
Why OccupyGPL is wrong - xai3luGi
http://www.rants.org/2015/02/11/why_occupygpl_is_wrong/
======
cogburnd02
> In the strange world of OccupyGPL, that's a “restriction”, I guess because
> it… restricts you from placing restrictions on someone else? But that's as
> silly as saying that outlawing slavery reduces freedom, because it takes
> away some people's freedom to own slaves. Hey, the analogy may be
> inflammatory, but the logic is the same, and it doesn't make sense in either
> case. The freedom to take away others' freedom is not a meaningful freedom
> to have — the proper word for that is not "freedom" but "power".

Where have I heard that before? Oh right, as usual, the FSF said this long
ago:

"[O]ne so-called freedom that we do not advocate is the 'freedom to choose any
license you want for software you write.' We reject this because it is really
a form of power, not a freedom.

This oft overlooked distinction is crucial. Freedom is being able to make
decisions that affect mainly you; power is being able to make decisions that
affect others more than you. ... We in the free software movement are not
opposed to business, but we have seen what happens when a software business
has the 'freedom' to impose arbitrary rules on the users of software. ... We
believe you should decide what to do with the software you use; however, that
is not what today's law says. Current copyright law places us in the position
of power over users of our code, whether we like it or not. The ethical
response to this situation is to proclaim freedom for each user, just as the
Bill of Rights was supposed to exercise government power by guaranteeing each
citizen's freedoms. That is what the GNU General Public License is for: it
puts you in control of your usage of the software while protecting you from
others who would like to take control of your decisions."

[https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/freedom-or-
power.html](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/freedom-or-power.html)

~~~
forrestthewoods
Da fuck?

"Making a program proprietary is an exercise of power." So is releasing source
code and limiting what they can do with it. Or forcing them to do extra things
(share source) if they do certain things (modify source).

Stallman believes that linking against a DLL constitutes a derived work that
would be subject to the GPL's copyleft nature. The legal validity of that
belief is unknown. You're free to call that freedom if you like. I'll be over
here in a corner considering it an abuse of power.

"If we confuse power with freedom, we will fail to uphold real freedom." On
that I do not disagree.

~~~
aric
GPL and copyleft further a cause. It's primarily for increasing _user
freedom_. User freedom isn't developer freedom. It's everyone's freedom,
indirectly. You're free to disagree with its agenda. But recognize it as a
cause.

Other causes seem to be respected or at least understood. No one, for
instance, is surprised to see that save-the-whales advocates try to save the
whales. They recognize their cause. They may disagree with their cause. They
may question why it's a worthy cause. They may think it's a counterproductive
cause. Maybe they ultimately love the taste of whale. They may disagree with
semantics. That's inevitable. It isn't helpful, however, to exhibit (or feign)
ignorance of the nature and motivations that would understand it as a cause.
Unfortunately, that's a common habit when it comes to those who argue against
GPL. GPL isn't for everyone. It's that simple. For developers who do feel that
GPL speaks to their goals, I raise a glass. When possible, I use their
software and develop in kind. Why? I agree with that cause.

> _Stallman believes that linking against a DLL constitutes a derived work
> that would be subject to the GPL 's copyleft nature._

Basic software dependencies, with few exceptions, are subject to GPL. Why
would anyone expect otherwise?

~~~
zamalek
Nicely put, however, according to GNU.org:

> The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your
> computing as you wish (freedom 1).

I actually _can 't_ do that with GPL code - not because my employer tells me
not to but because I know that could get my employer into trouble.

With MIT/BSD you run the risk of someone taking the code and never
contributing back. With GPL you run the risk of excluding people from the
ability to participate.

There is no license that encompasses all rights and freedoms because it's
probably impossible to create a set of rules that would encompass everyone.
Our freedoms are strangely mutually exclusive in some ways. I think
forrestthewoods issue with GPL is that it is toted at 'the' way to preserve
freedom - where the truth is that it's the way to preserve _one_ form of
freedom. That's why I never, ever, say "freedom" when talking about GPL and
rather _always_ say "free as in beer."

~~~
simonh
> The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your
> computing as you wish (freedom 1).

>>I actually can't do that with GPL code - not because my employer tells me
>>not to but because I know that could get my employer into trouble.

This is extremely loose and deceptive talk. That freedom is genuine and
valuable. You are talking about something completely different, that has no
bearing whatever on freedom 1.

The company I work for modifies and revises GPL'd code all the time. It causes
us no problems whatsoever, because we don't release or distribute it. Instead
we just use it internally for our own purposes. Nothing in the GPL restricts
your use, abuse or modification of the code. It only restricts how you can go
about sharing and distributing it.

~~~
rbanffy
> It only restricts how you can go about sharing and distributing it.

Let me clarify this: the GPL allows you to redistribute your modified version.
It only mandates you give your users _the same rights you were given_ , so
that they too can study and modify and share their work.

You get to stand on the shoulders of giants (for free!), but you have no right
to prevent others from doing the same.

