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
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.
Our man-hours come from leadership and architects so separated from code they can’t agree on drawings or what constitutes a micro service architecture or… Any real pattern at all.
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.
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’ve always found it funny that GPL is considered “free as in freedom” but you don’t have the freedom to use it in your own way if it’s proprietary code.
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.
It isn’t about it being a loan. It is about attention, care and respect. That is why I wrote favor/attention. You won’t be friends with someone who doesn’t in any way show you that they care/respect you.
Edit: just to be very clear, the gift is an example of you expressing care, in my example. It is not necessarily a gift, it could be helping them move, or anything else that expresses some level of care.
You don’t expect me to care for you, so you are probably not upset when I don’t hold open the door for you when you are 4 steps behind me. But if your friend would do the same (assuming that they know you are there) you could take it negatively.
With software there would be infinite copies of that free item for everyone to get. So the dick move is to sell it to people who are unaware that they could get it for free.
This person takes advantage of people who are unaware that they could just get it for free as well.
However, if this person is putting in an effort to sell this item (like advertisement or creating a platform to distribute this item more easily) then I don’t see anything wrong in charging money for that.
That’s not really a common situation though. Sure, people might use the BSD license on something they did as a hobby, or just to learn things. But, the scenario described here is more like:
A group of people all have the same little problem, and they work together to come up with a solution for it. They solve the main problem, but their solution has a few rough edges and there are similar problems they didn’t solve, but they’re not motivated to keep working on it because what they have is good enough for their current needs. So, they put out some flyers describing how to do what they did, and inviting anybody who’s interested to keep working on improving their fix.
A company comes along, sees the info, and builds a tool that solves the problem but not quite as well, and for a small fee. They spend tons of money promoting their solution, drowning out the little pamphlet that the original guys did. They use as much IP protection as possible, patenting their designs, trademarking the look and feel, copyrighting the instructions, etc. Often they accidentally(?) issue legal threats or takedown notices to people who are merely hosting the original design or original pamphlets.
Maybe the original inventor didn’t get screwed in this scenario, but you could say that the public did.
This is perfectly fine to do under GPL as well. I don’t see the problem.
There are companies that sell Linux distros on a DVD or USB drive.
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
I’m stealing this 👍
Cries in left-pad.
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Well, ideally you’re choosing your license based on the cases where it differs from others and not the majority of times where it doesn’t make a difference.
Someone aiming to make Free software should use a copyleft license that protects the four freedoms, instead of hoping people abide by the honor system.
Also, no one can 100% accurately predict which of their projects will get big. Sure, a radical overhaul of TCP has good odds, but remember left-pad? Who could have foreseen that? Or maybe the TCP revision still never makes it big: QUIC and HTTP/3 are great ideas, and yet they are still struggling to unseat HTTP/2 as the worldwide standard.
Seems like using a copyleft on the reference implementation of a new protocol is a great way to ensure the protocol is never widely adopted.
People who used left-pad deserved everything that happened to them. But, very valid point.
There is no honor system. If your code is open for commercial reuse, that’s it. If you have any expectations that are not in line with that, then yes pick a different license.
I guess I agree with you, I’m just phrasing it from a different perspective.
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.
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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.
First of all, in many cases, writing new code is lot easier than trying to modify/salvage old code from someone else. Unless you can just plug it in for a modular function in that case your code is not useless.
And if they think your code is valuable enough to save that many people after they improve it, they can approach you for dual license or other agreements. They pay people with patent all the time, so they can do the same for people who’s volunteering their time for open source.
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.
You’re clearly someone who never contributed to open source.
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?
holy fuck i didn’t even notice the chin text on that glowing emoji
WTF
When i wrote my comment i typed “i know Luke Smith is a bigot” at first, but then toned it down to “controversial” because i haven’t really watched or read a lot of him to know for sure. But that image basically confirmed what I thought I knew about him.
What the fuck.
This is your brain on racism.
It’s in reference to one of the recurring themes that came up in the blogs and streams of Terry A. Davis, sole developer of TempleOS.
I was half hoping for something like that. I like to believe bigots are a lot less common than their loudness would suggest.
Still terribly problematic and such a niche, ephemeral, reference.
I wouldn’t either had he stopped there (and perhaps been a shade less overtly hostile to someone giving their work away for free). Instead he followed it up with
“Maximum amount of freedom to potential users” is somehow mass-surveilance of every computer user thanks to the BSD license. Thanks for your contribution to “freedom.”
No problems with that either. Tanembaum did unwittingly contribute to the biggest mass surveillance program ever rolled out worldwide, and all he had to say about it was “they didn’t thank me”. That asshole deserves all the criticism that lands on his feet.
yeaah true
I read a story of someone that contributed to a BSD project, including fixes over some period of time, but later they ended up having to use a proprietary UNIX for work, that included their code, in a an intermediate, buggy state, but they were legally forbidden from applying their own bug fixes!
At the very least the GPL guarantees that if I am ever downstream of myself, I has fix my own damn mistakes and don’t have to suffer them.
I am still willing to contribute to BSD stuff, but vastly prefer something like the AGPLv3.
So it’s an argument against restrictive licenses? The more freedom the better? I mean Unix in this case had a too restrictive license?
What? GPL does not restrict freedom, it ensures its continued existence.
Read above please. You cannot import GPL code into BSD licensed code without restricting the code distribution. In the other direction, you can do it and just add a notice about the license. It does not add restrictions to the distribution. Otherwise Linux distributions wouldn’t even have OpenSSH in base install images.
It’s an argument against a license that permits relicensing under a more restrictive license. (E.g. BSD)
Of other software, yes. For example Linux distributions can use the BSD or MIT licensed code without any problems.
But it does not allow to remove the license from the software.
