Context:

Permissive licenses (commonly referred to as “cuck licenses”) like the MIT license allow others to modify your software and release it under an unfree license. Copyleft licenses (like the Gnu General Public License) mandate that all derivative works remain free.

Andrew Tanenbaum developed MINIX, a modular operating system kernel. Intel went ahead and used it to build Management Engine, arguably one of the most widespread and invasive pieces of malware in the world, without even as much as telling him. There’s nothing Tanenbaum could do, since the MIT license allows this.

Erik Andersen is one of the developers of Busybox, a minimal implementation of that’s suited for embedded systems. Many companies tried to steal his code and distribute it with their unfree products, but since it’s protected under the GPL, Busybox developers were able to sue them and gain some money in the process.

Interestingly enough, Tanenbaum doesn’t seem to mind what intel did. But there are some examples out there of people regretting releasing their work under a permissive license.

  • Regalia
    48·
    6 months ago

    Are we really going to start this pointless discussion again? They are two licenses with different use cases and different considerations. GPL has a lot more mental overhead to using it, MIT is hands off, both of these aren’t inherently invalid.

    Also Tanenbaum in your own link mentions that Intel probably would have just written their own microkernel if need be.

    • renzev@lemmy.worldOP
      8·
      6 months ago

      I agree that permissive licenses have their place for smaller projects (I personally use CC0 from small programs). The FSF suggests Apache license for programs with less than 300 lines (approximately) in order to avoid the overhead that you mentioned. The LGPL was also created in cases where allowing your free code to be used in nonfree contexts can help advance free software as a movement (e.g. writing a free replacement for a proprietary codec). But I also believe that if you really want to support free software, you have a moral duty to release anything “big” that you make under a copyleft license.