
Why I am pro-GPL - paroneayea
http://dustycloud.org/blog/why-i-am-pro-gpl/
======
TazeTSchnitzel
It's worth remembering why the GPL was invented.

Stallman had a printer which had proprietary drivers, and he wanted to fix an
issue with the driver. He couldn't. He created the GPL so that, in future,
people wouldn't have this problem.

Stallman created the GPL because he cared about user freedom.

~~~
wedowhatwedo
But on the other hand, VLC was packaged for the iphone at one point to let
users of that platform use it. Source was made available to everyone. It was
decided that GPL version 3 wouldn't allow GPL software on the iphone so users
were not free to use GPL software on their platform. It is available now for
iphone so I'm not sure what changed. I thought it was very odd that GPL
advocates wanted to limit user freedom in that case.

~~~
jbk
Seriously, most of your facts are wrong. Source: I'm the president of
VideoLAN, I did the VLC relicensing[1], and spent a lot of time on GPL/stores
compatibility [2].

VLC was GPLv2+ and so was libVLC (the engine library that was spawned from
VLC). VLC was put on iOS store as a GPLv2 app, which was not compatible with
Apple ToS, and was therefore removed by Apple.

At the same time, libVLC was relicensed over 2 years to LGPLv2.1+ for reasons
that were non related to appstores.

As a side-effect, VLC for iOS was rewritten and licensed as MPLv2 to be on the
AppStore, with a slight bit less features.

For your information, the main reason that the AppStore is not GPL compatible,
is because the AppStore DOES NOT allow you to use an application as you want
(even non-open-source ones). This is forbidden by the GPL. Which shows exactly
that the GPL tries to enforce the users freedom.

[1] [http://www.jbkempf.com/blog/post/2012/I-did-
it](http://www.jbkempf.com/blog/post/2012/I-did-it) [2]
[https://archive.fosdem.org/2015/schedule/event/appstores/](https://archive.fosdem.org/2015/schedule/event/appstores/)

~~~
minot
Thank you for your work. I have a question about copyright assignment. You
wrote:

>Unlike a lot of large open source projects, authors of VLC keep all their
rights on their code, even if the code is minimal.

[http://www.jbkempf.com/blog/post/2012/How-to-properly-
relice...](http://www.jbkempf.com/blog/post/2012/How-to-properly-relicense-a-
large-open-source-project)

For an entirely new project, would you rather require all contributors to
assign copyright to a single entity which then manages licensing or would you
have individuals retain copyright? (Off topic: is this even possible in
France?)

~~~
jbk
> For an entirely new project, would you rather require all contributors to
> assign copyright to a single entity which then manages licensing or would
> you have individuals retain copyright? (Off topic: is this even possible in
> France?)

First, there are more than 2 options. I'd say there are 3.

Copyright assignment is ALWAYS the wrong answer. It's a bad idea, and I would
even that this is unethical, and illegal in numerous countries.

If you want more control, notably for a potential future license change, do a
Copyright agreement that is not an assignment. Explain clearly what is in the
agreement and what is not.

Total individual copyright is a great idea, but if you care about an
application that will go on an appstore, don't go this route. If you integrate
a lot of library, same. But if you do a new cool software, just for fun, yes,
keep it like this.

------
bcg1
Christopher Allen Webber is a FLOSS hero and in my opinion deserves the utmost
respect, although I suspect he is probably too humble to agree with that.

I concur with everything he has written in his post... but one thing I'd add
to the points he made is my annoyance with the implication made by many that
proponents of permissive licensing care about freedom more than people who use
copyleft licenses.

People who really care about freedom care about it for EVERYONE, and licensing
that maximizes freedom for everyone trumps the "strings attached" in that
regard, that is such a simple thing to see that it challenges credulity to
think that someone who cares about freedom could say otherwise.

