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Comment by nevir | Hacker News Reader

So is the GPL, imo.

As ridiculous as it sounds, that depends on your definition of freedom.

BSD and such allow people the freedom to do almost anything with the code. Close it, leave it open, whatever. BSD grants you the freedom to deny a freedom.

The GPL attempts to preserve that freedom for people other than the current recipient. GPL denies you the freedom to deny a freedom.

"the freedom to deny a freedom" is not freedom, it's power.

Yes, and the GPL is only as powerful as the copyright system that supports it. Some people publish under public domain in the US and something like the MIT license for other countries where that license is less restrictive than their particular public domain.

The freedom to have a power is also a freedom. We as a society often want to restrict such powers though.

Yep, GPL preserves freedom in exactly the same way modern societies preserve freedom for their citizens. You are free, everyone who lives in the country is also free and you're not allowed to enslave other people. Of course, someone could make the argument that preventing you from owning slaves denies you some freedom. And from a narrow and purely technical side he would be right. However, which society would you say has more freedom, the one in which slavery is forbidden, or the other? I think the same argument applies to FOSS.

I just want to be absolutely clear...did you compare non-GPL licenses to slavery?

No he didn't. he compared the historical objections that was made by slavers when their ability to own slaves became illegal.

The south has even songs about the "good ol' days" where slaves was working in the field. Plantation owners clearly saw the change as oppression, and a limitation on their freedom to operate ones house and businesses as one pleases.

It's called analogy. I think the same reasoning and conclusions apply in both situations, which doesn't mean they are equivalent. It's a useful example when all this "which kind of license offers more freedom" arises.

The societies we live in have answered that denying a little personal freedom in order to protect the collective offers more freedom than the one in which that doesn't happen. There's no debate about that. Then, why are we still debating this?

your opinion is based on misunderstanding. The GPL says one thing: no restricting others.

You can say, "that takes away my freedom to restrict others" but that's like saying, "your law takes away my freedom to have slaves"

The GPL doesn't remove freedom except in one way, which is an unintended side-effect: incompatibility.

What the GPL actively restricts is POWER. What you want that the GPL blocks is not freedom, it's power.

  > "your law takes away my freedom to have slaves"

This does not work that way in software. More permissible licenses allow me to do whatever I want with my copy of the code. The original codes is still here, I cannot take it away.

I thought that the GPL restricted your redistribution of the code, as far as I know it still lets you do whatever you want with your own copy of the code.

Depends on whether you consider redistribution under a different license a part of "whatever you want".

What you do with your own copy, may that be adding to it, removing parts, or giving your one copy to someone else is generally not considered redistribution.

Only the creation of more copies which are then distrusted out are considered as redistribution, and to be covered by copyright.

The GPL says nothing at all about what YOU can do with YOUR copy. It says that you can't enslave OTHERS by limiting what THEY do with THEIR copies.

No, their motivation is to preserve your personal freedoms with your own software and hardware.

As a dev, I view the GPL's primary motivation to be about _forcing_ downstream developers to "contribute back". The additional freedom for a user to tinker with that software is a byproduct that isn't very compelling.

Note that I'm not trying to suggest that I don't find open source software very compelling - just that the trade off doesn't make sense to me.

I'd rather be generally trusting of downstream devs; it pays more dividends in terms of goodwill (and subjectively, contributions).

It happens that GPL encourages continued sharing, but that's not it's motivation. The motivation is strictly to prevent people from using the software in a way to restrict others.

Note that it only forces you to contribute back in the event that you not contributing back would restrict another's freedoms with their hardware or software.

You are perfectly free to keep your contributions to yourself and never distribute anything. GPL only jumps in when you are distributing code further downstream, as not distributing code along would refuses those users the same access and freedom to developing the program as you got.

Why do you think GPL is hostile to freedom? Could you elaborate please?

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