

Occupy GPL the movement to rid the world of non-permissive open source licenses - zangi
http://www.occupygpl.org

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tptacek
If you release your code under the GPL (or even the AGPL) and discover after a
few months that your community would work better if the code was MIT licensed,
you can always release under a new license.

If, on the other hand, you release under the MIT license and discover after a
few months that your "community" is a bunch of product companies using your
code without contributing anything back, you _cannot_ easily GPL your code.
Everything you released under the maximally permissive license will stay
released that way.

Think also of the dynamics of forks. If you look at GPL->MIT and MIT->GPL as
two instances of a fork, it's easy to see why GPL->MIT leaves you with the
winning fork: people will probably gravitate towards the more permissive fork.
On the other hand, if you fork and GPL, your competitors will have a _lot_ of
incentive to make sure that the MIT fork wins.

People have a habit of looking at the GPL solely through the lens of politics
and principles. But the GPL is also a very valuable business tool. It allows
companies to open-source things that they wouldn't otherwise be willing to
open.

~~~
quadrangle
To be perfectly fair (although I totally agree with you!), if a project is
copylefted and receives community contributions under that license without a
Contributor License Agreement (which is arguably a bad and susect thing to
require), this then makes the fork to more permissive much harder as it
requires everyone's buy-in, whereas the fork the other way is always feasible,
but still has the issues you bring up.

Overall, it would be a great thing if all code were AGPL and everyone had to
simply work out reasonable livelihoods and business arrangements within that
neutral commons framework. The issue is that a world of mixed proprietary and
open code is an uneven one with tragedies of the commons. Copyleft helps avoid
those tragedies, which every player actually wants to avoid.

------
CHY872
This is terrible work from whoever's made this page. Many important advances
have taken place due to software being licensed under the GPL.

For example, Objective C wouldn't be supported by GCC unless Steve Jobs hadn't
been forced to license the Objective C frontend under the GPL. c.f. Apple not
making the source to the Swift compiler available, since LLVM is more
permissively licensed. Now it is very difficult for people to create
extensions, or submit bug fixes etc to Swift.

There's a case of a Lisp compiler being made open source simply because the
developer wanted to use readline.

Licensing your software under the GPL can precipitate more software being
licensed under the GPL. It leads to improvements and bugfixes being made
public, and ensures that the developer can receive something back from those
who use the software.

On the other hand, it's clearly not for everyone. If you as a developer wish
to see your code being used on as many computers as possible, then you'll be
cutting off some of your potential market by licensing your non-standalone
tool as GPL.

The odd thing is that this site seems to suggest a false dichotomy of GPL vs
permissive. It's perfectly possible to (say) dual license software as GPL or
commercial - any company that sees value from your software could have the
choice of paying $100 for a license.

If your software holds enough value to them that it saves them a day or two of
their developer time, then everyone comes out on top.

------
notacoward
Somebody seems to have misunderstood what the GPL actually requires. Here's
their example:

"the company needs to ship a product so it’d like to keep their core closed
source. The GPL outlaws this kind of interaction. Our good citizen, a company
wants to release their patches to your library back to the community and yet
the GPL is banning them from doing so!"

That last sentence is utterly false, and the exclamation point doesn't make it
true. The GPL is absolutely not prohibiting them from distributing their
patched version of anyone's library. It merely requires that if they do so
then they might have to publish other source as well. _MIGHT_. I'll get to
that in a moment. The point is that GPL is adding a requirement, not a
prohibition. Might they find that requirement onerous? Certainly. Nothing
wrong with that, but portraying it as a prohibition is dishonest.

Now, about that "might" part. GPL might require that you publish other code
_only if_ it meets operative definitions of linkage and derivative works.
Those are complex issues which I doubt can be addressed adequately here on HN,
but maybe we can set some bounds. At one extreme, if you use a public API to
an existing library which is loaded separately from your proprietary code,
you're almost certainly OK. At the other extreme, if your proprietary code
meddles in the GPL code's internals or vice versa (via your patches) to the
extent that either becomes meaningless without the other, then you'd probably
be held to have created a derivative work and would be required to publish the
interdependent code under GPL.

The way this works out in practice is that the majority of proprietary/GPL
combinations actually do not create an obligation to publish anything except
your patches to the GPL code involved. When that's not the case, it's by
design to prevent the "secret sauce" version of a library from displacing its
still-open antecedent. Agree, disagree, but please don't misrepresent.

------
skore
"The GPL is not a free license. It does not grant freedom, it grants different
restrictions."

 _sigh_

Then why have a license at all?

You have to draw the line somewhere - we live in a complicated world full of
complicated humans. The FSF chose to draw the line in a very particular way
and they have perfectly good reasons for doing that. Other people or companies
choose differently for different reasons[0]. This site tries to even landgrab
the very particular phrasing of "Free" that the FSF uses. The _guts_ of some
people.

[0] The site mentions MIT, BSD or zlib as licenses but guess why Google
chooses Apache? Because patents. Because the world is a complicated place full
of complicated people.

------
ekidd
No thank you. My licenses are my choice.

For my open source libraries, I use the Unlicense, because I want to minimize
licensing friction. But if I'm distributing (say) a complete end-user
application that represents programmer-years of work, I'm likely to use the
GPL, because I may not want somebody to fork it and make it proprietary. It's
my code and _my_ decision.

If you want to use my GPLed code in your proprietary product, you can find my
email address and pay my company an appropriate license fee. And if you think
this is somehow unfair, my wisest course of action is probably to avoid doing
_any_ business with you: You're raising all kinds of "horrible customer"
warning flags.