If you want everyone to use permissive licensing because you want to use free
software inside of locked down programs you produce and are frustrated that
great copyleft software doesn't let you do that, fine. I can respect that
position because I've experienced the same problem. But please get over it and
find some non-free solution to your problem, instead of trying to undermine
the ideology of people who actually care about freedom just because you are
jealous of the quality of software that has that ideology attached to it.

~~~
burntsushi
> If you want everyone to use permissive licensing because you want to use
> free software inside of locked down programs you produce and are frustrated
> that great copyleft software doesn't let you do that, fine. I can respect
> that position because I've experienced the same problem. But please get over
> it and find some non-free solution to your problem, instead of trying to
> undermine the ideology of people who actually care about freedom just
> because you are jealous of the quality of software that has that ideology
> attached to it.

Stop pigeonholing people who disagree with you. I'd like everyone to use
permissive licensing because I believe copyright (and more generally,
intellectual property) is unjust. Copyleft is only possible in a world with a
strong IP system.

~~~
clacke2
If you are against copyright, support copyleft, which gives even big companies
an incentive to dislike copyright!

~~~
burntsushi
Copyleft depends on copyright.

Additionally, my goal is to make my software as widely usable as possible.
Using the GPL runs contrary to this goal.

~~~
rando289
> Using the GPL runs contrary to this goal.

Saying "giving everyone the right to share it" is contrary to the goal of
having it be shared widely (aka adopted), is at least a gross
oversimplification and at most an absurd statement.

However, RMS sees room for tactically using permissive licenses for the
purpose of adoption too,
[http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/pragmatic.en.html](http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/pragmatic.en.html)

Getting more adoption as part of proprietary software may or may not lead to
more overall adoption. Bsd kernel vs linux kernel is a case for gpl leading to
more adoption than permissive. GPL says "allow EVERYONE to share it." And in
some cases, more people share it this way! Who would have guessed? And it can
lead to more people contributing, because they know everyone will have the
right to share their work. The fact that permissive code means it could be
shared LESS, because it can't be part of software which makes sharing illegal,
is kind of across purposes. I mean, if you just care about adoption, a lot of
times, you might get more by keeping it completely proprietary and selling the
copyright to a big company. Or you might get more by embedding it into worms
and phishing emails and running a botnet.

~~~
burntsushi
I'm not writing a kernel. The fact remains that if I use the GPL, people will
tell me that they can't use it because their legal department forbids it.
Alternatively, using it requires approval from their legal team and that
requires enough effort not to use my code.

This isn't some theory that you can weasel your way out of using examples.
It's based on real experiences I've had.

~~~
rando289
I was not weaseling out of it. I explained how it can go either way.

~~~
burntsushi
And I'm saying it doesn't in my case. Fewer people would use my code if I made
it copyleft.

------
tdees40
I work in industry. Anything GPL is a non-starter. I totally understand and
appreciate the concerns, but at BigCorp GPL doesn't play.

edit: I'm well aware that some people don't want industry using their code.
Great! But that's really limiting the scope of who's going to get involved,
and it's probably going to make it harder to get a sufficient community
involved to help your project achieve liftoff.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
OK, so large companies won't extend your software. What's wrong with that?

~~~
stephengillie
At Microsoft (at least circa 2010) you weren't allowed to even install GPL
software, for fear that a developer might wind up using it somehow, and cause
the GPL to apply to all of, like, Windows 7.

Sorry for the hyperbole, but the concern was very real, even if poorly
defined.

~~~
Afton
This statement is false as a blanket. I worked at MS in 2010, and I had vim
and git installed on my machine. What they didn't want me to do was to install
(or look at!) the source code.

The amount of FUD from rank-and-file employees was shocking though. Based on
ignorance, but they just weren't part of the GPL world, and didn't care to
understand it deeply. So I don't doubt that you may have asked someone and
been told "Oh god, don't even _look_ at that stuff". But it wasn't any kind of
company wide policy.

I did end up talking to folks that were trying to _make_ such a company wide
policy, but even then what they were pushing for was some kind of GPL
registry, where if you installed any open source software, you had to register
it with the powers that be. I don't think that went anywhere though.

~~~
dalke
(nitpick: vim isn't distributed under the GPL)

~~~
Afton
I _knew_ someone was going to notice that! :)

It's true, but it is 'open source', and many of my coworkers were not
particularly discriminating among the different interpretations of OSS.

------
beering
A few years from now, when you want to hack on some new gizmo and you find out
that the toolchain is a pile of proprietary blobs that only work on Windows
and an old version of RHEL, you can thank the "pro-user" supporters of clang
and its non-copyleft license.

(I think this is already happening with GPU toolchains but that's not my
field.)

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
I mistakenly downvoted you, FWIW.

This is happening with Apple. Apple were so enraged about a GPL compliance
lawsuit that they pored tons of resources into LLVM, perhaps just out of
spite.

