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GPL, Copyleft Use Declining Fast
itwbennett writes "Use of the GPL, LGPL, and AGPL set of licenses is declining at an accelerating rate, according to new analysis by the 451 Group's Matthew Aslett. In fact, the 451 Group projects that GPL usage will hit 50% by September 2012. Instead, developers are licensing projects under permissive licenses such as the MIT, Apache (ASL), BSD, and Ms-PL. The shift started in 2007 and has been gathering momentum ever since. Blogger Brian Proffitt posits that 'the creation of the GPLv3 and the sometimes contentious discussion that led up to it' may be partly responsible for the move away from the GPL."
GPL caused too many problems for companies and tried to enforce all software to be open source. GPL itself was very restrictive license, and it's great to see more open licenses like BSD and Apache gaining usage fast.
I don't see why anyone would not want to use the GPL if they want their software to be free and open. Why create something, give it out for free, and then allow businesses to take your work, profit from it, and give nothing back? Maybe these developers are hoping to get bought out by a large company someday?
Why create something, give it out for free, and then allow businesses to take your work, profit from it, and give nothing back?
Because if you truly want to promote freedom and free code, you also have to let people to profit from it. Freedom isn't picking who gets to enjoy that "freedom" based on some rules.
When companies realized that if they ship GPL v3 code in any way, shape, or form, a customer could demand any trade secrets from them, the legal bean counters went nuts.
An example would be a machine that skins oranges. Any GPL v3 code used in the machine would force the maker to hand over to customers on request the CAD blueprints for the mechanisms, the timing involved, down to the color of the engineer farts when the thing is put together.
I personally have seen companies who had to re-engineer a whole embedded controller from Linux to Windows CE just so they did not bump into GPL v3 issues.
Exactly. It's like saying you have freedom of speech but you can only say what I want to hear.
For personal use, not everyone is in it for the money. <shrug>
And as far as the political aspects, to most companies GPL == toxic, and they don't care about the details.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
... of Richard Stallman shedding a tear with text below: Forever alone.
I have yet to see any evidence that GPL creates more benefit for society than any other FOSS licence. Can you provide anything?
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
That was true with the GPLv2 as well.
Boo hoo, so write it yourself. Why is it every complaint against the GPL seems to come from those who want to mooch and not contribute?
I can profit while using GPL code. I simply can't take and not give back.
What about the freedom to profit? It is a right for people to want to make money and why is that bad? Student loans, kids, retirement, and a car are considered basic rights and responsibilities. Aint got no money? Then you cant have any of it? Cry all you want but the grocery store doesnt care that you do great things for humanity when your kids are hungry. They just want your money.
So your rights if you own the code are important too. Thats life
Yes I advocate the BSD license.
http://saveie6.com/
Correct me if I'm wrong (and I'm sure you will), but wasn't the point of the GPL to enforce the rules of open-source while it was still emerging? The idea was that open-source projects would be more vulnerable when the open-source movement was new, and it would be more likely that some company would take BSD-licensed code and not just release it as their own, but be able to effectively relegate the open-source one to a small niche of irrelevancy. Now that pretty much every company takes open source seriously, it's not as necessary - if someone were to take Firefox, tweak the branding, and release it as their own commercial product, they wouldn't be able to take all the marketshare Firefox has simply by virtue of being a "real" company, not "a bunch of open-source basement-dwelling commie nerds".
everything has pros and cons, we can have something good for "economics" but bad for society as a whole
That is what happens with GPL and BSD
False. BSD has been incredibly good for society. UC Berkeley's sharing of their implementation of Unix is the very origin of the FOSS movement. BSD is where many original Linux developers learned how to do their thing. And where many Linux developers, to this day, find some pretty useful code.
Society generally benefits from the more open and more flexible approaches. Society usually does not benefit as much from the "this is the one and only true path" approach of the zealot.
Some developers are very happy to have their work included in something and used widely. BSD makes companies include an acknowledgement of the use of your work, so you can know you made that project happen. Presumably, if a lot of money is being made by some company that includes your free software, you've helped build something cool that people want. I think a lot of developers see GPL as a "taking my toys and going home" license which discourages free use. If you weren't going to make a million dollar idea with your software, why stop someone else?
Do you get the cash? No. Are your motives really that good if you opened your software only to make money? No. Does a commercial venture using your code prevent free projects from springing up around your work and building the same things as you could if you'd GPL'd it? No.
Because the only way to make money is to take open source software and ensure that the recipients of your modified version cannot have the source code? Or that the source code must absolutely be integrated deeply into yours?
I know, those pesky anti-DRM requirements sure make it hard to squeeze your users for money.
In my previous job I had customers who were deathly afraid of GPL to the point where they would not allow me as their supplier to use any open source code in the products I supplied regardless of what the license was or if it saved money.
For these people anyway GPL was a real impediment to the acceptance of open source.
Agreed. I think the shift has occurred because of increasing corporate interest in open source. BSD is seen as more corporate-friendly than GPL, when in fact it should be the other way around--BSD allows your competitors to reap the fruit of your labor without giving you anything in return. Start-ups, however, are lured by the idea of being able to close-source everything once their product becomes a smash hit, while established companies face genuine legal issues preventing them from linking GPL'ed code with closed-source code from vendors.
