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Comment by kamranjon | Hacker News Reader

This is probably the biggest and most successful example of utilizing non-permissive open source licensing for the public good - I’m curious why so many places I’ve worked have insisted on avoiding using libraries with GPL licenses in favor of MIT licensed projects, while at the same time hosting all of their services on different flavors of Linux.

It definitely seems like MIT is favored by big corps but at the end of the day, they’ll use GPL licensed code if it’s the best option. Which makes me wonder why it’s so demonized.

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Compatibility with proprietary dependencies that the company cannot control. If I'm not mistaken, GPL requires the release of the dependencies' source code too if there are no other implementations around.

I would be happy to hear from anyone who knows about this subject if what I'm saying is correct.

That's certainly the FSF's stance, but I don't know if it's been tested.

It depended on whether the programs were distributed together. So it wasn't okay to link against OpenSSL for GNU/Linux distributions (although interpretations varied). For a time, this was used to push GNUTLS as an alternative to OpenSSL. But it was generally agreed upon that it was okay to link against CryptoAPI on Windows because you would not distribute Windows code along with your GPL binaries.

> I’m curious why so many places I’ve worked have insisted on avoiding using libraries with GPL licenses in favor of MIT licensed projects

Because failing to manage their GPL obligations led to a lawsuit for D-Link followed by a compulsion to release a lot more code than they ever planned to share online, to the company's detriment.

You can pretty much look at the stock value before and after they lost the lawsuit. There was, notably, a big value spike immediately after, but the value then settled down to an average of around 15 a share, markedly below their previous 30 a share.

For some companies, the value is in the proprietary content and using GPL would be shooting themselves in the foot.

I think that a lot of companies stepped back from the GPL when GPLv3 was announced, because it puts some pretty severe restrictions on how you can productize.

The tl;dr is that for any GPLv3 software that you ship, you have to also give your users a way to install a modified copy. If you're trying to ship a secured product, that basically means that you have to give code/rootfs signing keys to your customers. This is a non-starter for many kinds of products that need tamper protection (whether for product, legal, or safety reasons).

The Linux kernel remains on GPLv2, and is still used quite heavily. Most GNU software (coreutils, gcc, etc) moved to GPLv3 and then commercial companies abandoned them in favor of permissively-licensed replacements.

> If you're trying to ship a secured product, that basically means that you have to give code/rootfs signing keys to your customers. This is a non-starter for many kinds of products that need tamper protection (whether for product, legal, or safety reasons).

Fuck that. If it's my device then I want to have control. If I want to violate part 15 of the FCC rules then I'm going to do it and nobody is going to stop me. This paternalistic rubbish has to stop, I'm sure your company would love to retain ultimate control of the thing you've sold me, but that's not compatible with a free society.

Would you feel the same way if we're talking about your car's driver-assistance ECU? If you can change its contents, then so can a remote attacker.

> Open source === RCEs/vulnerabilities

Welcome back 2005 bill gates

When it open source, it can be patched to fix RCE. Binary blobs are much harder to patch, so just buy a brand new car with brand new RCE.

"remote"? No. I want my driver-assistance ECU to be air-gapped but fully reprogrammable locally. After all, even with a totally tivoized ECU, a physically present attacker could still make my car kill me by cutting my brake lines.

Why do you say "secured" when you mean "tivoized"? That's not actually a requirement for anything to be safe or secure.

> while at the same time hosting all of their services on different flavors of Linux.

That linux uses GPL is entirely irrelevant to the vast majority of uses of it. What hosting services are customizing their kernels with proprietary code?

Lawyers are cautious people, not accepting interpretations. Until courts say otherwise, GPL is too high of a risk to use as a library.

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