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Comment by singpolyma3 | Hacker News Reader

This whole argument hinges on the statement that the GPL "does nothing for users" but is "annoying for developers". I dispute both of these claims.

GPL is all about doing something for users. It is users who are able to request source code. My entire network setup is based on the fact that I can customize my router which I can only do because users were able to request the source for the router in order to customize it.

When it comes to "annoying for developers" we need to be clear. The GPL is annoying for developers of software that is not open source. It annoys them because it says they must either take the open source deal or else rewrite it themselves. Apple has famously used a lot of time and money to rewrite GPLd thengs. This is the goal.

OTOH open source developers need not be annoyed by any GPL dependency since they can always use it without any trouble to themselves.

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Compared to permissive licences (from the user's POV), GPL is merery a guarantee that a proprietary fork won't left you behind in the dust overnight. That's a rather strong guarantee that most people (including myself) don't need. I'm fine with a "plain" guarantee to fork the last free version. In exchange, I usually get better, well-supported software with more corporate contributions.

> Apple has famously used a lot of time and money to rewrite GPLd thengs. This is the goal.

As an aside, that's a terrible goal. Rewriting the same projects over and over is a waste of human potential. We could be solving unsolved problems and actually making the world better, instead of pursuing this weird and misguided notion of "fairness"

It's not about fairness. It's about making bad actors like Apple pay to do their own bad work. If they chose to make open source software and actually make the world better we wouldn't even be having this discussion.

Do you consider open-sourcing the software a necessary precondition for making the world better?

In other words, can a company make the world better by making proprietary software? In my opinion, that's obviously true. (Although I too dislike Apple specifically)

Your approach forces every company to redo the work, even the "good" ones. In fact, that probably makes the situation worse, because it raises the barrier to entry and forces companies to choose agressive and hostile business models in order to get that investment back. If a new "More Ethical Apple" could be started instantly with no software investment, we would have one, the users would be able to switch, and would directly benefit from this

> can a company make the world better by making proprietary software?

If you assume a company that does not have any profit driven incentive to be anti-competitive and less accessible to some people, yes. But that's like assuming dictatorship can work if the dictator is just wise and benevolent enough. It's nice to think about but not viable in reality.

> it raises the barrier to entry and forces companies to choose agressive and hostile business models in order to get that investment back

You assume that corporations would not choose aggressive and hostile business models if they weren't forced to, which is obviously wrong.

> If a new "More Ethical Apple" could be started instantly with no software investment

This would not be possible with licenses that allow Apple to keep everything proprietary, which is what any profit driven company is incentivized to do. In other words, you need GPL for this scenario to be even theoretically possible.

> You assume that corporations would not choose aggressive and hostile business models if they weren't forced to, which is obviously wrong.

But, in my scenario specifically, they will be forced to by market forces (to some degree). Being less aggressive is a competitive advantage. In my scenario, the market is going to be flooded with competitors, some of whom are going to use that advantage. Even if some users still prefer the other advantages of proprietary Apple (as they do in reality), at least the users who care can switch and benefit.

> This would not be possible with licenses that allow Apple to keep everything proprietary

Sure, you can't clone Apple with literally "zero software investment". They will always have some proprietary parts. What I mean is that, in my scenario, they would have fewer proprietary rewrites (from GPL) and would use common permissive dependencies more often. Thus reducing the amount of proprietary code, and making their stack more uniform, "shallow", and easier to copy. Being easier to copy sounds like a downside that they'd like to avoid, but it's also cheaper, so a tradeoff comes into play.

A good example of this pull towards cheaper maintainance is Microsoft eventually replacing its proprietary web engine with Chromium.

Although, as I've noted in the other comment, that wouldn't happen if Chromium was permissively licensed. It happened because its partially LGPL/MPL, and thus you can't create a proprietary fork (but can still use it in a proprietary browser like the new MS Edge). It seems like somethimes LGPL/MPL have the best survival characteristics

> can a company make the world better by making proprietary software

Of course not

> If they chose to make open source software and actually make the world better we wouldn't even be having this discussion.

You mean like they did with LLVM/Clang?

> The LLVM project started in 2000 at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, under the direction of Vikram Adve and Chris Lattner. LLVM was originally developed as a research infrastructure to investigate dynamic compilation techniques for static and dynamic programming languages. LLVM was released under the University of Illinois/NCSA Open Source License,[3] a permissive free software licence. In 2005, Apple Inc. hired Lattner and formed a team to work on the LLVM system for various uses within Apple's development systems.[26] LLVM has been an integral part of Apple's Xcode development tools for macOS and iOS since Xcode 4 in 2011.[27]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LLVM#History

> The GPL is annoying for developers of software that is not open source.

It is also annoying for developers of open-source software that is not GPL-licensed.

It doesn't need to be, since they can still use it and keep their license the same etc.

This,

Moreover, a company can release a GPL'd version of their software and also offer a commercial license for their software (see Qt etc). So someone who's charging for their software can use it if they themselves pay. Some commercial vendors might annoyed by even this. But it would seem they "doth protest too much".

> OTOH open source developers need not be annoyed by any GPL dependency since they can always use it without any trouble to themselves.

Counterpoint: GPLv2-only is an absolute PITA to deal with but that's the point; GPL (especially v2-only or v3+section7b,7c) is good at preventing hostile forks

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