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Comment by stephenr | Hacker News Reader

> The point is that the current trend of companies releasing stuff under non-copyleft licenses and keeping the 'good stuff' in proprietary forks is bad for free (FSF-style) software.

Copyleft is meaningless without Copyright. Apple created Swift, and thus owns the Copyright. As the Copyright owner, Apple can licence/release Swift or parts-thereof, as it chooses. Even if they did release Swift under the GPL, nothing would prevent them from also using a non-released version of Swift or from keeping certain parts/libraries in-house.

> You might still think that free software is unimportant or that having pseudo-freemium open source release is still better than nothing.

I think its both insulting and an incredibly narrow-view to call permissively licensed software "pseudo freemium".

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>I think its both insulting and an incredibly narrow-view to call permissively licensed software "pseudo freemium".

I don't mean the general case of permissively licensed software, but the way that the article expects Apple to act.

Either you/the author are claiming Apple will break the licence terms they themselves have chosen to release the software under, or you're insulting permissively licensed software.

Which is it?

I'm not trying to insult anyone. The BSD and similar licenses are of course free software licenses, and the FSF does (again, of course) acknowlegde that.

Still, a company like Apple can use these licenses to take outside contributions in their proprietary software. Freemium might not be the right word for that, but I think it's not unreasonable to dislike these (completely legal) practice.

> Copyleft is meaningless without Copyright. Apple created Swift, and thus owns the Copyright. As the Copyright owner, Apple can licence/release Swift or parts-thereof, as it chooses. Even if they did release Swift under the GPL, nothing would prevent them from also using a non-released version of Swift or from keeping certain parts/libraries in-house.

If swift is GPL, Apple cannot keep secret changes it makes on top of third party contributions.

If swift is MIT/ISC, Apple can keep changes made on top of third party contributions secret.

If swift is GPL, Apple cannot keep secret changes it makes on top of third party contributions.

AFAIK, even the FSF requires copyright assignment – Apple likely would too, and this means any 'official' work on Swift will can be released by Apple under any license they wish.

Of course, if you don't agree with that, you are free to license your contributions as GPL and release them to the community without assigning copyright. They just won't be part of the official distribution, and Apple can't build on them. That's the best of both worlds, then.

>FAIK, even the FSF requires copyright assignment – Apple likely would too

Assigning copyright to a 501c(3) non-profit is much different than assigning copyright to a for-profit multi-billion dollar corporation.

I've completed the copyright assignment form for some of my contributions to GNU. The FSF's terms are reasonable and the legal text prevents the FSF from being able to make the software non-free in the future. I really dislike copyright assignment in general, but the FSF is in a unique position and I appreciate that they can defend the GPL on my behalf.

Oh like Oracle cannot make a commercial closed version of MySQL because it is under GPL[0] or QT[1] cannot have both a closed and a GPL version.

There are a lot more examples of this.

On the other hand look at how RMS/FSF talks about LLVM and BSD[2], i am a developer there prefers the MIT license for my software, and for me FSF and GPL are a lot more dangerous then apple and there open source license.

[0] http://www.mysql.com/about/legal/licensing/oem/#4 [1] http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/licensing.html [2] https://lwn.net/Articles/582242/

As I see it permissively licensed code puts every one on equal terms. We all can make open source forks & we all can make proprietary forks. With copyleft some one is more equal and it is not the users, since we can only make copyleft forks.

Or you could contribute back to the copyleft project (without copyright assignment or relicensing grants) and then you're all on equal terms again: nobody can make proprietary forks.

Why should i take the freedom of making proprietary forks away from people?

My goal with open sourcing my software are to make the (software) world just a little better, i do that by writing the best software i can and hope that as many people possible use it, if i write the best ftp library in the world and you need a ftp library for your proprietary program i hope you use mine instead of an inferior implementation.

In my world view i do not loss anything by you making a proprietary forks of my work (i still have my version of my work with my license) but you and your users are getting a better product.

If your priority is to improve the quality of the software that people use, I don't think you should use copyleft.

If you think that quality is important, but that as important as that is that users should have control over the software they use, as part of the control they should have over their own lives, then I think a copyleft license is a good tool to help achieve that.

My comment was in the context of big company X, "releasing something in a permissive license" vs "releasing something in a copyleft license". Either way I prefer to use, support and contribute to permissively licensed projects.

Most corporate copyleft projects only accept contributions with assignation.

Except that lone developers or small teams and large corporations aren't equal. A lone software developer who works on software under a permissive license is not benefitted to the same degree by those supposed "equal terms", because he doesn't have the resources of a larger team or corporation to exploit that "permissiveness".

> Oh like Oracle cannot make a commercial closed version of MySQL because it is under GPL[0] or QT[1] cannot have both a closed and a GPL version.

Oracle can't pick up third party patches and incorporate them into their proprietary version (for example: patches from MariaDB). They can only incorporate their own changes, and changes that other sign over.

I invite you to google "Contributor Licence Agreement". Either way I don't see why we are arguing about it, Swift will be released with a permissive license, which is a good thing :-).

> I invite you to google "Contributor Licence Agreement".

I know what they are, and that doesn't change anything. Apple can't force people to sign a Contributor Agreement. Look at, for example, what happened with MariaDB and MySQL. Oracle can't force the MariaDB devs to sign the agreement, nor would Apple be able to in similar situations.

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