6 ms·

Copyright vs. Copyleft (2007)

84 points by merelydev 6y ago

tim44 6y ago
ouch who can splain
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
cdogl 6y ago
I think the standard framing of copyleft as all about the user's rights is flawed. What we call copyright is a deeply flawed legal framework that helps to entrench rent-seeking and anti-competitive behaviour, but there's another side of the coin: the intent of the law is genuinely to guarantee access to the fruits of one's intellectual labour. Of course, copyleft licenses such as the GPL _can_ be used to protect the authors' rights to compensation for commercial use of their work - but the framing matters. I think that's the fundamental reason open source licenses such as BSD and MIT have caught on - they centre on the need of the developer to get productive work done, not on the far more abstract principle of the home PC user being able to recompile their own software stack from source.
- rhamzeh 6y ago
  I believe copyleft stands for and invisions a better world where all code is free/libre and available to everyone. And the GPL family of licenses is trying to get us there. MIT and the like, while being good open source licences, allow anyone to break the chain and not release their code to the public. So it is good in terms of being open source and free/libre now, but does do anything for the future, and does not do enough to bring about the vision of a fully free world. Personally, I'd prefer the GPL licenses unless there's an good reason not to.
  - mimixco 6y ago
    The good reason is that GPL's requirement that I make my source code and build instructions available to my licensed customers (paid customers only, btw, if I want) doesn't actually help the original developer at all. Is he or she supposed to dig into my doc and diff my changes? The idea that there is some wonderful "community" on GitHub and all this code just flows back into a beautiful, better place simply isn't how programming works. No one would do that.
    - kubanczyk 6y ago
      Who cares about GitHub? Your paid user can take the code and go to the original dev (or any other) and become their paying customer, if they need more work done. Therefore GPL helps both users and devs.
- theobeers 6y ago
  IMO it makes more sense to look at the rising popularity of a license like MIT, as opposed to the GPL, in terms of the acceptability of each license to different groups of individuals and institutions. What is the range of opinion regarding the MIT license? From what I’ve seen, people are either fine with it, or mildly disgruntled. Exceptions are rare. And of course, corporations love having access to software libraries under this license. How about the GPL? Individual developers seem to be either ok with it, or enthusiastically in support. That’s cool—I’m sure we can all relate to those feelings. But a lot of, ahem, for-profit institutions simply will not get involved in GPL-licensed software. We’ve seen repeatedly the effects of their willingness to walk away, to invest in alternatives, etc. It seems obvious, if depressing, how things will move over time.
  - zelphirkalt 6y ago
    But then again it is also obvious that greedy people will have more emotions involved when it comes to something that forces them to contribute back, so no surprise there. I think this is painting the picture in a too one-sided way. Here is another way to see it: While for-profits might develop their own alternatives, they will fail to make those GPL licensed in most cases, because that is what they wanted to avoid: Giving back to the society, that allows them to exist. So they will have proprietary code. The next company will do the same and so on, all while slowly the GPL licensed alternative creeps up on them, until finally it has caught up. It gets ever more expensive to not use GPL software, as free software slowly gains ground.
  - indymike 6y ago
    Plenty of for-profits use, support and contribute to GPL'd software. I suspect that those who will not are a smaller set than companies who prefer not to.
- throwaway50203 6y ago
  > far more abstract principle of the home PC user being able to recompile their own software stack from source. I contributed hundreds of hours of work into libraries. They are used by the same companies that sell me locked-down devices that I cannot modify or even inspect. They even invade the my privacy and I cannot disable that. At least GPL tries to mitigate this problem. MIT turns volunteering into unpaid labor for some billionaires. Calling it "far more abstract principle" is quite absurd. These companies try hard to push the narrative that MIT is "practical" and GPL is "political" - guess why.
  - qsort 6y ago
    > MIT turns volunteering into unpaid labor for some billionaires. Um... no? The idea behind MIT/ISC and the like is to let other people use your software, which they aren't automatically allowed to do because copyright is broken by default. There's a lot of software that I would like to use in my day job that I can't touch because it's GPL. This is by design. > These companies try hard to push the narrative that MIT is "practical" and GPL is "political" - guess why. I have no sympathy for FAANG, but that happens to be correct. GPL is explicitly political in its intent.
    - amw 6y ago
      MIT ends up just as political, it just does so by assuming society's default politics. It "just so happens" those default politics are great for billionaires.
      - crankyoldcrank 6y ago
        Ugh, they're also great for anyone that wants to feed themselves with their software, whether self employed or not. God forbid people use a license that makes it easier to turn a profit so they don't have to beg to stay afloat.
        wizzwizz4 6y ago
