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Comment by petcat | Hacker News Reader

The biggest scam that was ever pulled was convincing software developers that the GPL was somehow bad and out of vogue and that open source should prefer BSD, MIT, Apache, etc instead.

And now we have entire threads like this of people crying because some company used someone's software exactly as the license allows.

It's a shame, but there really is no sympathy for projects that choose the wrong license. Stallman knew this decades ago and somehow even now we're still learning it.

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It’s not that complicated. Most of us program for work, and can’t use GPL stuff at work.

People were optimizing for being the most useful and therefore getting the most use.

Alacritty is an application. Most of us use GPL applications at work.

Neither I nor the comment I replied to are talking about Alacritty

The comment you replied to is talking about how a company used the Alacritty code exactly how its license allows.

The comment I replied to is speaking about the industry at large and how we’ve all had the wool pulled over our eyes by nefarious actors, presumably at Amazon and friends.

The GPL would not have prevented the scenario that the top-level comment complained about. Nothing in the GPL requires rich downstream projects to send money to poor upstream projects. That's by design. The four freedoms that Stallman preaches intentionally permit distributing the software to free riders.

It would have prevented Warp from forking Alacritty and re-distributing it as a closed source product. That's what it's about. This whole scenario would have been impossible from the start because Warp would have been forced by the license to be good open source citizens.

The biggest scam is GPL convincing people that the license will keep things open source. Every try contributing to Chrome's web engine? It started as GPL khtml, but good luck doing anything as google controls it. Meanwhile FreeBSD manages to get plenty of contributors.

Don't get me wrong, license is important. However it doesn't have nearly the effect many people claim.

It is open source. You are free to fork it if you don't like the terms for contributing to that repo so long as your fork remains open source, just as Apple did with KHTML, Google did with Webkit, and Electron and Brave did with Blink. If Warp were open source to begin with, people would have been free to rip out the things they didn't like in it and build upon the things they liked, benefiting the project that was forked to begin with because they can do that as well.

In theory yes. In practice a web engine is so complex you need a large team. Your fork may start out good, but quickly it will become so far behind everyone else that it isn't usable as a browser for the latest sites. Plus you won't hear about many security issues/fixes until you are exploited.

Unless you can find a large team willing to maintain your system a fork is something that is not realistically possible. As volunteers I doubt you can get enough help, but if you are rich you can hire plenty of developers who would love to help.

Without it, chrome would be closed source entirely.

KHTML was LGPL, just as with the rest of the KDE libraries. Otherwise Apple wouldn't have been able to fork it in the first place.

LGPL yes. However the rest is false. GPL would have made a bit more of their fork open source, but Apple would have otherwise had no problem forking it and not allowing contributors. KHTML developers often complained in those early years that their fork was in theory open source, but it quickly became so different that it wasn't possible to figure out which changes were wroth porting and which not.

I suspect a lawyer could look at the state of WebKit and Chrome these days and conclude there is so little original code remaining that it can be re-licensed to closed source (see a lawyer for what this complex bit of law means) - worst case they only have to rewrite a small amount.

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