So, start-ups really need to ditch the bait-and-switch fantasy that's driving them towards the BSD. Back in the real world, most such start-ups will fail long before they ever create a popular enough product to pull this trick, and it will partially be due to the fact that they brilliantly gave away all their work to their closed-source competitors for absolutely nothing in return.
I need to make a living and am currently doing that by writing iPhone apps. GPL is fine in an idealistic world, however people are not idealistic and do not give you money for being a nice guy. When I release software as open source (https://github.com/bindle/BindleKit), I do it to be helpful to others. The GPL greatly restricts the ability of some one to use my software. Just because one developer uses my library in a proprietary application does not exclude another developer for using my library as well. What is the point of software being called open source when it is not usable by developers?
The problem with that claim is that it's not even remotely true. For example, consider Google. They have their own private fork of Linux (GPLv2) which includes things like their own filesystem. Some changes are contributed back to the community because maintaining them in a private fork costs more than the loss of competitive advantage from sharing them. Some are kept private, because the scales tip the other way.
In contrast, Yahoo uses a private fork of FreeBSD on a lot of their systems. They employ several FreeBSD developers and contribute a lot of changes back if doing so won't give away a serious competitive advantage, but they keep some things private.
One project has a permissive license, the other has a strong copyleft license, but the behaviour of downstream users is identical in both cases. The GPL doesn't stop you using, modifying, or profiting from the code without giving anything back, it only prevents you from refusing to share the source for your modifications with anyone who receives a binary.
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One of my projects was released under the WTFPL: http://sam.zoy.org/wtfpl/
I'm not exactly sure what this entails other than it releases me from liability if someone else uses it. There are so many hobbyist level projects these days that someone is probably replicating your project's purpose under a different codebase it doesn't really matter what you licence it under - you're lucky to get 2-3 people using your project's code. My other project got released under "the Berkeley licence" simply because my father went to school there years ago, and it was relatively short. Maybe I should make a "free licence roulette" website to help other hobbyist projects pick random licences.
TL;DR most hobbyist developers only include a licence as a formality
moox. for a new generation.
to most companies GPL == toxic
In my experience, it's a little bit more complex than that. To most companies, the GPL is complicated. They can almost certainly use GPL'd code without violating the license, but their lawyers aren't 100% certain. Their lawyers are certain that they can use BSD licensed code without violating the license. Their lawyers are also certain that they can use proprietary code without violating the license, because they get a license that explicitly permits them to do what they want.
I've seen several cases of the GPL driving companies to buy proprietary solutions: given the choice between buying a proprietary license and using free GPL'd code, they'll pick the proprietary solution and limit their (perceived) liability. If there's a BSD licensed alternative, they'll use that and quite often contribute changes back (after all, it's usually cheaper than maintaining a private fork).
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It's more like having freedom of speech, but anyone who feels like it can revoke it. GPL doesn't restrict freedom, it enforces freedom.
gpl first freedom (0):
"the freedom to use the software for any purpose"
"we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can."
from http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html
The cost of distributing someone else's gpl work is licensing your derivative work under the same license. The face up fairness of this deal is what appeals to so many developers. Every license has rules.
"better ways of doing things eventually just replace the inferior things" - Linus Torvalds 09-08-07
Perhaps the fact that all these new, fancy mobile devices running Android have kernel sources available. I'm sure if it were BSD we wouldn't see anything, and hacking them to do as we wish would be considerably more difficult.
Of course, this is my opinion and you are free to reject it as "invalid" if you see fit.
The statistic shows percenage of actual project count, and doesn't anyhow respect the overall usage or size ("importance/weight") of the software.
I'm therefore afraid that the plot is biased by a large amount of tiny projects that are used by 10 people and choose some cc-by-sa alternative because it's simple enough and often a "default" choice.
I see that the Microsoft Public License is grouped in with the other permissive ones like Apache and BSD. Honest question though, is the MS-PL actually a popular choice for non-Microsoft projects? I've never really seen it much, and my intuition says that a decent set of open source devs would be allergic to a Microsoft license.
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Licenses are like programming languages - the right tool for the right job. Some projects - especially those authors want adopted in a business environment - are going to want to go with more permissive licenses. A trend like this says that more and more projects feel they need to be more permissive, not that people are abandoning the GPL. The question becomes why do they need to be more permissive? I'd wager a guess that it has a lot to do with the number of corporations involves in supporting, expanding, and creating open source applications. As for myself, my next two projects are going to be using GPL 2 - but then again corporate adoption of my software is not a goal.
Heh, but I don't want to, which is why I write GPL3 code.
The GPL lets me ensure payment in some form. Either I get source, or I can possibly get money in exchange for a different license.
If you're not happy with that, then of course I don't get anything, but since there's nothing in it for me if I let you use my code without benefitting from it, it doesn't really make a difference.
When people say 'Linux' they usually mean Linux-and-all-of-the-associated-cruft. Typically this at least includes GNU libc, GNU binutils, and GNU coreutils (which, between them, are more code than the kernel), and typically the GNU shell (bash) and GNU libstdc++. All of these have no moved to GPLv3 (in some cases with the runtime exemption). Remove them, and even though you still have 'Linux' you don't have a system that can run any of your existing code.