~~~
forrestthewoods
"but you have no right to prevent others from doing the same"

That's not quite right. It's not you have no right to prevent others from
doing the same. Neither GPL nor MIT let you stop other people from standing on
the same shoulders you stood on. The difference is whether you must let people
stand on your shoulders. GPL forces you to open your shoulders. MIT lets you
choose to share your shoulders or not.

~~~
digi_owl
Or rather than shoulders, how about ladders?

If you use a GPL ladder to get up, you are mandated to leave it in place so
that others can do the same. With a MIT ladder you are free to pull it up
behind you.

Now the latter may be more free in the absolutist sense, but it is a very
antisocial kind of free. But then the corporate world has proven again and
again that it will be very antisocial if it gets them a pound of flesh...

~~~
forrestthewoods
No. That's not right. At all.

If you use a GPL ladder to get up and then climb even higher then you are
mandated to not just leave the ladder but to extend as you continue to climb.

If you use an MIT ladder to get up then climb even higher then you have the
choice to extend the ladder as you go or not. Or partially extend it in some
places but not all. But there is literally nothing you can do to the original
ladder. It's there for anyone else to use exactly as you used it and there's
nothing you can do to stop them.

------
Eridrus
Arguments about GPL vs permissive licenses are pretty much moot when so many
companies are building SaaS software. Without the Affero extension, GPL is
pretty much toothless to stop SaaS companies using your software without
releasing their source code.

Personally, I think there should be an Affero LGPL since the abundance of
permissively licensed code makes my day job so much more pleasant and I would
be happy if everyone was forced to share their contributions. Though I will
say that even AGPL seems like it has a hole where you simply expose whatever
library you want to use as a network service, and you only have to release the
wrapper.

But I'm a little confused by what the goals of the GPL license are besides a
warm and fuzzy feeling that no-one is ripping them off though. Professional
software developers outnumber volunteers by huge margins, most people working
on open source code bases are getting paid to do it.

The ability of corporations to make use of open source is what funds most of
the actual development. If you couldn't run proprietary software on Linux, it
would probably not be getting any significant attention.

Hence my thoughts on LGPL being a superior license to actually making sure
improvements see the light of day. GPL is simply a nonstarter for most
companies since they're trying to build up a useful asset and are not willing
to open source key bits of it (which are generally not technically
interesting), but are more than happy to release improvements to
infrastructure, since that's not their core business.

Is it just that the atmosphere has changed? When GPL was a more common
license, it seems like they were really fighting the good fight, since
companies weren't willing to release anything lest they give up some
competitive advantage, whereas these days at least some code is being
released.

~~~
jallmann
> what the goals of the GPL license are besides a warm and fuzzy feeling that
> no-one is ripping them off

GPL ensures freedom for _users_ of the software, not _developers_ of the
software -- a distinction that is missed every single time licensing is
discussed. Developers that use the GPL are (hopefully consciously) making a
choice to ensure software freedom for their users.

This article did a very good job of tackling this this from another
perspective, by addressing the usual (and tired) argument that the GPL offers
less freedom than more permissive licenses due to the share-alike clause.
Limiting "power" to take away freedom is a nice way to put it.

Not to derail this discussion, but my personal opinion is that the GPL is a
bit ahead of its time. With the marginal cost of software being nil, the path
of least resistance is just to make software free. The problem is, someone
still has to produce this software, and unless we hit post-scarcity,
production is going to cost money [1]. So the GPL straddles an awkward tension
between ideals and economic reality right now. This is in addition to the more
overt goals of FSF/GNU in terms of privacy, control and self-determination,
which RMS has proven to be quite prescient about.

[1] "In the long run, making programs free is a step toward the postscarcity
world, where nobody will have to work very hard just to make a living. People
will be free to devote themselves to activities that are fun, such as
programming, after spending the necessary ten hours a week on required tasks
such as legislation, family counseling, robot repair and asteroid prospecting.
There will be no need to be able to make a living from programming."

[https://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.html](https://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.html)
\-- a very good read.

~~~
djur
Nearly every argument against the GPL is based on convenience or desirability
for developers. I think in a lot of ways that's the primary split between the
FSF free/OSI open source factions.

Reading the GNU manifesto was a lifechanger for me. Even though I've strayed
(i.e. am employed producing proprietary software), I still believe the GNU
project and the FSF are the most important things to ever happen to the
computing world.

------
new299
As a developer, the GPL is useful when you want to ensure that people don't
take your work and profit from it. So it's often useful when companies want to
level the playing field, without allowing competitors to gain an advantage. A
cynic might say it allows you to subsume the competition, and control the
market (if you maintain control of development). This can make the GPL a
"safer" license for companies to release code under in some situations.

