Well, the GPL mandates the right to use the application, and that a redistributor cannot restrict it (section 0, preambule and section 6, IIRC); that right is not guaranteed by MIT, BSD, MPL or Apache.
Yeah, and because of the additional restrictions of GPL, big companies are simply avoiding it or writing software to replace it.
See: CLANG/LLVM. GCC used to be the king of the compiler heap; now it's well on its way to becoming an historical footnote.
It's far better to convince people to help you by being trusting and generous than by coercion. The GPL uses coercion.
Yes, some companies use BSD/MIT software and lock it up, never to send improvements back upstream. But they ultimately are harming themselves, as they can't trivially update to new versions of the the software, because they're now maintaining a fork, and the longer their code diverges, the harder it will be to maintain. So they are motivated to send improvements upstream. And many (most?) big companies do.
When there's another game in town, people will play the one where they're more welcome. Open source software benefits by many eyes and many hands; the GPL (especially GPLv3) cuts off access to just about everyone in big companies, which means the size of the potential user base is a fraction of what it can be.
Linux is a notable exception, obviously. But with Linux there's a clear way to use it that doesn't risk your proprietary code. Most other software, not so much.
* Microsoft is supporting CLANG.
* Android switched from GCC default to CLANG default.
* The CLANG development community, combined with the LLVM development community, are both extremely robust.
* GCC used to have full time commercial developer contributors working for Google and Apple and other large companies; most such companies have migrated almost entirely to CLANG/LLVM support.
* Because of better management and the army of full time commercial developers contributing to it, CLANG is better in practically every conceivable way at this point than GCC. If GCC weren't GPL, CLANG would likely be (at most) a fork of GCC, and may have been merged back into trunk by now (this happened to GCC once before).
CLANG is also an excellent example of how a completely permissive license can be sufficient to encourage big companies to contribute their changes back to the commons. All of the GPL fearmongering would have you believe that CLANG couldn't exist, and yet it thrives.
And printer drivers are still almost all proprietary [1]. So GPL didn't even achieve the objective that inspired it.
GPL did prove that open source CAN work, and it jumpstarted the open source movement. But its time has past; enough people understand the benefits of contributing to open source that the coercion is no longer necessary, and in fact is harmful.
[1] Some printer drivers have been reverse-engineered for Linux, certainly. But modern printers frequently leave so much processing for the host that their drivers are nontrivial, and even when there exists "free" drivers for Linux, they pale in comparison feature-wise to the proprietary drivers. I'm sure there are exceptions.
And the reason I switched was because Clang had better error messages.
The GPL is not harmful and I encourage you to utilize it when appropriate for it protects you (the original author) and your target users far more than BSD or other similar licenses.
[1] http://llvm.org/pubs/2004-01-30-CGO-LLVM.html Read full paper not just the abstract to get the full picture.
gcc was in fact set up to explicitly not be able to do this.
The developers of gcc made understanding the intermediate forms as well as creating plugins as hard as possible specifically so that you couldn't get around the GPL.
clang a direct result of attempting to coerce people with real money with the GPL.
> gcc was in fact set up to explicitly not be able to do this.
GCC was originally very difficult to integrate with so that non-free programs could not be built on top of it. However, the creation of LLVM does not reduce to: "GCC was difficult to work with so we made this." There had been many attempts to make "Universal Compiler IRs". These attempts had not gone well. LLVM instead chose to do something at a unique level of abstraction that wasn't good for everything but was very good for its particular niche. Once again, read the paper, LLVM really wasn't created as a reaction against GCC.
On the desktop, I believe that BSD was (a) hamstrung by the AT&T / BSDI lawsuit at a critical time and (b) suffered from fragmentation brought about more by incompatible forceful personalities than by technical issues.
Those are proprietary forms. I think we were talking about whether the decision to be BSD-licensed has been good for the health and contribution of the *BSD projects that OS X and iOS originated from. Then we can draw a conclusion (but hopefully after gathering more data) on whether releasing your codebase GPL or BSD is more likely to lead to long-term health for that open source codebase.
Still shares some userland, but this is irrelevant.
For a true picture, look at how well their open sourced Darwin OS project is doing in terms of update and support.
Apple gutted the FreeBSD core team back in the 90s, hiring them all away.
But fairly similar userland.
Still shares some userland, but this is irrelevant.
I would say that for most people, the API matters far more than the kernel implementing it.
not open sourced
http://www.opensource.apple.com has the kernel sources under "xnu". I don't think that substantially less is open sourced than e.g. for Android.
look at how well their open sourced Darwin OS project is doing in terms of update and support
The updates are fairly current (10.10.1 corresponds to the version of OS X shipped last fall), though there doesn't seem to be a very large community building on it.
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=clang-gc...
Show gcc and clang to be broadly competitive without a clear winner in terms of speed of execution.
Thinking about Clang, its better design didn't evolve in a vacuum. Clang was primarily developed by Apple [1] so that they would have (with LLVM) a full compiler toolchain that didn't include GPL code (and as others have mentioned, Clang is designed to integrate with editors for parsing, while GCC is explicitly designed to be HARD to integrate that way so that it can't be snuck into a proprietary project).
YOUR choice to change to Clang may not have been about licensing, but licensing and design choices in support of that license philosophy are what caused Clang to exist.
The best part is that so many have jumped on the LLVM bandwagon. There's even a formal semantics to get formal verification work going. Mainstream coders, tool developers, and high assurance people all under the same roof contributing a bit to the same tool. Lots of potential there.