~~~
spiralpolitik
They were so spiteful that they offered to license the whole thing under the
GPL. But because RMS uses an e-mail client written in the last century he
missed the offer.

[https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-
devel/2015-02/msg00...](https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-
devel/2015-02/msg00594.html)

------
smhenderson
_There is no reason to pit permissive and copyleft licensing against each
other. Anyone doing so is doing a great disservice to user freedom._

Or, IMHO more likely, has an agenda that benefits from permissive licensing.

~~~
gress
An agenda such as putting food on the table.

~~~
konstruktor
This is a perfectly valid agenda, but it doesn't entitle one to doing so using
the results of somebody else's labour.

~~~
jcranmer
Why are you releasing source if you don't want others to use the results of
your labor?

~~~
EdSharkey
Copyright holders do all kinds of wacky things. Who are you to judge?

------
jbandela1
I think the GPL license actually makes user freedom worse by encouraging
developers to release software as web apps instead of as client applications.
This is because a web application that uses GPL software is not required to
release its source code whereas a client application would be required to
release its source code.

The difference in user freedom between web apps and client apps is much bigger
than the difference between a GPL client app and a proprietary client app.
With a client app, even a proprietary one - the user at least in theory can
see exactly what the application is doing and what data it is transmitting
where.

So for the average user - GPL has encouraged loss of user freedom. Of course
this doesn't affect Stallman because he does not use any web apps.

~~~
Tyr42
I also feel the the GPL Affero licence (the GPL response to this, by re-
wording it so that you still have to share the source if it's a webapp) is not
very clear. I know the company I'm working at is willing to be a good GPL
citizen, but refuses to touch GPL affero'd code with a 3 meter pole.

I like it in principle, but I don't feel like it's a good solution in
practice, at least until we get some cases going before a judge to see how it
gets interpreted.

[http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-affero-
gpl.en.html](http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-affero-gpl.en.html)

~~~
quadrangle
AGPL is perfectly clear: if you make source available under AGPL, you are in
compliance. There's nothing to worry about. Plus, nobody ever sues you
initially over (A)GPL compliance, they just ask you to come into compliance
and only sue you if you refuse. Just release the source initially, and you're
all set. Why is this hard?

------
yellowapple
I think this article (and possibly the speaker the article responds to; I
haven't seen any transcript or recording yet) misses one of the bigger poitns
of permissive licensing: the ability for virtually _any_ free software project
to reuse your code. As a developer writing a library or somesuch, my concern
is often whether or not I'm locking a large number of projects out of making
use of my code. Yeah, this means that proprietary software can use it, too,
but at least I'm credited for the work (as per the terms of most
copyfree/copycenter licenses) and other FOSS projects have the same ability.

This isn't to say that copyleft is automatically bad, but rather that
consideration for the general development ecosystem is a worthwhile
consideration. If you're a Perl hacker, for example, you're probably going to
use "the same license as perl itself" (GPL + Artistic License) or perhaps the
Artistic License 2.0 because those are the norms of the Perl community. If
you're a Ruby hacker, you're probably going to use the MIT license because
that's the most common. If you're writing an Emacs package, you'll probably
release it under the GPL. If you're writing an Erlang module, I'd reckon the
Apache license nowadays to be the new baseline.

This is also affected by which operating system you're targeting. BSD folks
will tend to lean permissive, while GNU/Linux folks will tend to lean
copyleft. Windows and OS X folks will tend to lean proprietary or permissive.

In other words, what license to pick really depends on the norms of the
platform you're writing for. There's no "wrong" answer here unless the license
you choose excessively impedes reusability by the broader community you're
operating in, in which case you would be wise to adapt accordingly.

~~~
nickpsecurity
Good point on how all OSS developers benefit rather than just FOSS. However,
the author did address that by noting the permissive licenses goal was mass
adoption and FOSS was pushing their notion of freedom.

~~~
yellowapple
True. I got the impression that the specific nuance of benefiting FOSS as much
as non-FOSS was being a bit glossed over, though.

