IOW, TiVoization 2.0. GPL2 makes it very hard already, but GPL3 makes it impossible.
With permissive licenses, it's very possible.
Maybe ask these folks: https://www.busybox.net/license.html
Even people who nominally agree with the concept of Free Software might not want to be forced to use GPL. The freedom to choose how to license one's work is also an important freedom, after all. GPL can be confusing, so you can't fault anyone from not wanting to use it even if they agree with the spirit of the license.
(For the record, I use GPL on some of my projects. I don't hate it, but I also like to use MIT on some projects, too.)
A ton of commercial services and products somehow use Linux, the poster child of GPL2, while also running tons of their proprietary code. Python is GPL, and it's all over the place in the computing world.
If you just want to take some code someone else wrote, for free, and alter and meld it into your commercial product, well, yes, GPL does not allow that. I don't think it's a huge impediment for legitimate use.
I'd say that all open-source approaches have their own use cases. Certain things are easier to release under BSD / MIT license, some makes sense to release under GPL, some have to resort to AGPL, to the detriment of commercial adoption. A dual restrictive open-source + paid commercial license can be the best in many cases.
Doesn't GPL do that better by mandating that changes must be accessible to the public? Like, if an employee worked out some patch, it would be a violation of the license to not make it accessible to the public.
GNU and Linux are the engine that powers practically every form of online harm.
The best licenses are BSD and MIT and others of that sort; they have no naive pretense of not helping corporations: everyone can do almost whatever they want, be they a large business or an individual. These licenses also don't encourage unlevel playing fields where the copyright proprietor enjoys dominance in the ecosystem.
For instance, if you are licensee under the BSD2, the only thing you cannot do, in comparison with the copyright holder, is remove copyright notices from the documentation or other materials accompanying the compiled code. This is really a minor thing which only stands in the way of those who want to be outright plagiarists.
With the GPL, it's extremely important to be the copyright holder, so that you can litigate. That's why the Free Software Foundation and GNU Project require copyright assignment for all non-trivial contributions to every project. If your program is a patchwork of files, each copyright someone else, you can't litigate infringement cases easily.
The project owner ALWAYS has dominance in the ecosystem. At least with GPL the owner is protected from someone else scooping up the project to make a closed version. How would you feel if you made an awesome open project only for someone to copy it and close the source, make minor changes, and sell it without even giving you the changes? That crap is not possible with GPL.
For instance, Facebook is closed, in spite of running on a mountain of GPLed stuff.
A locked device may prevent the user from running a kernel image that is not signed with a certain private key, even though the vendor of the device complies with the GPL and provides the matching kernel sources and the correct toolchain to reproduce the build without a signature.
I would almost go as far as to say that, in this day and age, someone ripping off free source code in order to create a nice, local-only application, is practically a hero. :)
In a MIT only world, you would have no source of anything. So not only you can’t build a signature-free version of the kernel for educational purposes, you can’t even have it.
This is a corporation paradise.
Open source licenses are characterized by the fact that you don't have to read them, let alone agree with them, merely in order to obtain the software and use it. These licenses "kick in" when you redistribute.
The AGPL can only be litigated as a closed license; i.e. the argument being that if the defendant does not use the program in accordance with the license, their copy is infringing, the same like a cracked version of Photoshop. Whether you are allowed to have a copy or not depends on how you are using it.
A successful AGPL litigation would mainly succeed in proving to the world that the license is nonfree, which would be evident from the arguments that would necessarily have to be used, and the reasoning necessarily expressed in the verdict.
You may dislike that particular family of licenses, but it doesn’t allow you to give false information about it. Maybe it’s not intentional, so you need to refresh your understanding. We’re humans, and our brains are not tapes. Knowledge distorts. I experience the same.
GPL says something simple: “Modified the code? Share it. Oh, BTW, you can’t change the license.” The rest is legalese.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
"The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0)."
If you modified the software, there are restrictions on running it; you cannot run the program as you wish, for any purpose.
It looks like an open and shut case to me. The place where the AGPL comes from doesn't meet the free software definition coming from the same place.
It might meet your personal definition of what is free, but that doesn't fix the above hypocrisy.
It allows certain combined works to be redistributed whose redistribution would be forbidden by the GPL, like proprietary, closed-source programs dynamically linked to a LGPLed library.