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It's not that. The reason GPL is problematic is that it's all too easy to copy and paste a couple of lines of code out of some open source project into something you're working on. If it's under a BSD license, no problem. If it's under a GPL license, you're screwed. For this reason, the safest default policy for big corporations is to deny all use of GPLed software to remove the temptation.
The result of this is that folks working for those companies are less likely to spend time working on GPLed projects. More importantly, because those companies are not bringing in GPLed source from the outside, they are no longer forced to use that license for their own code. The net effect is that less GPLed code gets produced.
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I would have to imagine that the more the economy goes into the toilet the more independent developers (that may now be unemployed) and corporations (that may be struggling financially) are choosing to profit from their work to stay alive. The GPL and LGPL license terms have been taking a beating recently, but the acceleration of their potential demise may also be due in part to the realities of our current, global economic condition.
And even that is not wholly correct. Perhaps this works best:
I can profit while using GPL software. I simply cannot close the source code as a means of forcing my customers into a dependency on me. Which is why the GPL was created in the first place.
Sorry, I'm not sure what you're referring to. Which google product are you accusing?
It's more like having freedom of speech, but anyone who feels like it can revoke it. GPL doesn't restrict freedom, it enforces freedom.
Yeah, except a company which decides to use and modify open source software without giving back does not revoke anyone else' right to the code... so, in other words, it's not like that at all.
This author takes full ownership and responsibility for the unpopular opinions outlined above.
Which strikes an anti DMCA nerve with Big Content folks who don't want to lose the leash they have their users bound by.
Telling a commercial company to use the GPL is like telling an alcoholic to lob a nuke at the brewery.
Companies LOVE screwing their users over, and giving that up is too hard.
it enforces freedom
You're gonna be free wether you like it or not!
The freedoms are rivalrous -- you're free to distribute a piece of software however you please, or you're free to extend a piece of software however you please. The first one is a commerce right, the second one is a moral right. Both of these can't always be satisfied.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
If you encapsulate all your AI code in a standalone binary and don't directly link against the GPL'd stuff, then all you need to make public are the changes you made to the GPL'd stuff. Your proprietary binary can be kept proprietary as long as you can make a case that it is not a derivative work of the GPL'd stuff.
Can I have this in the form of a car analogy please?
GPL doesn't prevent profit. It just forces people to "pay forward" to their users the same favor they received from upstream.
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I'll give you that, but it is just as much a right to want to sleep with supermodels. However, don't confuse the right to want to with the right to have.
Those are basic responsibilities, but you don't have a basic right to them.
Okay, about the code itself. If you are the original developer and sole copyright holder, you aren't restricted by the license. The GPL could possibly be a greater way of making money because you can sell exceptions, and competitors can't distribute a proprietary version based upon the work you've done. If you licensed that same project under the BSDL, your competitors could make a proprietary version. They could keep using your beneficial changes, but you wouldn't have access to theirs. I don't see how that's beneficial to the original developer. I see how it's beneficial to the competitor that builds a proprietary version upon yours, but I don't see why we should be working to benefit those parties.
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I think the purpose of the GPL is to ensure that those that profit from your work also give back. Everyone needs to be paid, some of us just want to be paid in code. For that reason I use GPL, but BSD, MIT, Apache are all good, free, licenses, so I really don't see an issue here.
GPL caused too many problems for companies
[citation needed]
What are these problems? What companies are saying "we won't go for GPL again because of problems in the past"? Does this actually have a significant impact on GPL usage?
It is easy to assume that companies wouldn't be happy with the GPL because it restricts what they can do, but that doesn't mean that this is actually how it works out in practice.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
I think developers nowadays are just more aware of the various licenses and their implications. Jump back 10 years ago, a lot of devvers were like 'i've got this great piece of code, i want to share it. let's pick a license - o, GPL was the best license, right? let's release it GPL'. And only later came to the conclusion how inconvenient said license was.
Every license gots it's place. The problem with GPL is, is that's it's walling off it's very own garden - it is only compatible with other GPL libraries.
Another differentation to make is: application versus library. For applications, GPL is often very well suited. For libraries, it's a nightmare as it restricts usage. Yes, there is LGPL and no, it hardly helps.
As (amateur) developer myself, i began to favor BSD-styled licenses, whereever possible. GPL bites too often in your toes, if you don't watch out. It's a nice license, but highly situational. And it is a restrictive license, not an open one. Restrictive in a way that only compares to closed source.
The idea about GPL is great - make sure code stays open. The practice is: is there any need for that? There are many projects with *random* licenses, that work well, just because there is a team around it, involved in active developing. The focus should more be on 'how do we get this code better' than 'how do we restrict usage'. And the power exists in the mere fact that there's a team, not a codebase.
Personally, i wish the next GPL license would be more open, in the sense of: you can protect this very piece of code, but remove the 'viral' part from it, and allow usage in any further license. Example are the BSD unices that complain how they cannot use GPL'd drivers and other code, whereas the 'linux/gnu team' can happily borrow code from them. That's up to the very GPL license to fix. Same applies to closed source - i bet a company would happily show code of a GPL library they used, and possibly modified, if it was only limited to that.