The GPL is also useful if you have a political interest in moving the
community as a whole toward open source software for everything.

BSD-like licenses are useful when you want to gain adoption above all else. So
BSD-like (or dual licensing) can be useful for example for file format
reference parsers, tools were you want to gain adoption by companies (perhaps
to later provide consulting work).

As a user of software (not a developer/vendor of any kind). You probably don't
care, as long as you can gain access to the sourcecode, so you can potentially
get bugs fixed by a contractor. But the GPL protects users interests, so it
may well be in your interest to support the use of the GPL on new projects.

~~~
geon
> the GPL is useful when you want to ensure that people don't take your work
> and profit from it.

Huh? Are you saying you can't make a profit from gpl-ed code? Then why was it
written to begin with? If company A can profit from it, then so can company B.

As far as licenses are concerned anyway. Time to market and network effects
are probably much more important.

~~~
new299
> Huh? Are you saying you can't make a profit from gpl-ed code? Then why was
> it written to begin with? If company A can profit from it, then so can
> company B.

I think selling GPL'd software is a difficult proposition yes. I don't think I
know of any of any GPL projects which are sold for profit (unless there's some
other value-add, in which case they are selling the value-add not the GPL'd
software).

> As far as licenses are concerned anyway. Time to market and network effects
> are probably much more important.

In a limited view of software where you're only talking about websites you're
possibly correct...

~~~
kevinnk
There are plenty of dual licensed codebases that make a profit with no
additional value add (other than not having to respect the GPL.) For example,
the popular C++ gui framework JUICE[1]

[1] [http://www.juce.com/faq#t78n75645](http://www.juce.com/faq#t78n75645)

------
manicdee
Redundant rant. OccupyGPL site now redirects to
[http://choosealicense.com/](http://choosealicense.com/)

OccupyGPL previously complained that GPL wasn't really free because it imposed
the burden of freedom on the business trying to sell a closed-source product
who was hoping to use GPL or other Copyleft code.

------
comex
> In the strange world of OccupyGPL, that’s a “restriction”, I guess because
> it… restricts you from placing restrictions on someone else? But that’s as
> silly as saying that outlawing slavery reduces freedom, because it takes
> away some people’s freedom to own slaves. Hey, the analogy may be
> inflammatory, but the logic is the same, and it doesn’t make sense in either
> case. The freedom to take away others’ freedom is not a meaningful freedom
> to have — the proper word for that is not “freedom” but “power”.

A more pragmatic way to put it is that it restricts you from using the code in
the many real-life situations in which GPLing your entire program is simply
not an option. The ideology behind the GPL is fundamentally utopian: it starts
with a result - that users of software should have the freedoms to use,
modify, share, etc. - and reverse engineers the rest of the world from there,
including business models that are very different from the way most companies
operated at the time of its creation and now, and which are not always
practical. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, as it leads to a quite firm and
well-defined set of principles, and can serve as a lighthouse for real
businesses to try to navigate towards. But it means that individual developers
often find themselves in situations where the GNU philosophy is irrelevant -
while it's talking about the choice of whether to write free or proprietary
software, or this blog post is considering marginal issues like the physical
difficulty of distributing source code, they have, for various reasons,
already found free software unacceptable as a premise, and are faced with the
choice of what software to use. By virtue of their employment or business
situation, they are not in the "club", and certain software only available to
the "club" is therefore unavailable. From this standpoint, it's easy to see
why the GPL feels like a restriction of freedom.

Sometimes the premise is more mutable than it originally seems. See "Why CLISP
is under GPL"[1] (an email thread barely younger than I am at 22), the old
Apple Objective-C thing, and probably a lot of other cases; or look at the
case of the Linux kernel, where the utter technical dominance of a GPLed
program over all alternatives in certain spaces (particularly embedded) has
made a lot of companies who clearly want absolutely nothing to do with free
software put up source release webpages. Such examples are often cited as
benefits of the copyleft strategy, and rightly so. But for better or worse,
they're the exception rather than the rule.

[1]
[http://clisp.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/clisp/clisp/doc/Why-...](http://clisp.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/clisp/clisp/doc/Why-
CLISP-is-under-GPL)

~~~
belorn
Businesses has been limited in a very pragmatic way from doing what they most
would want to do: Take money from people. The way you can take money from
people is extraordinary restrictive in society, limited to fair trades and
agreements. They are restricted from applying a freedom of entrepreneurship
that privateer and slavers enjoyed in 19th century, or mobsters during the
early 20th century. Stealing, murder, slavery, and plunder are all restricted
ways to reach profits.