        MIT actually makes it harder for people to profit from their software than GPL, because the developer of GPL-licensed code has the exclusive right (by law, as author) to produce proprietary forks of that code; if the code's MIT'd, somebody else could fork, clone the proprietary features and add a few more (preferably going against the original program's general philosophy in doing so, to reduce the chances of those features being introduced into the original), aggressively market, and basically steal the whole project and its user base… then the developer's unemployed, the whole thing's proprietary and some unethical organisation is profiting off the work of another. The “rolling release” model, where the latest version's proprietary but six months ago's version is libre, simply cannot be done with something like MIT unless you're willing to risk somebody else taking it all for themselves.
- zelphirkalt 6y ago
  > I think that's the fundamental reason open source licenses such as BSD and MIT have caught on - they centre on the need of the developer to get productive work done, not on the far more abstract principle of the home PC user being able to recompile their own software stack from source. That is reducing what GPL is about quite a lot. For example it is equally important, if not more, that modifications in most cases have to be contributed back to the community, which means getting companies to take part in the action, instead of simply using work of others, profitting from it and never contributing anything back.
  - xyzzy_plugh 6y ago
    > For example it is equally important, if not more, that modifications in most cases have to be contributed back to the community, which means getting companies to take part in the action, instead of simply using work of others, profitting from it and never contributing anything back. This is wrong. There is no requirement to contribute back to the community, just the requirement that changes (or rather, the source with your changes) be made available to your users. This means they could mail CDs of their code to their paying customers only, if they so choose. A far cry from "contributing back to the community", closer to something like "a pain in the ass."
    - mimixco 6y ago
      Exactly. I don't know where the phrase "contribute to the community" came from but it's not in the GPL license text. All you have to do to comply is make your own source code available on request to users who accept your license, along with installation instructions to build the running product. That's not contributing anything to the other dev's community.
    - dec0dedab0de 6y ago
      And really that's a beautiful thing. If I'm going to rely on your software. I want a way to keep supporting myself if you go out of business or you deem my suggestions unworthy.
      - 6y ago
- asimovfan 6y ago
  You are comparing GPL to a product as if it should aim to reach some sort of market penetration. GPL is not necessarily for developers to get productive work done. It is for people to ensure maximum benevolence with their work for everyone and take the highest moral position. I believe what needs market penetration is this ideal, rather than the GPL itself. GPL is for people who already hold this kind of ideal. They are looking for exactly this. I don't say you shouldn't ever make money from your work or never use any copyright/MIT/BSD licenses. Most people are not filthy rich and need the money. What I am saying is GPL is not for this, and does not have the requirement to be convenient or framed in a different way than the heroic selfless endeavor it is, in any sense.
  - codeguro2 6y ago
    > GPL is not necessarily for developers to get productive work done. Try getting some productive work done without the source. Like fixing a printer of a proprietary driver, for instance. No, the GPL is about exactly about getting practical work done. That's why it emphasizes so much on the 4 essential freedoms, and why 3 of those 4 freedoms are essentially the same thing "the freedom to tinker with the source code and share that information with other developers who can tinker with it some more and do the same".
- bergstromm466 6y ago
  > the intent of the law is genuinely to guarantee access to the fruits of one's intellectual labour This seems a naive take when considering that it's Corporations who hold the most Intellectual Property[1] (Patents and Copyrights) and are the 'customers' or beneficiaries of Intellectual Property laws and systems. It's Corporations who focus on IP acquisition (and thus monopolization) strategies (e.g. Google buying smaller startups to add their Intellectual Property to it's repertoire). ...in other words, the likelyhood of average Joe being helped by the Intellectual Property system to get access to the fruits of his labor is not a common situation at all. Most new innovations are the result of access and engagement with existing Corporate Intellectual Property (plus an expensive education). [1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.en.html
DonHopkins 6y ago
“Copyleft (L)” sticker https://www.gnu.org/graphics/copyleft-sticker.html https://www.gnu.org/graphics/copyleft-sticker.html
bergstromm466 6y ago
"it wasn’t until the free software movement shed its rebellious roots and rebranded as the more business-friendly “open-source movement” that it really took off. One of the most crucial figures in this effort was Tim O’Reilly, founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, who built his business empire by identifying the pieces of the free software movement that could be commodified. Suddenly, corporations that had previously considered open source to be dangerously redolent of “communism” were starting to see its value, both as a way of building software and as a recruitment tactic. From there, an entire ecosystem of virtue-signaling opportunities sprang up around the marriage of convenience between the corporate world and open source: conference and hackathon sponsorships, “summers of code,” libraries released under open licenses but funded by for-profit corporations. If that counts as a victory, however, it was a pyrrhic one. In the process of gaining mainstream popularity, the social movement of “free software”—which rejected the very idea of treating software as intellectual property—morphed into the more palatable notion of “open source” as a development methodology, in which free and proprietary software could happily co-exist. The corporations that latched onto the movement discovered a useful technique for