Last not least.. No, that neat piece of code you wrote in the last 3 days isn't that special. Why bother someone stealing or profiting from it in the first place. A company that profits from your code may indeed do so, the difference is, you didn't have that company, so it's a bogus comparison to start with. But it you would happen to have a company, wouldn't you be pleased to be able to use existing code? Not re-inventing wheels, and cutting costs a bit, freeing up developer time for more challenging tasks? Yet, as thousand others wrote above, you would stay away from GPL code for obvious reasons.
Why create something, give it out for free, and then allow businesses to take your work, profit from it, and give nothing back?
If you love something, let it go free.
If it does not return to you, it was never yours...
If I am truly being charitable, why NOT let someone profit from something I have made? I would like them to return something if possible but why would I wish to place that burden as a legal demand instead of a request that they can choose to honor?
A lot of times you create something for others to use simply for the joy of having something used and helping people. Letting them use it without necessarily giving back or even crediting you does not diminish that.
I like the GPL a lot, I appreciate what it is trying to do... but in real life I love to gift a gift more freely, so that others may be encouraged to give back the same gift in return.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Sure. GPL (well, GPLv2) software is a car that can be copied an infinite number of times. Its original manufacturer says that anyone can use it, modify it, and repair it, as long as they let others copy it under the same terms. BSD software, on the other hand, says anyone can do anything with their car copies, since the original will always still exist—even people who want to prevent others from modifying, using, or repair their modified versions (i.e. pine-scented air fresheners, fuzzy dice, truck nuts, giant spoilers, neon lights underneath, racing stripes...)
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What? How come every single time GPL comes up everyone automatically assumes that there is a clause that forbids you to profit from GPL-ed projects? I personally modified quite a number of GPL software and, sticking to the license provided the source code along with the binaries AND received a payment.
Tell RedHat that you cannot profit from GPL software.
And to repeat once again — BSD is about freedom of the coder, GPL is about freedom of the code.
Google is using immense amounts of GPL software. Their data centers runs linux. Their own version of it, not shared back. Search, ads, everything Google runs is based on GPL-ed software. They can get away with it because they do not distribute their software, as technically they use it in-house, even though the results of the GPL software is what brings in the dough. They've found a giant loophole (the web) where you do not need to distribute actual software to let (a) people use it, and (b) profit from it.
So yes, the OP was right, and has an excessive flamebait mod: Google is one of the biggest abusers of GPL. Legally, they are 100% in the clear. Morally, less so.
Not to invalidate the outcome of the report (though the hyperbole could do with some work) but this arbitrary 'percentage' assignment has me wondering. Could this not just reflect a new growth in say Rails projects or Javascript (the Ruby community is traditionally MIT/BSD, see too very common frameworks like jQuery). In the past code like this was rarely included, but this might just represent the true makeup of the community and fast LOC growth in one community doesn't mean the other community is jumping ship to a different license.
As the maintainer of Net-SNMP I've received a huge number of patches that would never have been given to us if Net-SNMP used a GPL license (though in this case, the code predates the GPL). Companies that have worked on the Net-SNMP code and have given back to it do so because they want to use their cool new feature they've developed for the code base in their proprietary software or hardware. IE, the Net-SNMP libraries and applications are the base upon which they build. It's important to them to contribute their patches to the base back to the core Net-SNMP repository so they can be assured future patches will not conflict with their feature (ie, because a patch isn't accepted that breaks the existing code base). Plus it gets their name in lights (ie, the COPYING file. Not many lumens, but still "lights").
I've been told many times that if Net-SNMP was GPLed code it would never be used. But since it's not, it's used in pretty much distributed by nearly ever OS vendor except Microsoft, and is used on a ton of embedded hardware. This would not have happened if it was a GPLed code base.
(ok, Microsoft still wouldn't be distributing it and linux* still would be; but all bets on Apple, Sun, etc, would be off)
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The post you are responding to did not say one could not profit from GPL code. Nor did it say that you can not charge for distributing it.
The fact is you cannot distribute GPL code any way you want (unless you are the copyright holder and distribute it under non GPL terms as well, of course).
To amend what you are repeating BSD is about freedom of the distributor; GPL is about freedom of the code.
"exceptio probat regulam in casibus non exceptis" (lit. "the exception confirms [approves, demonstrates] the rule in cases not excepted"). His usage here seems perfectly valid, so I'm a bit confused by what you mean. Red Hat has to go through special means to profit through releasing GPL'd code. Implying there is a rule that companies cannot do so through normal means. Which is exactly what the phrase was coined to mean.
Also implying that companies that do not want to go through such exceptions should use the BSD (or similar) license.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
That's not what it actually means at all.
The fact that people defending the commercial viability of GPL'd software always trot out the same tiny number of examples is incredibly telling.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I hate to disagree but it forces not enforces. MIT and BSD licenses are completely free and require nothing of someone using or contributing. GPL requires that anything one creates using GPL code must be open as well. I prefer GPL. There is nothing more annoying then say a company that makes an OS which uses an MIT licensed graphics library or a BSD licensed network stack but at the same time fights aggressively against free and open source software.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
RMS calls it GNU/Linux because he's bitter that Linux supplanted HURD. Referring to operating systems by the userspace software they use is ridiculous.
