YES! So many old school projects hosted on janky sites that are immeasurably harder to contribute to. Looking forward to getting them all moved.
...as long as GitHub doesn't become an evil empire of some sort.
...as long as GitHub doesn't become an evil empire of some sort.
Perhaps you meant on a site that's designed to also serve the needs of proprietary programmers, as opposed to just FOSS programmers?
It makes sense for Github to promote other licenses.
Do you consider "proprietary software developers" to be anyone who develops proprietary software, even if they contribute to open source as well? Because even if you did both I would think you would prefer non GPL code since you wouldn't be restricted in where you can use the code.
So again it seems like "on a site by and for programmers it makes sense to discourage GPL" to me, for all except FOSS programmers.
See vdaniuk's response in this same thread.
Also, just because someone hacks on proprietary software doesn't mean their preference is to hack on proprietary software.
As for vdaniuk's response, I read it and I dont see what value it adds. The comment basically said overall GPL is good, without any explanation. Obviously I dont disagree that its good but dont see why one would encourage it over MIT or BSD.
If there's a competing library under a permissive license with mostly the same functionality, the GPLed version doesn't really help. The point of the GPL is to create an ecosystem of software with compelling functionality that makes it much easier (and more fun) to hack on Free Software than proprietary software.
And if you're hacking on proprietary software, repeatedly encountering GPLed libraries you could be using instead of recreating their functionality from scratch makes it easier to make a case to management that maybe the thing you're working on shouldn't be proprietary after all, as well as making it more tempting to change what you're working on.
There are several reasons to give away code. It's perfectly reasonable to want people to share improvements with you, in which case the GPL is the right choice. But it's also reasonable to just not care what happens to the code after you send it off, in which case the GPL is likely to be as much a burden on you as on downstream programmers. Using Stallman's terminology, the GPL prevents people from boarding your code, but it also prevents them from using it with incompatible open source licenses (say, licenses with an advertising clause or a choice of law clause) without special permission. I just don't get all that worked up over whether somebody wants to use the Apache license version 1.1.
I don't care if someone profits from my work. Had O released it as GPL, they would have profited the same from something else. What difference did my chioce of GPL do, other than to prevent others from using my code? None.
Then again, having GPL licensing isn't the only incentive for recieving patches. A developer of closed source, using my library will want future updates to be easily applied without their fixed bugs getting reintroduced. Not sending me a pull request would be counter productive.
I've never noticed a shortage of GPLed projects on Github. But I think it would make sense for Github to nudge programmers into choosing licenses other than the GPL. When I start a project, I appreciate the ability to build off of permissively licensed libraries. At the least, it means that I don't have to worry about various pretend lawyers wasting my time with emails about how the GPL handles some edge case.
A great deal of (good!) proprietary software is currently in the hands of consumers too. So?
What is that supposed to mean? Software is software
Different classes of software exist with different licensing concerns.
Let's take a step back:
>>> For (B), that's a good thing. Nowadays, the GPL merely prevents software from having widespread use.
>> Bizarre claim. Doesn't seem to have affected Linux/Android or git itself from achieving widespread use. reply
> Platforms versus modules.
I don't understand what the last line means. I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with it, because I don't know what it means in the first place.
Rebuttal: Didn't impact Android, Linux, or Git.
Operating systems and developer-only tools are special cases and are not relevant to the general claim of "GPL preventing widespread use".
You seem to be distinguishing between two things, but I cannot see what they are.
Three orders of magnitude of what? What is being measured? Do you mean that platforms are bigger than modules?
What I meant is that the software is used differently, and it is developed differently. It seems obvious to me that the ideal licensing for software that is vastly different from these examples of gargantuan/universal FOSS might not be GPL.
Last I saw, they only (rarely) show that they have a 'GitHub Client for Win and OSX'.
Command line interface and all other Git tools are usable. Hell- when you create a new, empty repo they give you the commands to type into your terminal to upload from there.
I'm pretty sure there is a tool to transfer a GitHub repo and all meta data to GitLab (which is open source).
That's a good point, but Google Code was never a core business of Google.
Github would have to undergo a serious shift before hosting code repos isn't a core business function.
The free-as-in-beer parts of github.com are not (guaranteed to be) a core business of Github either. Just look how lousy Atlassian is with bitbucket.org; their core business is Stash.
Atlassian's core business is Jira and Confluence. Stash is pretty much an also-ran at this point. (Bitbucket, the free product still looks better and has more features - Stash has literally no reason to exist unless your company is terrified of the cloud - and then, Github Enterprise is superior in every way.)
A company I used to work for once had a customer demand (and pay for the purchase of) a separate HPC cluster just for running the simulations for that customer. Because we could not guarantee 100% that it was impossible to circumvent the access controls on the regular cluster, which only had users from the same company, but not all those users had clearance for that project.
Let me just drop this here: https://bitbucket.org/site/master/issue/8436/not-all-github-... shows that Atlassian can't even be bothered to make it easy for people to migrate to Bitbucket, their repo import tool cannot handle the pagination the github.com API does. They can't be bothered to let people paying to Github pay them instead. My guess is: they don't care about your $5 (or whatever puny amount it is) payment for private Bitbucket repos, they care more about the $XX,000 they get from every Stash license sold. And mentions on Bitbucket tickets make it look like Stash is quite popular in some corporate circles.
NB: GHE may be superior in every way, but does it integrate with JIRA as well as Stash does? What if you've already invested in JIRA and want to add a repository management platform? (Also, don't underestimate the portion of the market "terrified of the cloud".)
* 250 user Stash license: $12000 first year, $6000 after [1]
* 250 user GH Enterprise license: $61750 per year [2]
If you need on premise git hosting, I'd look at Stash or Gitlab, long before I thought about looking at Github Enterprise!
