> What difference does it make to you in that situation whether the result of the hour of work that you are paid for is licenced under GPL or under a proprietary licencse?
Directly, not at all. But most companies find it very difficult to turn a profit on GPL-licensed software without resorting to things that render the whole thing moot, like being SAAS vendors who never "distribute" the software in the first place. The whole "derivative works" angle on the GPL, then, makes it hard for commercial vendors to make distributable software that relies on GPL packages without putting their own revenue stream at great peril.
So commercial software shops tend to build on MIT, BSD or Apache licensed stuff. Which is typically NBD. My experience has been that fears about "not contributing back" are typically unfounded. Everyone submits pull requests for their bugfixes and enhancements, because nobody wants to deal with maintaining some special snowflake private version of cURL or whatever.
Consequently, I think that the elephant in the room is that, typically, when people complain that there's something akin to a moral obligation to use GPL, what it's really about is fears that someone might make more money than they think is seemly by shipping closed-source software that relies on open-source components. Which, fine, if you don't like that, you do you and license the software however you want. But don't begrudge the rest of us for not being quite so worried about that.
As far as the whole ownership thing goes, I'd say it was pretty clearly implied in your first sentence:
> The programmer doesn't sell code, the programmer sells time writing software. With proprietary software, the owner of that software has a monopoly on the work on that software
That statement tacitly denies the existence of freelance software developers, by implying that all programmers are working for another company for some sort of salary or wage, and don't ever individually own code themselves. Which isn't quite true, and subtly frames things in a way that strips developers of their moral agency.
> So commercial software shops tend to build on MIT, BSD or Apache licensed stuff.
That's just not true in this generality. If you do custom commercial software for a customer's own use, using GPL code can work perfectly fine. The customer pays for the development work and gets the code under GPL. The customer in such cases often will get the source anyway, and it really doesn't matter whether it's GPL or proprietary.
> Consequently, I think that the elephant in the room is that, typically, when people complain that there's something akin to a moral obligation to use GPL, what it's really about is fears that someone might make more money than they think is seemly by shipping closed-source software that relies on open-source components.
As for myself, that is just not correct, and I don't really think it's a common sentiment. I care about my own and others' freedom to control their own computers and data. If you use my GPL code to make money, good for you.
> That statement tacitly denies the existence of freelance software developers, by implying that all programmers are working for another company for some sort of salary or wage, and don't ever individually own code themselves. Which isn't quite true, and subtly frames things in a way that strips developers of their moral agency.
Well, yeah, it's not quite true, but largely, it is, including for freelance developers. If you work on a customer's proprietary software project as a consultant or whatever, you normally don't get to keep the copyright either. You get paid whatever price was agreed upon and the customer gets to own the code.
Yes, if you do independent software development and you only licence your proprietary software to your customers, then the above does not apply to you.
Directly, not at all. But most companies find it very difficult to turn a profit on GPL-licensed software without resorting to things that render the whole thing moot, like being SAAS vendors who never "distribute" the software in the first place. The whole "derivative works" angle on the GPL, then, makes it hard for commercial vendors to make distributable software that relies on GPL packages without putting their own revenue stream at great peril.
So commercial software shops tend to build on MIT, BSD or Apache licensed stuff. Which is typically NBD. My experience has been that fears about "not contributing back" are typically unfounded. Everyone submits pull requests for their bugfixes and enhancements, because nobody wants to deal with maintaining some special snowflake private version of cURL or whatever.
Consequently, I think that the elephant in the room is that, typically, when people complain that there's something akin to a moral obligation to use GPL, what it's really about is fears that someone might make more money than they think is seemly by shipping closed-source software that relies on open-source components. Which, fine, if you don't like that, you do you and license the software however you want. But don't begrudge the rest of us for not being quite so worried about that.
As far as the whole ownership thing goes, I'd say it was pretty clearly implied in your first sentence:
> The programmer doesn't sell code, the programmer sells time writing software. With proprietary software, the owner of that software has a monopoly on the work on that software
That statement tacitly denies the existence of freelance software developers, by implying that all programmers are working for another company for some sort of salary or wage, and don't ever individually own code themselves. Which isn't quite true, and subtly frames things in a way that strips developers of their moral agency.