No, the source code only needs to be given out if the software itself is given out. GPL doesn't force you to distribute any software, despite St Stallman's exhortations to 'help your neighbor'. GPL only says that if you distribute a GPLed software, you have to distribute the code as well. In other words, if you take a software, make some additions/changes, but decide not to distribute it, but just use it for yourself, you are not in violation of any of the GPLs - not 1, not 2, not even 3.
This stuff about if one profits, one should give back - even if one accepts this premise (I don't) - the only way the company profits is if they sell this thing, which they are not. If they are just using it and becoming productive because of it, that doesn't imply that they should make it available. Most of the time, in-house software is something very specific to the unique needs of an organization, and something that nobody else will have a need for; rather, it's more likely that the organization can end up inadvertantly spilling out details of its internal workings - something you definitely don't want your competition to know.
First, your statement that "they are getting around the GPL requirements" is factually false. There is no "law" requiring anyone to be a mind reader, and somehow divine "intent" - and in the case of licenses such as the GPL (and other "contracts of adhesion"), any and all "grey areas" are to be interpreted strictly to the benefit of the recipient, and set up against the grantor.
Second, the GPL clearly states that it's okay to profit from GPL'd code - and makes NO additional restrictions about it when you do so, so that case is also covered.
Third, the FSF has, by their head (Stallman) publicly claiming that it's okay to violate copyright on closed source, put themselves in the position where anyone who chooses to vigorously litigate against the enforcement of any copyrights assigned to the FSF or the gnu project, or to demand that code they previously assigned be returned, has a good chance of winning.
The GPL won't be around within a decade or two ... the more permissive licenses, such as the bsd and mit, will be, because they better address the real world. 2011 was the year that a LOT of us woke up, smelled the coffee, and realized that the GPL is an evolutionary dead end. Thanks to the GPL, there will never be a "year of the linux desktop", because there's no economic incentive. Just look at Apple - the company with the most worth in the whole world - selling software that was built upon FreeBSD.
Well, I'm not against them profiting from my code. If they used the code and never made an improvement, the end result would be the same. It's one 'bug' in the GPL license, but I don't see a need to pursue it. They are using the code internally and not distributing. Anyone that wants to make improvement and distribute, well those people will have to give back to the community. I'm not too worried about that.
Use Affero GPL for the project in question in the first place. Problem solved.
The freedom the GPL guarantees is the customer's freedom.
It means if you use something you also get to see what it is and to be able to modify it.
Programmers are not an ends in themselves.
So tell me, o mighty spouter of clichés, what the fuck your statement has it to do with the question at hand?
If you can't immediately see the answer to that question, then you could always look up the old legal concept properly and educate yourself. Here, let me Google that for you. Perhaps next time, you'll have the courtesy to do so before you resort to knee-jerk ad hominem attacks.
The point of the original legal idea was that if you start enumerating specific counter-examples then you are creating a presumption that the general case holds. In this context, while obviously we're talking about economics rather than law, the same basic idea makes sense: any time someone asks about commercial viability of GPL'd software, the same tiny number of companies that make money based around such software get trotted out as counter-examples. (Don't agree? Try Google again, this time to see how many other examples you can find by searching the history of Slashdot. It won't take you long.) Given that it is easy to cite numerous companies that make money via other means, this suggests that perhaps making money from GPL'd software really is relatively difficult, thus backing up the comment by InsightIn140Bytes above.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
You're gonna be free wether you like it or not!
This would be a great view of things if you could just compare BSD/MIT to GPL. Unfortunately, you have to take into account that there's also copyright and other laws which do also impose a "whether you like it or not!" situation that many people -in particular those having to deal with software development- end up very much not liking.
The GPL licenses are trying to work around various un-sane defaults in copyright. And the BSD/MIT licenses are really only deferral of all rights to the next party, which then -by default or intentionally- would just apply the very restrictive copyright as usual, or pull some shenanigans with DRM, or other things.
Either way you get a "whether you like it or not" situation. But I see the one where all people get more rights as opposed to deferral of this decision to the next person in line as the better solution.
So what are you exactly against? People using your code and improving it without giving anything back? Because that is what Google is doing. Why are you exactly against distributing modified code without source, but not against locking in that code in their own datacenters and never giving anything back? Because the end result is the same - they use the code without contributing back. In fact it's even worser, because it also locks users to their services.
I have a good example of this. I've been using Cryptoheaven as my email provider for several years. They open source their client, but not their server side code. This means you cannot actually use the code without also using them, and I've been locked to paying them because I was stupid enough to use their domains for emails while registering to all kinds of services.
The Island of Sark was, until fairly recently, the only remaining feudal state in Europe. Not that long ago they did have an actual referendum and decided to stay like that, rather than transitioning to democracy (some time later they had another referendum and decided to make the change after all).
Its a tiny, tiny place - cars are illegal, you use bicycle or cart - so I imagine there genuinely *is* an argument that you know the people in power personally, so why would you need elections. Presumably the first time round they just couldn't see the benefit of democracy in their particular case. Not the same scale as, say, Egypt but it is a valid case of where there were sane arguments against democracy.
Tangent: when they did switch, the democracy was apparently under immediate attack. Some UK newpaper barons from neighbouring island (the Barclay Brothers, who own the Telegraph newspaper) threw their weight behind the democracy campaign and put up a candidate. They have subsequently been accused of using their muscle as a local employer to punish and manipulate the population (who voted for someone other than the Brothers' preferred candidate). A thoroughly surreal situation and bizarre to think of a state the size of a very small town / large village immediately under attack by commercial interests and pressures!