developing software, but jettisoned the critique of property rights that formed its ideological foundation. Yet it was precisely the weakness of that foundation that made the free software movement vulnerable to co-optation in the first place. The movement’s greatest limitation was its political naivete. Even as it attacked the idea of software as property, it failed to connect its message to a wider analysis that acknowledged the role of property rights within a capitalist framework. Free software pioneers like Stallman tended to approach the issue from an individualized perspective, drawn from the 1970s-1980s hacker culture that many of them came from: if you could change how enough hackers wrote and used software, you could change the world. This highly personalized model of social change proposed an individual solution to a structural problem, which necessarily neglected the wider social context." + "the neoliberal consensus of the last few decades has meant that the benefits of technological development have largely flowed to corporations, under the aegis of a strong intellectual property regime. As the free software movement came up against these prevailing economic forces, its more contentious aspects were watered down or discarded. The result was “open source”: a more collaborative method of writing software that bore few traces of its subversive origins." — Wendy Liu, https://logicmag.io/failure/freedom-isnt-free/ https://logicmag.io/failure/freedom-isnt-free/
mimixco 6y ago
The premise that copyleft licenses force or encourage devs to "contribute back to the community" (the most common claim) is ridiculous. Contribute what? And to whose community? Let's say you've written a library and published it under GPL and it gets used in a cellphone or an automobile. The "community" of users for that paid product is not the same as the users for your dev library. In fact, most commercial software innards don't have a "community" at all. I think that's a complete fiction. What they have is customers who pay. When the automaker changes that code, do you really want it back? Are you really going to publish their automobile version or cellphone version of your library back into your "community?" If its a simple bug fix, you might, but again this big company isn't republishing your software just to fix your bugs. They've modified it for their application. Do you want or need their mods? Are their devs in the same "community" as yours? I don't think so. GPL tries to reach into the surrounding and supporting code that the commercial entity writes and somehow force that company to "contribute" that code back to a non-existent community of people. What right does the first developer have over any code that the second dev wrote? That idea that the first author could reach into my code or my product and have anything to say about it is antithetical to the values of open source software right from the start. Non-permissive licenses use the tools of the enemy to try to do something that sounds good on the surface but in practice is immoral and largely unenforceable. I would argue that, far from encouraging liberal software use and development, restrictive FOSS licenses like GPL and its cousins prevent a great deal of software from ever being commercialized and also prevent great products from reaching users because no one bothers to commercialize them. If you love our industry, please help your fellow devs by giving them the maximum ability to use your work in their own work so that they can create businesses, pay the bills, hire other devs, and so on and so forth.
- craigsmansion 6y ago
  > GPL tries to reach into the surrounding and supporting code that the commercial entity writes and somehow force that company to "contribute" Well, maybe that "commercial entity" could have picked a different library to begin with, and your rant has no bearing on the GPL at all? > When the automaker changes that code, do you really want it back? Well, if you buy that car, yes?! Because that's the very stipulation you set forth when you published the library. > If you love our industry, What a load of bollocks.
specialist 6y ago
Do any of these copyleft (FOSS) licenses address royalties? I was wondering how FOSS teams could get their fare share of revenue from cloud providers. It just seems reasonable that AWS would pay royalties to the elasticsearch, postgres, rabbitmq teams. For examples. Am noob, just started foraging for details. I didn't quickly find anything, so started reading about how the music industry handles royalties, because that's copyright. Stuff like sampling, covers, airplay. Next, I'll probably read about royalties for patents. Thoughts?
- Kye 6y ago
  None address it as far as I can tell. Their goal is usually to ensure people have the code to change how their software and hardware works and are able to actually make those changes. The original GPL tried to address the first concern. GPL 3 was an update made in light of companies like Apple, Amazon, and Google (and Tivo) making billions off open source software and not contributing much if anything back to the original project while not letting people touch the operating system--usually based substantially on open source code--on their hardware.
- mr_tristan 6y ago
  Is the MongoDB SSPL license an example of such a "royalty friendly" license? https://www.mongodb.com/licensing/server-side-public-license https://www.mongodb.com/licensing/server-side-public-license I've heard of this in a couple of other places, I'm not aware of a common approach just yet. And I'm not sure how it's played out.
- phkahler 6y ago
  >> Do any of these copyleft (FOSS) licenses address royalties? No. The goal of copyleft is to ensure that the users of software are free to do what they want with it. Royalties would encumber that freedom. The only freedom not allowed is giving the software to someone else without granting them the same freedoms.
  - specialist 6y ago
    How's that working out? As I said, I'm pondering fairness. Something practical, a la Hintjens (zeromq). Like maybe dual licensing. Edit: Hintjens has some advice about using trademarks to maintain control. I'll go back and check if his strategy talks about getting paid.