They're already moving to encourage / require iOS devs to ship them LLVM IR code - the most logical reason for this is so that they can keep the last part of compilation entirely proprietary in future, taking further freedoms from users and developers.
They design and fab their own ARM chips already, so this is plausible.
See how that works? And despite Google's BS, I have plenty of ways to keep Android devices largely under my control. On that side of the fence, people stopped worrying and started modding en masse. :)
Further, mobile security vendors such as OK Labs w/ OKL4 let us isolate that mess while programming directly on the kernel or a custom runtime (think MirageOS for mobile). So, we have plenty of options because we aligned with a company doing open-source mobile with little lock-in. Align with closed-source and lock-in loving companies then you get what you had coming. ;)
I used to work for a company which produced a game-playing virtual machine. We had a toolchain that allowed building C and C++ programs for it. The toolchain was based on LLVM and gcc (because clang wasn't around at the time).
Integrating gcc into our toolchain was appallingly hard, solely due to GPL restrictions. The extra work in dividing everything into GPL and non-GPL parts, interfacing between the two, producing split packaging and distribution etc was basically half a full time job.
If the company had survived long enough for clang to have become stable --- which, sigh, it didn't --- we would have switched to it like a shot.
Sure, and my point was to answer the parent about what freedom does the GPL grant to the users.
Your point is interesting, but is totally besides what I was saying, or the parent.
Those who wouldn't share under a permissive license wouldn't accept the GPL to start with, so what additional user freedom can the GPL possibly create in the world that's not already there with permissive licenses?
Yes, and that freedom is being guaranteed to fewer and fewer end users of GPLed software because of those feelings you're dismissing.
Linux is probably the success story for GPL, and even in that case Google has bundled it with proprietary software (Android now outnumbers all other operating system installs, IIRC). Yes people can make their own distributions, but they're for the most part irrelevant to 99% of users of Android devices. Probably 99.99% if you include people who never install Google proprietary apps (the Play Store; Google Maps; etc.) on their devices.
The point of GPL wasn't to serve the 1%, but to expand software freedoms to everyone. To start a revolution in software, and to supplant closed source and restrictive licenses. Look around, though; most people are ignoring what freedoms they are offered and basking in proprietary software options.
Open source is beautiful when it works. But freedom to redistribute something without value is about as relevant as debating whether a tree falling alone in a forest makes a noise.
No, it's not.
GPL is only relevant if it can grant freedom to modify software that's relevant. Freedom to modify something you don't really want to use has no value.
It is worse, though, in larger companies. There is generally several layers more of bureaucracy to get through to be able to use GPL licensed software.
To be clear, I'm speaking of my role as a developer and using GPL software in developing proprietary software.
Companies may try to avoid GPL but only if they have another, viable choice.
Is there any evidence of this?
See "Working with the LLVM community": http://llvm.org/devmtg/2013-11/slides/Robinson-PS4Toolchain....
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTU4MzE
That clang is not GPL is more an accident of history than a preference of licenses:
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-02/msg00...
"indeed there are multiple proprietary compilers and utilities built on top of LLVM—including Apple's Xcode and NVIDIA's CUDA compiler."
https://lwn.net/Articles/582697/
OpenStack is one of the biggest permissively-licensed free software projects out there:
""" Everyone I know who is deploying OpenStack has forked. Not publicly, but they have. No one can run the mainline code, it’s a disaster, and OpenStack politics of the “Big Tent” are going to make that problem a lot worse. Because everyone has their own fork, very little code is making it back upstream. """
I've yet to see a person who hasn't been able to get the free version of Lua/zlib/libjpeg/libpng/etc. just because some of its rights were restricted by a commercial product (ex. a game).
I'm not saying that the GPL is a bad license, but I personally believe that people who defend it by saying it gives you "more freedom" than MIT/BSD/Apache-like licenses should do a reality check first. More freedom in legalese doesn't equal more freedom in practice.
1. When lua/zlib/libjpeg is compiled into a closed system (perhaps even with DRM), you can't modify that copy of the library. For example you don't have freedom to replace your iPhone's JPEG encoder with MozJPEG.
2. GPL code only helps projects that respect users' freedom, so only Free projects can benefit from it. OTOH do-whatever-you-want code helps both Free and closed projects alike. It allows user-hostile projects to take gratis code, add one (mis)feature, and with little effort compete with the open-source version (see: majority of Android market share belongs to derivatives with unremovable crapware and locked bootloaders).
It's hard to argue about overall effect in practice — it expands problem from legalese to politics. Maybe carriers would never let Android to take off if it was GPL-licensed, but OTOH a GPL3-licensed Android now would be great: it would still allow vendors to customize and extend it, but wouldn't force users to put up with unremovable crapware.
But anyway, the question is "which kind of end user would want to switch a JPEG encoder and doesn't know about code injection"? Certainly not many.
Quoting a comment from above:
GPL is only relevant if it can grant freedom to modify software that's relevant. Freedom to modify something you don't really want to use has no value.
2. I hardly see the issue with the Android example, even if Android were GPL-ed, the carriers would include unremovable crapware, because the GPL license doesn't apply to external files.
> the question is "which kind of end user would want to …
No, that's completely missing the point. It's like "We don't need freedom of speech, because most people have nothing interesting to say".
2. GPL3 has anti-tivoization clause, so if they modified Android to prevent removal of any program (closed or not) you would have right to reverse that change and get rid of the crapware.