It's a little bit more nuanced than "mass adoption", too, though. For me (as
someone who tends to lean permissive in his software projects), it's more
about deduplication of work and making my things as useful as possible for
everyone. I'd love for a GPL project or an MPL project or an Apache project or
a BSD project or whatever to find enough value in the code I write to not feel
that they have to write such code themselves.

~~~
nickpsecurity
"True. I got the impression that the specific nuance of benefiting FOSS as
much as non-FOSS was being a bit glossed over, though."

In the original article? Yeah, these people often get so worked up about how
proprietary products can benefit that they forget the huge amount of open-
source, non-GPL efforts that can draw on the work. Despite the fact that the
server traditionally running on every Linux box was an Apache-licensed one
who's name I can't recall... jk.

In any case, I fully respect your decision to try to help OSS projects avoid
wasted work and make something they can all use regardless of license. Similar
to those putting work in the public domain. That used to be a badge of pride
in developer altruism. Now, the standard license (GPL) for altruism forces the
developers will on users of the code. Quite the change OSS went through.

------
smhenderson
I feel like a lot of the comments in this thread are conflating permissively
licensed software with closed source software.

If you want to write software and keep it closed so you can make money off it
I don't necessarily love the idea but I can respect it.

But we're not talking about closed source here, just the difference between
the GPL and permissive licenses like BSD, MIT, etc. I don't see how creating a
killer app and releasing it permissively guarantees a developer an income. The
opposite is the obvious effect. On the other hand using the GPL as your public
license and negotiating a private license with a company like QT does seems
like a logical way to provide user freedom, enjoy feedback and improvements
from the community and still allow for a revenue stream.

It's definitely a tired argument at this point so I was actually pretty happy
when the author went out of his way to reiterate at the end of the article
that there are benefits to both approaches, why can't we all just get along...

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
> I feel like a lot of the comments in this thread are conflating permissively
> licensed software with closed source software.

They're not. They're saying you can take permissively licensed software and
make it proprietary.

------
amirouche
BSD was not meant to shape a future, it was created to maximize the reach of
its software through devaluation.

GPL was created to shape our future and continue to do so. Not just the
forseable reach of our little lifes and immediate surroundings (if any).

I see a lot of people looking at their immediate needs. IMO We need need to
give time to Time. The problem is not FLOSS licensing or software. This is
mostly a solved problem.

------
awinder

      > To return to the arguments made last night, though copyleft
      > defends source, in my view this is merely a strategy towards
      > defending users. And indeed, as in terms of where freedoms 
      > lie between those who make use of the source and code side of
      > things vs the end-user-application side of things, one might 
      > notice a trend: there are very few permissively licensed projects 
      > which aim at end users. Most of them are stepping stones towards 
      > further software development. And this is great! I am glad that 
      > we have so many development tools available, and it seems that 
      > permissive/lax licensing is an excellent strategy here. But when 
      > I think of projects I use every day which are programs I actually run 
      > (for example, as an artist I use Blender, Gimp and Inkscape 
      > regularly), most of these are under the GPL. How many truly major 
      > end-user-facing software applications can you think of that
      > are under permissive licenses? I can think of many under copyleft, 
      > and very few under permissive licenses. This is no coincidence. 
      > Assuming you wish to fight for freedom of the end user, and ensure 
      > that your software remains free for that end user, copyleft 
      > is an excellent strategy.
    

This was the key paragraph from my reading anyways. This is not an argument
for / against whichever license, it's an argument that different types of code
and projects have different licensing trends, and those probably align with
how the code is going to be used and the audience that it's targeting.

------
asgard1024
I sympathize with the author, even though I work at a corporation that doesn't
like GPL.

I think big part why the GPL has been lately out of fashion is that many
developers work for (big) companies, which of course (as correctly stated)
benefit lot more from BSD than GPL.

These developers naturally want to use the great software at work they do or
use as a hobby, so they are willing to compromise with the powers at be
(business leadership) and release their software under a more permissive
license (or pressure their peers working on OSS to release it under more
permissive license).

Of course, if these developers acted really rationally, they would
collectively rise up against such demands; but then they could just establish
some sort of anarchist/libertarian/communist (depending on your leanings)
commune where everything is fair and just.

So I think it's a lot of small pragmatic decisions that ultimately lead to
irrational results.