mimixco 6y ago
Taking away the political terms like contribute and community (which are not in the GPL license text), the actual license requires the 2nd developer to do two things that are contentious. Release the source to his own mods to the first person's code... AND release the build instructions. If you read the license, this is explicitly specified. Even if the second developer isn't evil, he may be willing to release his mods to the first person's code, but there can be several technical and business reasons that he cannot release his build process to his customers. BTW, nothing in GPL requires that the second guy communicate with the first one in any way. There is no "community contribution." It only says he has to make a copy of his source available to his customers on request. That's a pretty huge delta from the idea of folks sitting around in a community and improving software. To actually use the second guy's code, you'd have to diff it from the first! There is no requirement that the code have any comments or documentation. It cannot be intentionally obfuscated, but it can be obtuse by design. Again, none of this implies any community of people working to improve some theoretical software. And that's because the second person is likely building very different software from the first! The first person and his community probably don't need or want most of the second guy's code. And if there's a community of devs for the second guy's product, well that's kind of his problem. The real burdens that GPL places on the second dev are pretty bad problems. Releasing the build process and the surrounding code which is not related to the first guy's product is a huge problem. You don't have to be evil to see that. There are also many, many cases where the second person is making something that improves the first product but doesn't compete with it. It's in a different technical niche or customer application and in that way, they're not related. (Same software in a TV and a fridge, for example.) Does the TV company care about the fridge people's mods? No, not really. Unless there are some bugs or real improvements in the TV software that the fridge people could make. Since this does happen if the TV code base gets big enough, eventually you see paid software companies like Google and Red Hat who go ahead and fix errors and make improvements in the free software they use. But this only happens when there is a certain critical mass of users or an overlap between the use cases of the base code. Nothing in the fridge people's proprietary software would be of any help to the TV users! There is no great "GitHub in the sky" where all the mods to the TV code for a fridge or some other thing come together to make the "great, perfect TV software!" That just isn't how software development works.
worldmerge 6y ago
On this topic is it possible to show the source code of your product but retain the copyright on it? Like some of the electronics my grandmother had came with a manual that had their full schematic in them. I want to make products that come with the schematic and source code but retain my copyright. I want to build products that empower you to fix it if it breaks and make it last a long time. Is that possible?
- vagrantJin 6y ago
  That line of thinking died a ling time ago. Take a toaster. I dont think you should need to buy 2 toasters in a lifetime and yet Im over the 10 mark. A simple machine to heat bread with a timer and spring mechanism. How hard can it be to fix...we've all probably thought to ourselves.
  - worldmerge 6y ago
    >That line of thinking died a ling time ago. Hopefully companies go back to it. Hopefully I can have a positive impact and maybe that will cause others to try it.
  - conk 6y ago
    A toaster is a simple device but the physics involved in the safe operation is not trivial. You’re dealing with resistive heating elements that get incredibly hot and exposed conductive wires with lethal voltages present. The liability and risk around repair is so high that I’m not surprised there’s no support for field service of it. I have 2 toasters at my house, one pulls 600W while on, the other 1400W. Both toast 2 slices of bread and are otherwise the same. If someone accidentally installed the 1400W elements in the 600W toaster something would melt and possibly start a fire. I’m all for promoting the repair of consumer devices but toasters are one device that I don’t think the general public has the knowledge and skill to repair safely.
  - eeZah7Ux 6y ago
    > That line of thinking died a ling time ago That line of thinking has been removed from global consciousnesses because it was less profitable.
unabst 6y ago
I would love if something like this caught on. "5% royalties due on profits derived from this product." So if something is given away free, nothing would be due. But if something were used for profit, part of that profit would have to be paid upstream. And that would be profit for that node which, if used the same license, would have 5% of that trickle upstream. This could be an automatic process and handled through an open registry. Anyone could take anything, register, and then pay their "taxes". If you wanted to donate anything you made, make that an option also. Of course there are an infinite amount of "what if" scenarios, but that's the gist of it based on the following philosophy: No one should need permission to copy anything or profit from anything. But they should share their earnings if they "opt in" to capitalism.
tomasreimers 6y ago
If you've never seen it, I HIGHLY recommend Lessig's talk on "Free Culture" from OSCON 2002 (the book too). It's one of the first talks that got me into software copyrights, and covers a lot of ground into an area many of us (or at least I) probably only know at a surface-level: https://youtu.be/5HiW9ZCpnK8 https://youtu.be/5HiW9ZCpnK8
- tomasreimers 6y ago
  Ah sorry! Messed up that upload (it didn't have audio). Correct upload here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uH4RskpUFiA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uH4RskpUFiA