On the other hand GPL code cannot be imported into BSD code without introducing restrictions.
In some cases it works, in some it doesn’t. PostgreSQL for example for huge support after Oracle got control of MySQL, despite the license.
Yes. But it’s despite.
You totally misunderstand MIT licensing
Why not explain what’s missing to the room?
One project goal of OpenBSD is: “We strive to make our software robust and secure, and encourage companies to use whichever pieces they want to.”
They are not being taken advantage of, this is a desired outcome.this is exactly what a cuck would say
LGPL ftw
Can someone help me? I have been licencing my code under BSD2Clause, I wish to switch to gplv3. How do I switch?
- Do I have to put the licence at the top of every file?
- Where do I put my name ie Copyright <Author Name> <Year>
Thank you
Here is a guide from the GNU website: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-howto.en.html
Thank you so much. This is exactly what I needed
One other thing you may have to do if you have contributors who have also committed code is to get their permission to change the license as well, as the code they committed may still be under their copyright and not yours, and they can choose to allow their code to be relicensed or not. Some projects use a contributor release to reassign copyright for contributions for reasons like this, for instance. This is partly the reason why the Linux kernel has never changed to GPLv3 and still uses GPLv2 (and also because Linus just doesn’t like some provisions of the GPLv3) — it would be pretty much impossible to get everyone who contributed code to a project as large as the kernel to agree to a license change. Any code that couldn’t be changed would need to be extracted and rewritten, and that’s not going to happen given the sheer size of the code base.
If you don’t have other contributors then you’re home free. You can’t retroactively change licenses to existing copies of the code that have been distributed, but you can change it going forward.
Delete the current LICENSE file in your repository and replace it with the new one.
You don’t have to put your name, year etc anywhere, the license is valid for the entire repo. You are not filing for an IP, it’s just a usage license.
Note that all the legal jargon is not necessary, you can write one yourself as long as you make it clear what you allow and what you don’t allow.
I.e. “don’t be a dick” requires elaboration, “do not use my code if you intend to make money off of it or parts of it” is clear and legally binding.
So just replace my old licence file with the GPL?
Yeah.
Something I don’t get paid enough to understand - what constitutes contributions, and what’s the definition of selling the software?
For instance, I don’t think I’ve worked on a project where we have made changes to the source code for security policies (much quicker path to update immediately if something gets flagged). But I don’t think I know of an instance where we sell our software as a service - as far as I know it’s largely used to support other services we sell.
Except now that I say that, that’s not entirely true, we DO have a review board that we have to submit every third party library to and it takes forever to hear back but we have occasionally gotten a “no can’t use that” or “contract is pending.” So maybe I’m just super unaware of who reviews the third party software and they review the licenses.
We have a scanner that does that on every build.
It blocks builds for dependencies with
- licenses not acceptable to Legal
- serious or critical vulnerabilities.
- political messages, even if you agree with them
- we may also add a criteria to block non-release dependencies.
As a developer, you’re free to use anything that works
I have yet to figure out how my company views contributing back to open source. I don’t know of anyone actively doing that, but it turns out we host a few originals of open source. I’ve been trying to improve development processes, get tools and dependencies up to date …… but then I ran into things where it’s a bigger change because of the downstream opensource dependencies and because it’s not really owned by the company
No one brought up ai yet? No, srsly ……
My opinion on these licenses is theoretical since I haven’t actually developed any open source.
However an analogous scenario which DOES affect me, and most people here ….
- I’ve posted my opinion online in various places. Offered freely to the public to do as they please.
- I’m fine with companies making money off providing the aggregate of such efforts to the public, such as by advertising. However my pseudonym retains credit and the audience is open
All well and good until AI came along and everyone sees a potential jackpot. And there’s Reddit, wanting a bigger share of that jackpot. They’ve taken the idea a step farther and I’m not ok with it. I guess I don’t like the restrictions and I don’t like the extra levels of profiteering: Reddit makes money off providing my content in a limited form to private companies. They in turn make money off AI trained by my content, to a limited audience and there is no longer a portion credited to my pseudonym. Technically they’re in the right since I never thought to prevent this scenario, but they’re not using it in the way I expected/intended/ was told
Personally I believe that the rights of users to privacy and freedom are more important then a corporations right to use open source software to make proprietary software. There’s a reason why nobody uses FreeBSD and why Linux is the dominant open source operating system.
The reason is not the license.
Hi. Nobody here. Do you know that if you own a PS5 or Nintendo Switch, you’re a FreeBSD user?
Maybe we’ve got a different idea what it means to be a user.
The closest FreeBSD has to users is its proprietary derivatives, at this point FreeBSD might as well be considered proprietary.
At the moment large companies sponsor the development, without being forced to do so. And they allow developers to spend time on the project for free.
The foundation also makes sure that devs sign an agreement otherwise the code is not accepted.
So where is this all proprietary?
Because on Linux the vast majority of its users run a complete operating system under the GPL, meanwhile on FreeBSD the vast majority of people use a proprietary dirivitive. Also significantly more companies sponsor Linux and it’s not even comparable.
If you think about how many people use proprietary Android by Google, it is exactly comparable.
Comparing numbers is pointless here. Fact is that GPL has more conditions when you’re allowed to use and modify the code. More conditions means more restrictions. And this means, less freedom.
It means less freedom for developers but has proved that it provides more freedom for users. Does MacOS have an open source version? No but ChromeOS and Android do (ChromiumOS and ASOP respectively). Even when companies make a proprietary fork of Linux they still contribute massively in terms of code, not just money.
I don’t get what you’re trying to say here: the BSDs aren’t private and secure?
I’m saying that when code is open source it helps the open source ecosystem and when using open source code means contributing your modifications everyone benefits.
I have spent the last 10 years of my career writing open source scientific software