[1] https://www.atlassian.com/licensing/stash#serverlicenses-1
I'm trying to see why this is held to be a bad thing. Even if Github shuts down the way Google Code is, I don't see that is a particular problem except for projects that are already essentially abandoned.
Github without distributed commits isn't based on git anymore, and the other stuff is ancillary (and also easily exportable)
designed to discourage GPL use
What the hell are you on about? From choosealicense:
The GPL (V2 or V3) is a copyleft license that requires anyone who distributes your code or a derivative work to make the source available under the same terms. V3 is similar to V2, but further restricts use in hardware that forbids software alterations.
Linux, Git, and WordPress use the GPL.
This is in the middle of the front page [1]. What is discouraging or inaccurate about this?
Furthermore, the license chooser under the new repo page has the GPL as the second friggin' option [2].
Acerbic? Yes, but I don't appreciate people peddling lies.
How about: "The GPL (V2 or V3) requires anyone who distributes your code - or a derivative work - to make the source available. V3 is similar to V2, but it also demands that, whenever the code comes "pre-installed" in a device, the user can run a modified version in the device"
Or even: "The GPL (V2 or V3) requires anyone who distributes your code - or a derivative work - to make the source available. V3 is similar to V2. Only worry about the difference for code that comes "pre-installed" in a device"
The GPL is objectively a more restrictive license than BSD/MIT/Apache - just because you think the word "restricted" is ugly doesn't change this rather uncontroversial fact.
(and yes. If you dont know if you want MIT or GPL, "dont worry about" V2 vs V3)
The "purpose of those restrictions" is the whole and entire point of the GPL. If you don't explain (to users or developers) why the GPL restricts distribution of code and future changes the way it does, well, you might as well just not mention it at all.
Furthermore, the FSF are precisely the last people I'd go to for a forthright and non judgmental description of the GPL and its purpose. The FSF is at least a primary source in this matter, and furthermore an advocacy group.
So lets change the "I want it simple and permissive" text to "I want attribution. The MIT License only requirements is that users provide attribution back to you and don’t hold you liable."
Its a forthright and non judgmental description of the MIT license and its purpose, and it matches perfectly with the style of the GPL description.
You are omitting what is probably the most important part of the GPL.
I disagree that it is an important thing about what is its intent
If I'm choosing a license for a project, it's important that I know that changes other people make will be available to me under the same terms as my own code.
A license that requires you to make the changes available but allows you to restrict my use of those changes is plainly in contrast with the intent of the GPL.
better ?
(sure, there is a tradeoff between comprehensibility and precision ...)
I don't think issues and PRs, along with all the comments on them, are ancillary.
Github does make it easy to export that data, but then it's not necessarily easy to bring it in somewhere else and keep using it. That's not Github's fault, but there is definitely a degree of lock in.
First of all, it says that the main default simplest license should be the permissive one. It chooses that first on purpose. Second, they say that you should use Apache if you care about patent issues when actually GPLv3 is arguably superior for that. So, they worked to actively relegate GPL to the last choice.
And you picked out the small text. The big text is "I care about sharing improvements" — what does that mean? It's much more wishy-washy than "I want to block the code from being used in proprietary projects" or "I want to require that derivatives stay free". The motivation behind the GPL is about freedom, not about improvements. But GitHub doesn't want to talk about freedom, they only want to talk about code improvements.
Anyway, it's already aggressive to encourage people to use GPLv2 instead of GPLv3, given that v3 specifically closes loopholes that GPLv2 has.
Anyway, it's not a lie… watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bAAlPXB2-c to hear the GitHub co-founder explicitly tell people to reject the GPL in the very presentation in which he announced the choosealicense site.
According to Wikipedia, SourceForge hosts about 300,000 projects, and GitHub has 10 million as of December 2013.
I still have pretty strong confidence that the majority of open source projects are not GPL'd.
[1] http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTg4NDY
One conclusions reached from this is that people tend to not care about licensing when they just want to push this weekends freshly created project into github, which result in the MIT license getting higher statistics in github compared to repositories with some quality requirements. One can also assume that uploading things to github is much easier that SourceForge, and people use github as a development platform instead of a pure publishing platform.
I dunno, I'll admit this thread has been eye opening. The GPL is definitely more common than I originally thought. But I think really nailing down specifics on this would be tough.
We're animals. The feeling of community arises when we're not alone yet feel being in private. Community is us (versus the rest). Github is a faceless "everybody" (vs. nobody left), which on the animal level translates to "me" (vs. everybody else).
It was easier to maintain a tiny community in the times of janky sites with mailing lists and diffs emailed around. Github gives you access to a larger pool of potential drive-by contributors, but you can't create a loose ring of a handful of people in /issues and /pulls. The community arises through people joining, and then failing to leave, a mailing list, and then contributing to the project through occasional replies to questions asked by beginners.
There may be seven long-term subscribers to your niche project's mailing list. When a newcomer shows up with a question, one of them might answer it before you get up. And even if they don't, their continuing passive presence on the list is still a currency that helps you push the niche project further.
Stars on a github.com repository just don't carry that much weight. Seven people might star your niche project repo. If they use their "dashboards", the entry for the new issue (the newcomer asked a support question by filing a ticket since you have no janky old school mailing list) got lost among the other tens and hundreds (even thousands) entries for individual commits and comments in repos those people have starred beside yours. They won't answer that support call for you. And, even if they did, they won't feel being part of any niche project's community either: it was just a drive-by comment on a random issue they spotted on their feed...
tldr: github.com is the largest open-plan office in the world.