Just look at Apple - the company with the most worth in the whole world - selling software that was built upon FreeBSD.
And not contributing anything back to the community. Should Apple fall one day or just discontinue its BSD-based products, all their achievements will be lost. On the other hand, when a big GPL vendor falls or discontinues a product, anybody can come in and keep it alive from the last public release.
What is "profit from" also? If I borrow some internationalization code as part of a huge project, this saves the company money from having to buy a propriety product perhaps. More likely though it means we don't implement it ourselves and have less bugs down the road than if we rolled our own. Now does that mean we profited and the original author now gets access to every single line of our code as the GPL would imply? Even if the code is proprietary and our competitors are anxious to get a peek at it? Even if various government agencies disallow giving away the code or allowing end user customization of the machines?
With GPL the return payment is that you must also be GPL in absolutely everything you do. With BSD the return payment is that you give recognition to the author and keep the copyright notices intact. The first type of payment is too high for most companies unless they've got a software model that fits (ie, dynamic libraries, separately loaded programs, kernel modules, multiple cpus). The second payment is much easier but many companies don't know of it and they associate all free or open source software as GPL tainted. So the result is many smaller companies reinvent small pieces of code or libraries all the time, not the result desired if the author wanted to share code.
Quite the contrary - here's the source. And keep in mind that apple also hired some of the FreeBSD developers, and contributed back to the FreeBSD project with code.
Boo hoo, so write it yourself.
Precisely. "The problem with GPLv3 is that I can't use it in an application I develop unless I release any changes/mods I make to the source code." - which presumably means "The problem with code licensed under the GPLv3 or v2 is..." - really means "the problem with code licensed under the GPLv3 or v2 is that I can't control it the way I want rather than the way the person who wrote the code wants."
That's only a "problem with the GPL" in that the GPL exists, meaning it's available for developers to use; if you have a problem with that, it's really a problem with the author of the code, who doesn't want you doing your own work atop his or her work and then not letting those who get your software get the source code to your work as well as his or her work. That's entirely their right; if you don't like it, don't use their work, use the work of authors who are fine with that.
If your "secret sauce" is based on, or built atop, commercial code for which you'd have to negotiate a license to redistribute, so that some of your revenue has to go to the developer of the commercial code, are you going to complain that you're not going to make as much money because you'll have to pay the people who developed the commercial code in question?
As long as you do not redistribute the code, then there is no problem. I like the BSD license, and for certain projects it just works better. I don't think that one should just use one or the other, but so far, I have only needed to use the GPL license. I don't believe either one is more "free." If companies want to be misinformed, then let them be misinformed.
Referring to operating systems by the userspace software they use is ridiculous.
And referring to them by a subset of the userspace software.... (Admittedly, the C library is a very significant part of the userspace software, and it is from the GNU project on most Linux distributions, albeit not the one with the green robot as I understand it.
So "Linux", in the sense of "a Linux distribution", is not under any single license:
and so on.
Sorry but your post does not make any sense. If Google decide to use GPL code then that is fine. If they improve it internally but do not give it back then they can do that but they will either have to permanently fork it and lose any improvements to the GPL version or they will have to continually patch their modifications back against the GPL source tree. Even then they don't 'own' their code which can have legal ramifications down the road, for example if they decide to release a version in Android. The fact you think it locks users into their services is clueless, do you know anything at all about software?
Your example is incredibly poor. Open sourcing the client makes sense as then it can be ported to different platforms. They may not open source the server side code but the data is encrypted using standard RSA asymmetric and AES symmetric algorithms. As they keys will be stored client side you have all you need to prevent lock-in of your data. If you register for services using an email address then, er, yes, those services will expect you to have that email address. If you wish to change then simply create a new email address, and log into each service and change the registered email address. But you are obviously too lazy to do this.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
Your listing of Webkit among Apple's contributions to community is a big fail. Webkit is GPL'd and it had to be GPL'd all the way back when Apple forked it from KHTML. And if you still don't understand, I'm not talking about releasing a few apps and libraries here and there while keeping the system core proprietary. I'm talking about getting complete system build without reimplementing a proprietary decade of development history from scratch.
BSD is about the freedom to make choices for everyone in the distribution chain.
And what I just remarked is what is wrong with BSD... from a GPL POV. Keeping everyone else in the distribution chain able to make their own choices (except restricting anybody else) is, for GPL advocates, more important than you losing the ability to forbid everyone to do anything with the code you "inherited".
GPL is about imposing restrictions ON THE USE OF THE CODE for everyone in the distribution chain.
And that is false. There is one restriction on distribution, and none on use. You don't use software when you distribute it. Please remember that.
Just an off-the-cuff thought, but maybe we could categorise GPL as "want to be paid" and BSD/MIT as "already been paid". With the former, it tends to be coders writing pet projects in their spare time. They want to contribute to the world but resent being exploited for free. Hence the GPL means they will be paid in code or if corporate they need to pay cash for a commercial license. With BSD/MIT the work has been funded by academia/corporations hence has already been paid for, meaning less barrier to releasing it into the wild even if plagiarized for no return. The growing percentage of corporate contributions will of course be reflected in the percentage change in licensing terms.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
You had me at "truck nuts".