Given a GPLed library, you can make such a combined work anyway, and use it; but you may not redistribute it.
The LGPL is more free than the GPL, whereas the AGPL is nonfree.
In 2016, the Cygwin project LGPLed its libraries (DLLs). That was great news; that meant I could bundle a BSD-licensed program without having to put a GPL license on the combined work as a whole and cast doubts about how it could be used (since it is a programming language implementation, needing to be redistributed by downstream developers).
I immediately started working on a fork of the Cygwin DLL that would enable it to serve as a more native-looking run-time for Windows applications. I could build the program on Cygwin (and make a regular Cygwin package), but also ship exactly the same executable as a Windows application by bundling it with the modified cygwin1.dll.
The LGPL is good.
In computer science, there is the question whether P =? NP.
Likewise, we have the question GPL =? LGPL; would the GPL's unreasonable exclusion of dynamic linking hold up in court, or would it fall, reducing GPL to LGPL?
I'm of the opinion that everything library-like should use the LGPL rather than the GPL (if it must use some kind of GPL). The LGPL is what the GPL should be (if it legally isn't already anyway).
The LGPL is better for promoting free software. If some developer has a choice between a proprietary library and a free one, it's counterproductive to slap a GPL on the free one to steer them to the other one.
Obviously, the LGPL is used for platform libraries like Glibc, based on similar reasoning, which is probably also why Cygwin sobered up and switched to LGPL. Because banishing proprietary programs from linking to the libraries that comprise free platforms would be counterproductive. You just lose user base and mind share.
It would behoove you to check the license in order to confirm that whoever gave it to you had the right to do so.
Beyond confirming that you have a legit copy, you don't have to be concerned with the license at all, if you're not redistributing anything.
The vendors of proprietary software and their lawyers dreamed up this idea that a license can lapse based on the user's non-redistributing uses of the work. For instance, if the user reverse-engineers the binary code to understand how it works, then they become unlicensed, the idea then being that they are perpetrating copyright infringement by continuing to have a copy.
The AGPL falls into this category.
The restriction itself does not come from copyright law; copyright law doesn't say things like that allowing network users to interact with a software program is an infringing activity, or that reading the work to understand it is infringing activity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_St...
Certainly if you privately modify it is going to be unlikely for someone to find out you did that, but that doesn't make it any less illegal.
You're not breaking the law if you scribble notes in the margin of a textbook; that's just crazy. Even if you pass that on to a friend, for that matter.
Anyway, if a license tries to rely on such draconian doctrines to prevent uses, it's obviously not a free license.
Kind of like how cops in some places in America can evidently arrest someone for DUI if that person merely walks to their car with their car keys, intending to sleep inside until sober.
https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2021/mar/25/install-gplv2/ https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2021/jul/23/tivoization-and-t... https://events19.linuxfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017... Behan-Webster-1.pdf
https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2021/mar/25/install-gplv2/ https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2021/jul/23/tivoization-and-t... https://events19.linuxfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017...
This is exactly what AGPL is for. Of course, AGPL is too overbearing for most projects, and only makes sense for SaaS.
>A locked device may prevent the user from running a kernel image that is not signed with a certain private key, even though the vendor of the device complies with the GPL and provides the matching kernel sources and the correct toolchain to reproduce the build without a signature.
This is a problem indeed (that most people have forgotten about, due to the shim code that people use to load other operating systems like Linux). It may become a problem in the future so we need to stay vigilant and never support products that lock the bootloader. Unfortunately most phones do that. Phones are a rats nest of proprietary software and hardware and we need more development of open technology in that space.
Nobody cares if you take some open source server software, and run version that you modified with your own cool features, without sharing the source code, and this is something you're entitled to under the FSF's Freedom Zero.
Among the social harms of SaaSS, this is not on the radar; and obsession with it shows either that the FSF are out of touch, or that they think that any action is better than inaction, so that if they take a swing at the problem with the wrong tool (copyright licensing) they look like they gave it a good college try.
The problem of SaaSS is people being locked to a service because that's where their data is siloed. This harm can be perpetrated with completely unmodified software you can download yourself. Running your own copy does nothing to solve the problem; your copy is not where the data is, where the other users are.