Hacker News Reader

Comment by spoiler | Hacker News Reader

I think it's just the GPL family of licenses that tend tend to cause most problems. I appreciate their intent, but the outcome often leaves a lot to be desired.

View on HN

The GPL exists for the benefit of end users, not developers. It being a chore for developers who want to deny their users the software freedoms is a feature, not a bug.

How does the GPL help a user who doesn't write code themselves?

They have the right to use the code, and they have the right to use improvements that someone else made, and they have the right to get someone to make improvements for them.

They also have the guarantee that the code licensed under the GPL, and all future enhancements to it, will remain free software. The same is not true of the MIT license's weak-copyleft.

As far as I know, all the (L)GPL does is make sure that if A releases some code under it, then B can't release a non-free enhancement without A's permission. A can still do whatever they want, including sell ownership to B.

Neither GPL nor MIT (or anything else) protects you against this.

(EDIT) scenario: I make a browser extension and release v1 under GPL, it becomes popular and I sell it to an adtech company. They can do whatever they want with v2.

By allowing them to benefit from the work of others who do. Directly or indirectly.

I’m not good at car maintenance but I would benefit from an environment where schematics are open and cars are easy to maintain by everyone: there would be more knowledge around it, more garages for me to choose from, etc.

In context of your metaphor: what if we didn't need cars anymore?

Then we would stop checking them into our source control repositories.

Isn't the legal situation the opposite here? Car manufacturers don't release schematics because they believe in "free as in freedom". In fact any interfaces you as an end-user or an independent garage can use and schematics that are released such as the protocol for the diagnostic port, are open primarily because govermnents made laws saying so.

I'm most familiar with the "right to repair" situation with John Deere, which occasionally pops up on HN. The spirit of someone who releases something under GPL seems the opposite of that?

Yes I think we agree? I was even thinking specifically about John Deere but I’ve never bought a tractor so it seemed a gauche comparison :)

If you have ill intentions or maybe you're a corporation that wants to use someone else's work for free without contributing anything back, then yes, I can see how GPL licenses "tend to cause problems".

Why? What's your problem with them? They do exactly what they're supposed to do, to ensure that future derivatives of the source code have to be distributed under the same license and distribution respects fundamental freedoms.

If the GPL causes you problems, then it's working as intended.

I like to think about GPL as a kind of an artistic performance and an elaborate critique of the whole concept of copyright.

Like, "we don't like copyright, but since you insist on enforcing it and we can't do anything against it, we will invent a clever way to use your own rules against you".

That is not really the motivation behind GPL licenses. These licenses have been designed to ensure by legal means that anyone can learn from the source code of software, fix bugs on their own, and modify the software to their needs.

We've surpassed the need for this now.

It doesn't matter whether the AI or a human learns from the software, the source code for the learning must come from somewhere.

Wtf are these comments? A LGPL licensed project, guaranteed to be free and open source, being LLM-washed to a permissive license, and GPL is the problem here?

They are literally stealing from open source, but it's the original license that is the issue?

They have been maintaining the project for years. It's not like some Joe Random with ChatGPT randomly entered the scene

And? Doesn't give them any right to re-license the code. Especially not to strip rights for other users.

But it's a reimplementation... So it's new code, their code. Can't they license it? Only the project name and the API surface remained similar

And what exactly are some of these problems?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com