I think that HN is read by a lot of people who want to start a company and make a lot of money. There aren't that many business models (which I know of) to build software, give it away for free and make a lot of money. If that is your goal, then I think some people perceive GPL as a road block rather than a help. (I mean, if you want to build proprietary software, then it would be a lot easier if everything was licensed under a BSD license.)
I'd like to hear more about why the GPL would be a roadblock.
If you're writing code and see the GPL as a roadblock, then you can use a different license.
If you want to use code that is under the license and see the license as a roadblock, no one is forcing you to use that code. It's either compelling enough code that you'll deal with the licensing, or it's not compelling enough and you'll have to roll your own. It's basically just a non-monetary price point then, isn't it?
Am I missing something or is there some kind of assumption that people are entitled to other peoples work if they GPL it?
(Not saying that you make the assumption personally, but that you might be assuming that is what is stopping others)
I'm all thinking aloud / genuinely interested in what the issues are here.
In a perfect world where developers have chosen exactly the license they want then there is nothing really worth discussing. However I think a lot of times people put their software under the GPL because of its position in the open source world, and the rhetoric of the FSF.
There is a continuum from having your code used in a completely non-commercial project to being used by Microsoft in some terrible software. The FSF seems to be still in a mindset where software was controlled by these large companies who are the enemy. I think we've moved on, and I would like the community to reflect that a bit better.
Surely you are not suggesting that people who can write kick-ass code (enough so that more than a handful of people want to use it in their projects), cannot choose their license properly? After all, regardless of GPL rhetoric, the BSD, Apache and MIT licenses are also very popular and someone who does a little digging can find exactly the license he is looking for.......unless he/she intentionally chose GPL!
Also, I dont believe anyone today is silly to believe that Microsoft or "unknown large corporation" will really steal their ruby/python/java code. Most big companies choose their libraries and tools very carefully and are more concerned about lawsuits as opposed to spending some developer time to re-write some library.
Surely you're not suggesting that anybody besides you understands the differences between any of these 30 open source licenses. I've been writing software professionally for 15 years and I can quote you the initials of a few of them, but not even the names. I honestly don't have a clue as to the contents of those licenses, and I just plain don't care.
Sure I've contributed a fair pile of open source software. But it's just code that I've put out on the internet, with no silly license attached. It's entirely possible that some of the places I've stuck that code have presented me a list of checkboxes to randomly select a license, so one of them probably got checked. I can't quite understand why anybody takes this stuff seriously enough to spend even 5 minutes comparing licenses.
Thanks for the explanation. Agreed that BSD is the license of choice for people building proprietary software. Except for 2 points:
- In my lurkings on HN (for a few months now), I have seen that most folks here are pretty fair. Surely then they realize that choosing a license is the prerogative of the author. This is nothing to hate or get angry about.......just respect the writer of the code. There should be plenty of similar projects with more acceptable licenses if someone digs around. And if more people start using them, they will, in time be more popular than their GPL counterparts. After all, what is an open source project without a community?
- Writing webapps (as a lot of projects on HN seem to do) does not require one to open source one's backend application.
I don't think people hate the GPL per se.
It's more about the way GPL is promoted ... in the name of freedom and all that shit, when in reality GPL is more likely to be used in instances where the company wants to sell commercial licenses.
What I don't like about the GPL is that it limits the choice of license for derived works ... where "derived" has a very broad meaning (if your software uses a GPL component, and that GPL component has no replacement, no matter how trivial it would be to implement one, than it's a derived work).
This is in contrast to .NET for example, which is proprietary and doesn't permit changes to the code base and it's not developed in the open ... but it doesn't restrict your choice of license.
Another bad example ... Qt's licensing may have been good for Trolltech, but because of that Gnome / GTK+ happened. As a result there are more third party applications (both proprietary and open-source) written on top of GTK+ / Gnome, although it is an inferior technological choice. Qt got LGPL'ed (finally) but I think it's too little, too late (regarding the Linux desktop).
The GPL (not talking about LGPL) is a good license if used for the right purpose. But it is promoted as being the backbone of software freedom, and looking unbiased at its current usage, that's just not true.
