Love the MIT license. If this were further along we could use this as the foundation of our business without having to "give back" device drivers and other things.
I think a big issue is also that it's hard to show actual damages with this kind of copyright violation. It's obviously copyright violation but what damages are there really? Also, there are so many dubious cases where it's not clear whether it is a violation or not.
https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/ https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/vizio.html
Can you provide examples of these? I'm aware of temporary forks for things like Xtensa, but these typically get merged back upstream.
To the author: kudos for the interesting project, but please strongly consider a copyleft license moving forward.
A "gift" requiring GPL-like conditions isn't really a gift in the common sense. It's more like a contractual agreement with something provided and specific, non-negotiable obligations. They're giving while also asserting control over others' lives, hoping for a specific outcome. That's not just a gift.
People doing MIT license are often generous enough where the code is a gift to everyone. They don't try to control their lives or societal outcomes with extra obligations. They're just giving. So, I'm grateful to them for both OSS and business adaptations of their gifts.
The obligation is not to the author of the code, it is to the public. MIT-style licenses are gifts to people and companies who produce code and software, copyleft licenses are gifts to the public.
I don't give a shit about the happiness of programmers any more than the happiness of garbage collectors, sorry. I don't care more that you have access to the library you want to use at your job writing software for phones than I care that somebody has access to the code on their own phone. You're free to care about what you want, but the pretense at moral superiority is incoherent.
It is non-negotiable. GPL is basically proprietary software. It's owned by the public, and all of the work that you do using it belongs to the public. If you steal it, you should be sued into the ground.
Are parks “proprietary”? I can’t run my car dealership from one, so it’s …proprietary? No. So using the terminology of “proprietary” doesn’t do justice to what it actually is.
If I use GPL'd code, I have to keep releasing my modifications for free because it's mandated. I have to do that even if I do 1000 hours of labor but they gave me 30 min of it. So, it's also near-infinite work required in return for finite work they did. And I have to bind others to this with my own work.
That's not someone giving me a gift. I'm not sure what to call that except a collective work with permanent obligations for all parties. It's more like a job or corporate charter or something. I like another person's claim that it's creating property with requirements for those using it (which copyright certainly does).
Pedantically, only recipients of your updated binary are owed updated source, so if you're not distributing that binary to the whole world, you're not required to release updated source to the whole world. Kind of a nitpick, but maybe not.
The point of copyleft is that the author wants the code to remain available to the public, not to give it as a gift to whoever wants to build their own closed source system
You're right. GPL code is not a gift to you its a gift to the public.
Dont try to build your house or business in a national park.
Here, I'll make a substantive contribution. I hope this succeeds and causes a lowest-common denominator Linux ABI to exist that user-land can target, thus freeing us all from the Linux kernel as the only viable option. Solaris/Illumos, the BSDs, and even Windows have all gone through one or two phases of attempting Linux ABI compatibility, ultimately giving up because the Linux ABI is such a fast-moving and underdocumented target.
So, I defended the author and the concept of generosity. I also tried to help FOSS people reframe what their doing as collective property or work so everyone understands the tradeoffs better. They confuse people by advocating for "free" or "freedom" with licenses that take away freedoms from authors. It's like they're redefining words to have non-standard meanings but get angry when people act on standard morals or word usages.
I'm also starting to think the confusion was intentional because many of their arguments look like socialism or communism disguised as software advice. We also see the same failure modes across most projects and products. Like communist nations (eg Shenzhen), we see the GPL projects succeed best when they relied on capitalists instead of communist principles for code contributions. So, I'll eventually look to see if people like Stallman were communist and if this was sneaky, ideological warfare or subversion. Like we see with critical theory ("woke") proponents constantly repacking their ideas (eg DEI, Codes of Conduct) to snesk them in where they'd be rejected after peer review. I feel like so much fighting online started with people doing something evil built on a conflict-oriented philosophy (Marxism/Communism) that causes the same destructive effects everywhere people promoted it.
1) the marginal cost of software is zero.
2) some software is becoming more like infrastructure that everyone uses.
In the physical world, some infrastructure is privatized, some is regulated, and some is provided by the government. But going back to point 1 we see that privatization makes even less sense (to society) with software.
I'm done with proprietary operating systems and IMHO everyone should be. There's no reason to support that.
This is the paradox of tolerance, essentially.
Also, seeing F/LOSS as a "gift" is an awful way of looking at it.