One might wonder why more businesses succeed today with all those restrictions
compared to the times when everyone was free. It almost seems that freedom is
distinctly bad for everyone, and restrictions, harsh has they might be,
benefits everyone. I think it might be correlated with the businesses desire
to be protected, as a ship full of gold serves little purpose if it is all
stolen by someone else.

------
new299
OccupyGPL now redirects to "choosealicense.com", but it's still available on
waybackmachine if anyone's interested:

[http://web.archive.org/web/20150210203941/http://www.occupyg...](http://web.archive.org/web/20150210203941/http://www.occupygpl.org/)

~~~
djur
Wow, that is insanely over the top and also pretty poorly written. I
appreciate the irony of using a historically leftist image like the raised
fist to promote what is essentially a pro-capitalist message ("Even if these
people are companies who want to develop proprietary solutions. [sic] A
company using your technology will increase the value of the project").

~~~
digi_owl
Welcome to modern marketing/propaganda, no symbol is beyond re-purposing.

------
kazinator
[http://choosealicense.com/no-license/](http://choosealicense.com/no-license/)
neglects to cover liability, focusing only on permissions. While you may have
a "right" not to put a license on your distributed work, you are open to
liability if that work is implicated as a cause of some harm. A good chunk of
the MIT license text is about liability, and it's ALL CAPS, which makes it 90%
by weight.

~~~
geon
Isn't this extremely US-centric? In my country, I can't even imagine someone
suing (much less winning) for using a piece of software they got for free.

~~~
kazinator
Well, the BSD and MIT licenses _are_ named after institutions that are in the
US of A. Many popular software licenses are American, and are based in
American legal doctrine.

Liability related to something which was "free" makes a certain amount of
sense. Something given away from free could be harmful. Just because the giver
didn't take compensation doesn't mean it's not their fault.

Basically, when you give something for free, you're implicitly making a
representation that the thing is good. If you don't make any disclaimers, then
that representation is all there is. And so if that something you gave away
causes harm, your representation now looks like a misrepresentation: you
tricked someone into being harmed by your gift.

That's what I think is the general idea.

If your country doesn't have this sort of concept among its legal doctrines
and statutes, that's kind of bad!

------
anonbanker
After viewing this link, I think RMS might not be seeing the big picture here.
There isn't merely an attack on GCC, but rather an attack on Free Software
itself.

HN has proven for the past few years that the valley is less in-tune with
individual freedom than they are with corporate-compatible licenses. This has
understandably created some disconnect and often friction between us. but
regardless, stay with me on my reasoning.

within a three month window, we have seen:

* a downright (successful) coup by systemd, which is an RPC backdoor for proprietary corporate software to bypass GPL restrictions via trivial bits of LGPL'ed code, wrapped in the controversial plan to swallow the GNU toolchain whole.

* very real talks about (GPL'd) GCC being replaced by (BSD Licensed) LLVM, followed by the peanut gallery using this as an example of the inferior quality of the GPL.

* an outright attack on the GPL, using the slimiest sound bytes and half-truths, for not being corporate-compatible.

Call me a conspiracy theorist (Literally: one who has a proven hypothesis
about a group of people working together to commit a crime), but in the
eighteen years I've been running linux, I've never seen this large an effort
to sway people from using Free Software before. And no, I haven't forgotten
about SCO v. IBM[0], "Get The Facts" campaign, or Halloween Documents I and
II[1].

It would be easy to make a case for Microsoft, still being run by Steve
Ballmer[2], as the culprit. But Apple and Cisco (and Red Hat, post-CentOS
purchase) are not very good players in the GPL sandbox, and we can't exactly
rule them out. All I know is I see a pattern, and, Confirmation Bias
notwithstanding, I'll keep talking about it if these sort of articles continue
getting frontpaged on HN.

0\.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO%E2%80%93Linux_controversies...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO%E2%80%93Linux_controversies#Microsoft_funding_of_SCO_controversy)

1\.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents#Documents_I...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents#Documents_I_and_II)

2\. [http://arstechnica.com/business/2015/02/one-year-in-its-
stil...](http://arstechnica.com/business/2015/02/one-year-in-its-still-steve-
ballmers-microsoft-satya-nadella-just-runs-it/)

------
bitL
This site just reinforces my view that people are getting more insane and
lazy, and to stick with releasing my own software under GPL...

It won't prevent anyone from "stealing" my code (e.g. incorporating it into
their own code without giving any credits nor releasing their modifications to
the public), but at least their conscience will make them feel a bit worse,
which I believe OccupyGPL is a sign of.

I had my own share of rip offs when I generously released my SQL database
server code under a more permissive license and as a consequence for multiple
years students ripped it off for their own projects at one university I
attended, and pretended they wrote it themselves...

------
egil
Google cache of the original page in question,
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:TSYSWNu...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:TSYSWNu5z2AJ:www.occupygpl.org/)