~~~
MetaCosm
Random aside about Unlicense. Unlicense depends on two core ideas that are not
anywhere near universally applicable... public domain and relinquishment
rights. This makes unlicense a non-starter in Germany, and most likely
completely invalid in Australia. These issues are why SQLite offers special
licenses
([http://www.sqlite.org/copyright.html](http://www.sqlite.org/copyright.html))
-- and the SQLite license was the inspiration for Unlicense.

My point is -- Unlicense doesn't do too much to minimize license friction and
actually creates complicated international issues. I don't use it -- because I
don't want to have to hand out "special" licenses based on where my users
live.

------
quadrangle
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UneYZikN85Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UneYZikN85Q)
required viewing for pro-business people who are somehow clueless about how
important the GPL is for businesses.

And, no, losing ability to impose your power over others via a proprietary
license isn't a reduction in your freedom. GPL is not non-free, it's non-
power-enabling. GPL says you can do as you like but not restrict the freedom
of others. To be absurd, "the freedom to own slaves" is not _freedom_ , and
analogously, "the freedom to restrict others via proprietary licenses" is not
_freedom_.

------
addisonj
Huh... Not sure I will ever understand the idealogical debate of different OSS
software licenses.

Ultimately, different licenses work well for different projects. More
permissive OSS licenses (BSD/MIT and other) seem to be the best choice for
libraries and other bits of code that can be freely shared and used without
worrying about modification restrictions, linking, etc etc.

GPL on the other hand has really found its niche in larger projects for
complete software packages that often are primarily developed by a single
entity but made open to allow contributions and customizations.

Both types fit a use case, both types are useful and we have seen success
using both models. Why isn't that good enough?

------
droope
I think people whine because they can't legally use these awesome open source
software without releasing the software they are making as open source, but
that is exactly why GPL exists.

Sure, you could update the library you use and release those changes as open
source while you make closed source software. But people pay you for your
software, why shouldn't you pay for the libraries you use?

GPL is a free license.

------
TheCoelacanth
> The GPL is not a free license. It restricts freedoms only to people it deems
> to be morally acceptable.

That's just completely false. It does not restrict who can use it. It
restricts how you can use it, but not who can use it.

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oldmanjay
I agree in a limited sort of way, in that I personally use BSD-alike licenses
for my software, but I just can't get behind the idea that things I don't like
shouldn't exist. That's too religious a standpoint for me to support.

~~~
theonewolf
Yes, "ridding the world" of the GPL is a bit too strong of a stance to take.
Almost like a knee-jerk reaction.

I think it would be better to catalog the licenses into categorical types so
that we could then more intelligently decide which license to use, and also
understand our own "chosen" licenses better.

In some cases, the GPL may be desired or even necessary to achieve the
vision/goals of the authors of some software.

------
Sir_Cmpwn
I completely agree. I use MIT wherever possible. I'm glad someone is stirring
up the drama pot again.