So, we have a variety of licensing styles that meet various goals. People can pick what suits their needs and wants. That's a good thing.
Who is "they" in this context?
A permissive license allows anyone to take someone else's work, profit from it, and never contribute back to the original project. For someone advocating for fairness, it's remarkable how you ignore this very real and common scenario.
> Many people think they're owed more software, including fixes to software, without compensating the laborer. That worldview is the real problem.
Compensation is orthogonal to F/LOSS. Authors are free to choose whatever income streams they like, and many successful businesses have been built around F/LOSS. Whoever is expecting people to work without compensation is being unreasonable, of course.
But F/LOSS as a social movement goes beyond a mere financial transaction. It works on the basis of mutual trust, where if I share something you find valuable, then the acceptable "payment" for that work is for you to do the same. This collaborative effort is how the highest quality products are produced.
The irony of your point is that a permissive license allows precisely the scenario you're arguing against. We've seen corporations profit from the work of others without compensating them for it. So much so, that OSS projects are forced to roll back their permissive licenses, often going too far in the other direction, to where they can no longer be labeled as "Open Source". E.g. Elastic: Apache -> SSPL -> AGPL; Redis: BSD -> SSPL; HashiCorp: MPL -> BSL; etc.
That is the actual problem which copyleft licenses prevent.
Not giving anything back is fair because the author's license specifically allows them to do that. A gift has no expectation of anything in return. God blesses such generosity because it's a a truly, selfless act.
re compensation
Compensation is not orthogonal to FLOSS. Copyright was mainly designed to ensure work couldn't be shared without paying the author. Anything given for free dramatically decreases the chance of getting paid. OSS and FLOSS almost guarantee no money is made on standalone software but GPL with CLA's allows dual licensing to recover some.
If anyone uses permissive licenses, it's a gift where they're not (in legal terms) expecting money. Some try to sell it or ask for donations, too, which is incompatible with the license. The free license usually undermines that. It works for some people to some degree, though.
Re roll backs
I didn't argue against any scenario. The original person I replied to appeared to be arguing that it was evil to give software away with no obligations. I had to explain what a gift is and why it's morally good to give. I believe the reason is years of people promoting FOSS politics which I now see are rooted in ideas similar to socialism or communism. It wouldn't surprise me if Stallman was a closet communist and just repackaged those ideas into software licensing.
(Note: I feel like I'm going to have to think more on that political angle given I've been influenced by such people for years on these sites. I'll do a fresh take at some point.)
On companies being unsustainable, I've already explained what happened. Their goal included selfish gain (money/contributions) from selfish entities who normally take but don't give. Their goal was also to build, individually or collectively, a shared work. They used a license that said it's a one-time gift with no obligations. So, entities took the gift and felt no obligations to return anything. Surprise!
Now, they've changed to licenses that suit their commercial and/or property goals. That may or may not work for them. Whereas, the companies successfully marketing proprietary software are able to build it up to their hearts' content. Some companies give out the source or dual license under GPL/AGPL. They should probably do Parity License to close remaining gaps and see if FOSS people are really about the free commons.
License Zero and Polyform have new licenses to help. I conceptualized some in the past that allow modifications, forks, etc so long as the customer keeps paying. Then, redistribution among paying customers. I'd like to see more models for people aiming for sustainability with software freedoms baked in.
Many people (corporations) think they're owed more money beyond the labor. This is why SaaS is a major business model these days. The marginal cost of software is zero, and yet people expect to keep getting paid for it over and over.
GPL is a gift that keeps giving.
Would you want people controling your property based on their current and future desires? And dictating what you do with your property enhancements? Would you call that giving you more freedom? Or denying you freedom to force you to support their goals for your property?
F/LOSS is not a charity or a gift, so your analogy is not appropriate. It is a social movement and philosophy with the goal of sharing knowledge and building software for the benefit of everyone. It invites collaboration, and fosters a community of like-minded people. Trust is an implicit requirement for this to succeed, and individuals and corporations who abuse it by taking the work of others and not giving anything back are harmful to these goals. Copyleft licenses exist precisely to prevent this from happening.
MIT is a fine license for many projects, but not for an operating system kernel.
Thank you for reading it correctly. I originally had a </sarcasm> to make sure nobody thought I liked the license choice. What's it to me? Well someone posted it to HN here so we could comment on it, so I did.
I think the MIT license has its place, but IMHO it does not belong on an OS like that. Reason is indicated in my original comment.