~~~
omouse
> _These developers naturally want to use the great software at work they do
> or use as a hobby, so they are willing to compromise with the powers at be
> (business leadership) and release their software under a more permissive
> license (or pressure their peers working on OSS to release it under more
> permissive license)._

The funny thing is that using the AGPL or GPL would benefit them; the company
abides by whatever rules they want since they hold the copyright and the
developer gets to use the code for their side projects. The only people who
are out of luck are competitors who can't use the code unless they want to
abide by the AGPL or GPL.

Basically, using the GPL protects the company. The only concern you should
have is if a competitor has enough resources and is unafraid of the GPL or you
don't want users to self-host (supposedly eroding the revenue stream in a
SaaS, though I don't see it since it takes effort to self-host)

------
llllllllllllll
I think this quote from the article is what is all qbout. "In Shane's talk
last night, he argued against copyleft because software licenses should have
"no strings attached". But the very strategy that is advocated above is all
about attaching strings! Copyleft's strings say "you can use my stuff, as long
as you give back what you make from it". But the proprietary differentiation
strategy's strings say "I will use your stuff, and then add terms which forbid
you to ever share or modify the things I build on top of it." Don't be fooled:
both attach strings. But which strings are worse?"

------
dzsekijo
What bothers me both about the article and the comments here that they speak
in the context of the pro-GPL/anti-GPL debate, but what actually gets
discussed is lax vs. copyleft FOSS licensing.

However, the two topics are not the same. I, for one, like the idea of
copyleft licensing (for cases where its appropriate), but don't like GPL. GPL
has taken the status of "the real copyleft license", but indeed it's an abuse
of the idea of copyleft.

Here's why: create the Merry Mermaid Public License (MMPL) as follows: take
the text of the GPL and replace all occurrences of "GNU General Public
License" with "Merry Mermaid Public License". Also remove all references to
FSF and refer to yourself / another non-profit whenever a legal entity is to
be named in the text. MMPL will be essentially the same as GPL, just called
differently. However, GPL will condemn MMPL in the sense that the two won't be
compatible. You can't mix and distribute code bits where one is GPL and one is
MMPL licensed. An aggressive monopolist drive is built in to GPL as it decrees
incompatiblity with other licenses not on base of licensing conditions, but on
base of not being originated from the FSF.

------
ggreer
The author gives good reasons for preferring the GPL to BSD-style licenses,
but it seems to me that there's an even better license for his ideals: the
AGPL.[1] It fulfills the same purpose as the GPL, but it fixes loopholes such
as running code on remote servers (most website back-ends).

I've yet to hear a good argument from ideals that prefers the GPL to AGPL. The
latter really does give people more freedom over how they can use and modify
software.

1\.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affero_General_Public_License](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affero_General_Public_License)

~~~
Gregordinary
The author actually uses the AGPLv3 for MediaGoblin:
[http://mediagoblin.org/](http://mediagoblin.org/)

~~~
ggreer
Thanks for the info.

This confuses me. He knows about the AGPL. He uses it for his own code. Yet he
doesn't even mention it in a post about his favorite license. Why?

~~~
Gregordinary
I found that odd as well. He mentioned using the AGPL for MediaGoblin at
LibrePlanet a couple years ago. Not sure why no mention now.

------
err4nt
I'm very grateful the GPL exists, but I don't like the viral clause of the
GPL. I find people sometimes aren't able to use GPLed code in their projects
which defeats my purpose for putting it under an open licence in the first
place.

Lately I just release stuff under MIT which says you're free to do anything
but remove the copyright notice, or sue me because you used my code. Other
than that it's free for nearly any purpose.

~~~
belorn
Its good that you have defined a purpose for why you release code. When I see
people share a photo on a flikr, a video on youtube, or a song on a band/indy
website they also have a purpose for that. Often it is not to allow companies
to use it in their proprietary products or incorporate it into commercials,
but sometimes they do allow it. Its their choice to decide how viral and
restrictives they are when sharing to the public, even if they can't dictate
how entitled the recipient will feel towards the conditions.

The goal of the license is thus to define what the author will accept and what
they don't. The more authors that actually make an aware choice, the better
the result is.