I think the purpose of the GPL is to ensure that those that profit from your work also give back.
Its purpose is economic warfare against all non-copyleft software, with the ultimate goal of world domination (eliminating non-free software).
It's odd that they consider EULAs to be simple and the GPL to be complicated.
I'm not sure if the simplicity isn't illusory. The problem is that lawyers are pedants. I mean look at the 3-clause BSD license:
Copyright (c) [year], [copyright holder]
All rights reserved.
Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without
modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:
* Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright
notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
* Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright
notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the
documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
* Neither the name of the [organization] nor the
names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products
derived from this software without specific prior written permission.
[AS IS no warranties block]
It certainly looks fairly simple.
But let's think about the third clause there: You can't use the name of the copyright holder to endorse or promote products derived from it. Now normally you have a first amendment right to make statements of fact. But let's say I go ahead and use OpenSSH in my software, which is BSD licensed, and then somebody in an internet discussion questions the strength of the cryptography I'm using. I respond that it's not even my cryptography code, it's OpenSSH, which is developed by those OpenBSD people who really know security. Oh crap! Have I just violated the BSD license? Or does the first amendment trump the license? Or does it not, but the term "promote" is ambiguous and needs to be interpreted? You end up still needing a lawyer.
Or what about this: The BSD license says redistributions "must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer." It doesn't say "you must actually enforce these conditions against downstream licensees" and it also doesn't say "the original copyright owners retain the right to enforce these conditions against downstream licensees." Which means that there is an interpretation of the BSD license which makes it a recursive license, where I get code from you, I change it and give it to Bob, and then Bob has a license from me to distribute your code, which only I can enforce against him if he violates it, because I'm the one who licensed it to him. If I then decide that I don't give a crap about enforcing it, the BSD license turns into the public domain license, because anybody can get your code from me knowing that I won't enforce any of the conditions. Is that the right interpretation? I have no idea. But it seems pretty clear that "looks simple" doesn't get you out of needing a lawyer to figure out what the crap is going on.
they will have to continually patch their modifications back against the GPL source tree.
The same situation as in the common case when they do release their patches, but King Chief Committer does not consider your puny code worthy of notice and refuses to merge in your filthy changes in the pristine head branch, which is only for King Chief Committer and his inner cicrle of nerds.
No, that's RMS goal. I personally like the gpl and have nothing against proprietary software, if it delivers enough value, it will always be there. Integration, vertical markets, efficient algorithms, and so on.
Proprietary stuff must have alternatives or we get back to the best win/office days. Bloated stuff, incompatibilities, forced obsolescence... that's what free software saved you from, even if you don't use it.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
Blogger Brian Proffitt
A person well known for anti-open-source propaganda and nothing else.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Since when does Apple fight aggressively against Open Source? They have spent billions writing open source applications and distributing them. They run one of the largest open source repositories (MacPorts)...
There is nothing more annoying then say a company that makes an OS which uses an MIT licensed graphics library or a BSD licensed network stack but at the same time fights aggressively against free and open source software.
Apple?
Well, maybe, except that
It's more like a total crock of shit.
It's the old percentages game people. When GPL came out there was bugger all open source software and as GPL become more popular closed source proprietary software companies started launching various kinds of open source public relations licences.
Low and behold there are now a whole bunch of other types of open source licences and with proprietary closed source software companies companies playing silly buggers with public relations, breaking down programmes into modules and open sourcing the modules to ramp up the numbers, just so they can crap on about how good they are at sharing.
Just another lame arsed pathetic attack piece. Of course when you want to charge thousands of dollars for a report https://store.the451group.com/index.php?cPath=3&osCsid=gttqeg90f1go39789fobdf4nf2, you have to be pretty inflammatory to pull the mugs in.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Noooo...RMS has said repeatedly the ultimate goal of GPL is to kill proprietary software. You can look up his "GPL VS LGPL" for just one example, but there are several others out there.
We're all adults here right? so lets cut to brass tacks gentlemen, RMS is a militant and seems to get more militant as he gets older. compare GPL V1 - V3 to see how he tries his damnedest to make sure there is NO way you can use GPL unless YOUR PROGRAM is likewise GPL. He also says this in his GPL VS LGPL essay.
You have to remember folks that old RMS doesn't see this as a software thing, he sees it as some "good VS evil" battle where you are either FOR him or AGAINST him, there is no shades of grey, no compromises. Now while he is perfectly within his right to hold that view i think the numbers show that most developers don't see the world that way, otherwise the change to GPL V3 would have saw an uptick not a nosedive.
While the rational thing to do would be to sit down with developers from all walks of life, talk to them to find out what they don't like about the current GPL, and then fix it, sadly the problem with zealotry is there isn't any room for compromises like that and honestly from reading the man's writings I doubt it'd bother him in the least if he was the only one using GPL as long as it remained 'pure'. Remember we are talking about a guy who got rid of his OLPC because the BIOS wasn't GPL and is now using some rare loongson netbook simply because that was the ONLY device he could find that met his definition of GPL compliance.
