Sometimes there’s a benefit in getting open source code into proprietary software. Think libraries implementing interoperability APIs, communication protocols, file formats, etc
That’s what permissive licenses are for.
If some company wants to keep their code closed and they have a choice between something interoperable or something proprietary that they will subsequently promote, and the licence is the only thing stopping them from going for the open source approach, that’s worse.
Completely agree that a good breadth of everything else is suited to copyleft licensing though
This is a hypothetical that has no clear bearing connection to common practice.
In other words, I could just reverse this to contradict it and have equal weight to my hypothetical: devs should always use GPL, because if their software gets widely adopted to the point where companies are forced to use it, it’s better that it’s copyleft.
This is not a hypothetical and is in fact quite common. Say you’re working for a non profit, write code for a standard specification that is better than all other open options. It is better for everyone that companies adopt this code for interoperability.
If some company wants to keep their code closed
That’s the whole point, you’re leveraging the use of the commons so that it’s less feasible to keep your code closed. If they want to keep their code closed, they can spend a lot more manhours building everything from scratch.
This seems like complaining that the BSD license does exactly what it intends to do.
Yeah, as if the authors had no idea what terms the license has…
ignorance is one thing, but it’s a whole nother level of loser behaviour to intentionally do unpaid work for big tech companies in your free time
“Unpaid work” is pretty much all OSS development. “Here’s a thing I made, anyone can use it for whatever they want as long as they give credit” is a very simple philosophy. Not everybody who works on OSS is opposed to the existence of closed source commercial software, and rather a lot of people don’t like viral licenses like the GPL. Really out of line to call people who contribute their time and effort to making free software available to everyone losers just because you disagree with their choice of license.
I am of the opinion that such people are fools. That is their right of course, just as it’s my right to call them fools.
I take it that you’re in the first camp
You’re doing it for yourself/for fun/to better humanity
If some corporate fucks want to abuse that then it’s their problem not yours
Publishing it under GPL does benefit the humanity because any improvement on it will be also available to everyone. Letting corps take your work and put a monetary/legal block for people to use freely doesn’t seem like benefiting humanity that much.
No, it will not be available to everyone. Just the clients of the corpo and they can request the source. If you’re not a client, you still have no rights.
What if your open source code is awful and is unusable, and a company comes in and makes it actually useful? What if it’s used in a medical device that saves hundreds of peoples lives every day?
You’ve now gone from free but unusable, to also fee an unusable, but in addition to paid and actually useful.
You’re making it for fun. You’ve achieved your desired fun, and lost nothing if some rando takes it and makes another fun project, or big mega corp uses it.
What’s gonna stop them from just stealing it anyways? Why would they care about Joe Shmoe when they have infinite number the lawers you have? Also AI kinda makes this irrelevant because it will rewrite the code in a way that’s probably not protected, or at least provide enough shielding that their 10000 lawyers will.
Also also, what about all the mega corps that already use linux? That’s free an open source and they’re free to run their proprietary code on it. If you’ve ever contributed to linux, or any tool that’s built into a distro you’re not this supposed loser who’s done free work for a big tech company. It’s silly to complain about this.
GPL enforcement has, in fact, been very successful so far. I recommend this Wikipedia entry.
And then there is the very successful lawsuit from the Software Freedom Conservancy against Vizio.
I know Luke Smith is controversial, but this Blogpost of him is kinda funny and fits the topic:
To an extent I agree with this, but “Once upon a time, this guy licensed his code under BSD instead of GPL and basically it’s his fault the Intel Management Engine exists” is definitely a step too far
Tanenbaum is right, they obviously could’ve taken the time and money to write an OS themselves if they had to, but they didn’t have to, because a BSD license cuck wrote it for them. Thanks a lot, sucker!
I have no issues with this point.
But what’s up with the CIA “a bunch of n****rs” image above that? WTF?
Someone biulds a thing and puts it on the curb in front of his house with a sign:
I had fun building this and learnt a lot. Do with it whatever you want.Then someone else comes along, takes it, and sells it.
I fail to see how the inventor was taken advantage of. They presumably thought about which license they want to use and specifically chose this one.Taking without giving is always viewed negatively in social settings.
Maybe “taking advantage of” is wrong but then again, it is a dick move anyway.
If I’m putting BSD or MIT license on something, I’m explicitly saying you can use it however you want, you can change it however you want, you don’t have to share back, I just ask for credit for my part in it
It’s not taking so much as being given freely
Exactly this. I have a couple of small projects that are MIT licensed specifically because I don’t care how people use them or what they use them for. If someone finds it useful then they’re welcome to do whatever they want with it.
This idea that I’m being somehow hoodwinked or taken advantage of because the thing that I explicitly said could be used freely is being used in a way that doesn’t align with the values of some other completely uninvolved third party is beyond absurd.
I think you are missing the point. I am not saying it wasn’t. But if you makes a gift for your friend’s birthday, and they don’t bother at all to return the favor/attention, would you be upset as you would think it is kinda a dick move?
But if you makes a gift for your friend’s birthday, and they don’t bother at all to return the favor/attention, would you be upset as you would think it is kinda a dick move?
That’s kind of a different thing. But no, I would have no issue if I gave someone a gift and they didn’t give one back. A gift is a gift, not an loan they didn’t ask for.
I feel like most people base their decision on license purely on anecdotes of a handful of cases where the outcome was not how they would have wanted it. Yet, most people will never be in that spot, because they don’t have anything that anyone would want to consume.
If I had produced something of value I want to protect, I wouldn’t make it open in the first place. Every piece of your code will be used to feed LLMs, regardless of your license.
It is perfectly fine to slap MIT on your JavaScript widget and let some junior in some shop use it to get their project done. Makes people’s life easier, and you don’t want to sue anyone anyway in case of license violations.
If you’re building a kernel module for a TCP reimplementation which dramatically outperforms the current implementation, yeah, probably a different story
I once read that the license should be smaller than your code. Gives me a good baseline:
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Permissive license for small projects and little tests
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Copyleft license for big projects
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