------
lucozade
I'm torn. I understand the benefits of enforcing user freedom. But it's not
clear to me that users aren't better served by the ubiquity of re-use that the
more permissive licenses have encouraged.

For example, permissive licenses have helped with the walled garden that is
iOS. But would end users be better off if we hadn't had iOS? If it were GPL'd,
sure, but in reality it would never have been. So is its existence, and the
competition it fostered with Android, net beneficial to users?

Maybe more concretely, I feel that the deliberate hamstringing of GCC wrt a
published IR to be, well, wrong. Again, I understand the arguments and I
appreciate the reasoning but it's not clear that the end user is best served
by this.

For me, at least, it probably comes down to the simple statement that, as much
as I value end user freedom, it isn't always the most beneficial thing for the
end user.

On a different day, mind, I'd probably argue the other way...

~~~
phkahler
>> Maybe more concretely, I feel that the deliberate hamstringing of GCC wrt a
published IR to be, well, wrong.

I think hindsight has shown that strategy to be a mistake. But that's a
separate issue from the license.

------
0xdeadbeefbabe
If you want freedom don't involve any lawyers. 's why the Trex ate the lawyer
first:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMzfrod7hcE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMzfrod7hcE)

------
nickpsecurity
The first half of the article was good and balanced. I especially like the
distinction in lay terms: copyleft to push freedom; non-copyleft to push
adoption. That's a great way to describe it to a person contemplating what
license to choose. Then, the article goes in a different direction that
embodies negative qualities that author critiqued in the related presentation.
Let's address a bit of this from my pro-consumer, pro-security/quality, pro-
OSS, anti-copyleft perspective. Mentioned that just so my bias is clear
upfront and why I push adoption-oriented licenses (esp for open hardware &
high assurance).

re stepping stone. Yes, this is the common goal of proprietary use of anti-
copyleft software. IIRC, copyleft software got its start using the
architecture, languages, tools, and platforms of BSD and proprietary
offerings. So, even GPL proponents build on existing work. Anyone wanting an
open, free version of a given enhancement can similarly produce it starting
with the same stepping stones.

re open to closed. We saw this happen with Apple App Store, the QNX source
reversal, attempts to combine open code with DRM, and so on. This is bad.
However, it almost exclusively happens with companies whose licensing, TOS's,
SLA's, etc allow for this sort of thing. That's where the problem is. Avoiding
such companies, selecting safest licenses, and/or ensuring certain conditions
are perpetual in contracts/licenses are easiest solution. GPL is actually a
successful implementation of my claim, although it wasn't good enough. Affero
corrected a major deficiency and more evolutions will probably follow. Many
more licensing schemes can happen to reduce negative impact of business
participation while empowering users.

The common theme in most gripes is what the companies do. The reason we have
this problem is that users almost exclusively do business with scumbag
companies. They don't care about terms. They don't care about its ethics.
Prior abuses rarely make them change companies (see Microsoft and Facebook).
They don't try to leverage their buying power to force (existing) or
incentivize (startups) companies to negotiate something that's favorable to
them and future-proof in main risk areas. Like the old saying, the only thing
that was necessary for triumph of evil was that good people did nothing [while
evil kept its eye on the ball and its hands/feet in a sprint].

A lot of these problems can be avoided by simply investing in the right
organizations. People who pick up Microsoft's server operating system are in
for more schemes than those that used FreeBSD with commercial support. Certain
small companies behind IDE's and libraries have had _great_ terms for their
users for years with minimal hassles unlike the mess that's Microsoft's
development tools. Services provided by non-profits, cooperatives, and
companies simply focused on customer satisfaction have done great compared to
race to bottom in cost or highest shareholder earnings that get many others
scheming on customers. Pick the right people/companies/tools, maintain an out
to avoid lock-in (open formats/API's help), and invest in that. Double down on
it if they use permissive licenses and re-invest back into their communities.

In the end, this is more a problem of incentives than purely a legal one.
People trust companies that don't care about them. They get screwed. Stop
doing that. Do plenty more of the opposite. On top of it, explore alternatives
[1] to popular source-sharing models in case business opportunities arise. Get
momentum going in directions other than companies that do lock-in and lock-
down. After all, I've done a lot of business with proprietary companies and
have mostly avoided being boxed in. Same goes for FOSS use. Imagine that...
All about what you use, how, and from whom. Sacrifices will need to be made,
though, and now we're getting back to user demand (incentives) driving the
negative practices.

Outside a niche, I don't see it happening because market as a whole won't take
responsibility to make it happen. The problems are market's fault, as usual.
Good that niche commercial, OSS, and FOSS have given us plenty of good stuff
to work with. I encourage all of them to keep at it without a need to fight
with any. I avoid GPL strictly for economic reasons: certain investments don't
happen, esp high assurance or ASIC development, unless they can recover the
cost somehow. Additionally, companies adopting high quality components makes
stuff more robust over time. Finally, making money allows them to fight
inevitable patent suits that will attempt to put them out of business and
create more patents for defensive use. So, for economic reasons, I oppose the
GPL in some spaces while respecting it and being neutral in others. My OS is
GPL, for instance, and I'm grateful to its developers & community. :)

[1]
[https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/05/friday_squid_...](https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/05/friday_squid_bl_424.html#c6051639)

------
hasenj
I think the GPL is a little outdated in that it misses the point on what
really matters to ensuring the user's freedom.

I think having an open source application is useless to the end user. I mean
really useless in and of itself.

What really matters is standarizing the data format and providing tools to
convert/export to various other formats.

Say I'm using application X as a free-software word processor. Two years later
I decide I'm done with it, for various reasons it's annoying. I want to
migrate to some other application Y.

Also suppose that X hasn't been in development for over a year and no one is
maintaining it.

Also suppose X is very complicated and no one understands how the code works.

What do I get as a user? What benefit do I get from X being open-source?
Almost nothing.

On the other hand, if X came with tools to "liberate" data from itself, and
had its data format extensively documented, _then_ I could get some real
benefits.

The only thing open source does is allow developers to collectively work on
infrastructure tools. Such as git, etc.