So the fact that the GPL is going down the shitter as far as usage is concerned really doesn't surprise me and frankly i expect that trend to get worse not better. Life simply isn't black and white and when even Torvalds won't use GPL V3 because its too restrictive that should let you know RMS simply went too far. While i like the idea of FOSS and use it quite often i also know that companies have to make money and developers need to eat But it seems that RMS doesn't feel the same. Of course he is a self proclaimed "squatter at MIT" so he doesn't really have to worry about kids, a car, house payments, etc so its probably easier for him to live in a black and white world than it is for the rest of us.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
The claim of BSD users is that it results in a situation that is more free. In other words it is being taken as a given that freedom for people downstream from the developers is an intrinsic good. If freedom is not an intrinsic good the whole anti-GPL argument made by the BSD camp, that the GPL reduces freedom, falls flat. Reducing freedom is no longer a bad thing.
So given that axiomatically freedom is an intrinsic good lets look at the X situation. At the time of the open systems movements there were essentially no important / useful Unixes with an open source derivative of X as their windowing system. The purpose of XFree86 was to create a free X first for Linux and BSD, they had to do this because there was none that was useful. Eventually (after about a decade) XFree86 became the reference implementation, and when this moved back to X.org the reference implementation became useful; but there was about 15 years where that wasn't the case. To this day many of the features of the proprietary X's are still not part of X.org.
Quite simply there was, in a meaningful sense no useful X that was open source. The reference implementations that existed, benefit operating system manufacturers but did not benefit the users of those operating systems. In effect there was no freedom, and since freedom is an intrinsic good that is a negative situation to be avoided.
I didn't say those weren't responsibilities. I claimed there's no such thing as a right to a car. Those are things you can get, but aren't inherently entitled to have them. Also, I don't think that people who don't have children, cars, or student loans are irresponsible. Opting to not have these things could very well be the responsible thing to do.
That would seem to take BSDL off the table for you as well. Your problem with the BSDL appears to be that you can't make use of the work other people have done and then turn around and stop other people from using your work in a similar manner. It seems you want others to use the BSDL over the GPL, not that you think BSDL is better for you to use. I don't really feel sorry for you in that situation.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
I think the purpose of the GPL is to ensure that those that profit from your work also give back. Everyone needs to be paid, some of us just want to be paid in code. For that reason I use GPL, but BSD, MIT, Apache are all good, free, licenses, so I really don't see an issue here.
No, that's the purpose of OSI and Eric Raymond's group (used to be his, but he no longer runs it - has moved on to other things, unlike RMS). Those people are about the things you describe. People who are interested in open source due to practical agreements about the best development models ought to support the OSI. Those people are the ones working w/ companies to make the case of how open source can work for them.
But the FSF and the GPL is all purely about Stallman's ego, as Hairyfeet pointed out above. This is someone who discusses software freedom like it was food - software under non-GPL compatible licenses being the moral equivalent of e-coli in vegetables. The most damning example of his fanaticism can be found in his explanations of why all the common distros don't qualify as free, in his book. Their crime? Daring to either bundle 'non-free' software, or even point to where non-free software would be available. E.g. Debian providing a repository of non-free software, and then hosting them on its servers make it impure in the eyes of Stallman/FSF, even if it claims that that non-free software is not a part of the Debian system. After applying similar non-endorsements to every major Linux distro, they then turn around and try to insist that GNU be prefixed to Linux whenever it is used. Why, if you're not going to accept that they are free, when they are all under the GPLv2 license?
Given all that, it's indeed no surprise that GPL & copyleft are declining. I do hope that open source itself flourishes, regardless of whether the FSF does or not. RMS does not associate himself w/ open source, and that idea does not deserve to go down w/ him. I don't mind losing the concept of Free Software however, since not only is the term misleading to begin w/, but freedom 2 of the GNU - freedom to freely distribute copies to help your neighbor - essentially forces down the price of all software, even though it's theoretically correct that GPLed software can be sold for a price just like any other software.
Yet more FUD
There are two versions of the GPLv3; The GPLv3 its self and the AGPLv3. Only the AGPLv3 requires contributing back for code which isn't distributed and even then it's only if the code is providing a user interface to users who don't have access to the code. If you use the GPLv3 you can still do SAS and keep your changes private. This is actually a reason for businesses to use AGPLv3 when distributing software since it means you will be more likely to get back changes.
In fact, most of the changes between the GPLv2 and v3 are specifically designed to address a bunch of business concerns with the GPLv2. For example, a clause was added which allows businesses which have made an unlicensed distribution to come back into compliance. This is specifically designed to support big companies which have situations such as where the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing and one division may end up breaching licenses that another division wants to respect.
Another very good reason for a business to use the GPLv3, especially for widely distributed software, is that becomes much more difficult for someone to make a patent based on slightly extending your work and then come back and use that to sue you so that they can take over the market
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
No it doesn't, any more than the rules of soccer apply to tennis.
In legal usage - the only correct one - the meaning boils down to "why did they write it, then?". So if a law states that you may drive the wrong way down a one-way street if it's blocked, and you do cautiously yada yada yada, that implies that there is a law stating that you may not drive the wrong way down a one way street; if there was no general prohibition there'd be no need for a specific permission.
This is obviously not the same as claiming that the existence of black swans somehow strengthens the assertion that all swans are white. It does quite the opposite.
Pity google doesn't supply understanding. Shall I drop you a new shovel?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."