~~~
copsarebastards
I think having an open source application is useless to the end user. I mean
really useless in and of itself.

What really matters is that the user is alive and healthy.

Say I'm dying of cancer. Two years later I die of cancer.

What do I get as a user? What benefit do I get from X being open-source?
Almost nothing.

On the other hand, if X came with a cure for cancer, _then_ I could get some
real benefits.

The only thing open source does is allow developers to gain understanding of
how it works even if no one understands how it works, and then write tools to
"liberate" data from itself and extensive documentation of data formats
knowing that it matches the source code. But I suppose you're right, none of
that is useful if you're looking for other people to solve your problems.

~~~
hasenj
No one is claiming having an open source application will cure cancer.

FSF promotes "free software" as a means of ensuring the user's freedom.

When in fact, if you have a piece of free software that's old and unmaintained
and the code is complicated and no one understands it, your software is by all
definitions "free", but it doesn't really give you the freedom you are
seeking, unless you are a developer yourself.

Most of the time, you will get more freedom if the developers had documented
their data formats and provided tools to liberate your data.

~~~
copsarebastards
> No one is claiming having an open source application will cure cancer.

What? I thought they were!!1!

> When in fact, if you have a piece of free software that's old and
> unmaintained and the code is complicated and no one understands it, your
> software is by all definitions "free", but it doesn't really give you the
> freedom you are seeking, unless you are a developer yourself.

Well obviously knowledge is power, but criticizing the GPL for users' lack of
education is like criticizing the GPL for users dying of cancer. Actually,
it's less reasonable: users are free to fix their own ignorance, while it's a
bit harder to fix cancer.

> Most of the time, you will get more freedom if the developers had documented
> their data formats and provided tools to liberate your data.

¿Porqué no los dos? I'm not sure why you seem to think that ensuring license
freedom is mutually exclusive with documentation and tooling. If anything, I
see a positive correlation with open source and well-documented, migratable
data. Have you ever tried to pull data out of an Excel spreadsheet into a
database?

~~~
hasenj
> I'm not sure why you seem to think that ensuring license freedom is mutually
> exclusive with documentation and tooling

Really? Where did I ever say it was mutually exclusive? Why would you ever
think that?

It's a good thing, but it's _not always necessary_. It's tangential and kind
of misses the point.

------
anon3_
> there are very few permissively licensed projects which aim at end users.

Lack of citation and data noted. I'm assuming good faith and going to approach
this as I would a fellow colleague :)

I'm also going to assume you perhaps haven't been introduced to the vibrant
ecosystem of permissive licensed software.

The article also doesn't mention how GPL is a show-stopper at some companies
where we are building proprietary solutions.

Oracle, IBM, Sony, Apple, Microsoft, Boeing all are monetized empires that
profit not just from binary blobs, but from providing a superior product.
Also, being the patent holder is lucrative.

How do you intend on running a business and feeding your employees, let alone
making investors happy following the virtues of GPL? Consulting and support
only goes so far.

> Most of them are stepping stones towards further software development.

Ever hear of DragonEgg? (GCC was used to bootstrap LLVM/clang in it's early
days.)

Devs use GPL software to write permissive software. Sometimes they do so
because they have no choice but to reinvent the wheel because of GPL's rules.

~~~
dublinben
>providing the user with the best products

You've completely missed the point of the article, and the entire purpose of
Free Software, if you think this is about 'providing users with products' and
generating a return on investment.

~~~
anon3_
> if you think this is about 'providing users with products' and generating a
> return on investment.

In who's eyes?

Consumers want the best product.

Investors want a payout.

How does GPL satisfy either of these?

GPL doesn't have the nimbleness to be viable with the market. It doesn't
respect creativity and time of developers or investors - leaving consumers
left to pick a proprietary / permissive alternative.

You don't need to be GPL to be open: You can MIT/BSD/Apache and still
volunteer to not give out binary blobs [1]

[1]
[https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=491435](https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=491435)

~~~
__david__
> You don't need to be GPL to be open: You can MIT/BSD/Apache and still
> volunteer to not give out binary blobs

That's fine but it's only one level deep. What about the people that download
your source and accept the terms of your license? They are totally free to
make binary blobs and refuse to give source to their downloaders or their
changes back to you.

The GPL directly addresses that and keeps the code free, no matter who gets it
from who. It's really the only way to guarantee software freedom.

------
arunc
Free as in "Freedom".

------
zobzu
My name is zobzu. I fight for the users, and I'm standing up for the GPL.
(seriously tho, same license by default, same reasons - feel free to downvote,
it won't change my licensing choices)

------
gress
This makes the usual false dichotomy between 'users' and 'developers' and
positions GPL advocates as freedom fighters.

Also as usual, there is no mention of how a GPL based economy can work. The
reason the GPL is not loved by developers as much as the freedom fighters
would like is because we need to earn a living. If GPL advocates can address
that, they would be able to stop wasting time with these rants.

~~~
pknight
You seem to be persisting the myth that developers aren't able to make a
living under GPL. In the WordPress ecosystem virtually all products are GPL
compatible and the economy is worth millions and millions. Developers are
doing just fine under it, more than fine actually. I'd like to hear a single
case where GPL licensing made a negative difference between financial success
and failure (maybe they exist, but examples are never brought up, funnily).

~~~
gress
You seem to be perpetuating the fallacy that because some software developers
can make a living under GPL, all software developers can do so.

Perhaps the market has already chosen the correct balance of GPL vs permissive
licenses.

~~~
pknight
I'm not perpetuating this supposed fallacy. Software developers fail with
their products for various different reasons, there just seems to be very
little evidence that the choice of GPL has impacted economic viability. At
least I can say that there is very little evidence of that in the WordPress
ecosystem.

If you complain about the lack of an example of how a GPL based economy can
work, you simply ignore existing markets. The WordPress ecosystem (worth
billions) is almost exclusively GPL and developers are succeeding with
successful products and services, operating businesses in all kinds of revenue
ranges. Many small teams and even solo developers are regularly netting 6-7
figures a year. They are doing so utilizing a variety of business models,
proving that almost any kind of solution can be made to work in some format,
provided it's something people will pay for.

There has always been some push back for the GPL, especially by designers, in
the WordPress space. Despite that things are working. We have an entire
commercial themes market that is selling GPL based themes, with many
successful authors raking in money. Some people thought it was crazy, but
theme sales are sky high.

The only reason some developers aren't making money there isn't because GPL,
it's because the competition is strong and the work is hard and some people
can't or won't adapt.

~~~
gress
You haven't addressed the fallacy which you are in fact making.

~~~
pknight
sigh