84 points by merelydev 6y ago

tim44 6y ago

ouch who can splain

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

cdogl 6y ago

I think the standard framing of copyleft as all about the user's rights is flawed. What we call copyright is a deeply flawed legal framework that helps to entrench rent-seeking and anti-competitive behaviour, but there's another side of the coin: the intent of the law is genuinely to guarantee access to the fruits of one's intellectual labour. Of course, copyleft licenses such as the GPL _can_ be used to protect the authors' rights to compensation for commercial use of their work - but the framing matters. I think that's the fundamental reason open source licenses such as BSD and MIT have caught on - they centre on the need of the developer to get productive work done, not on the far more abstract principle of the home PC user being able to recompile their own software stack from source.

rhamzeh 6y ago
I believe copyleft stands for and invisions a better world where all code is free/libre and available to everyone. And the GPL family of licenses is trying to get us there. MIT and the like, while being good open source licences, allow anyone to break the chain and not release their code to the public. So it is good in terms of being open source and free/libre now, but does do anything for the future, and does not do enough to bring about the vision of a fully free world. Personally, I'd prefer the GPL licenses unless there's an good reason not to.
- mimixco 6y ago
  The good reason is that GPL's requirement that I make my source code and build instructions available to my licensed customers (paid customers only, btw, if I want) doesn't actually help the original developer at all. Is he or she supposed to dig into my doc and diff my changes? The idea that there is some wonderful "community" on GitHub and all this code just flows back into a beautiful, better place simply isn't how programming works. No one would do that.
  - kubanczyk 6y ago
    Who cares about GitHub? Your paid user can take the code and go to the original dev (or any other) and become their paying customer, if they need more work done. Therefore GPL helps both users and devs.
theobeers 6y ago
IMO it makes more sense to look at the rising popularity of a license like MIT, as opposed to the GPL, in terms of the acceptability of each license to different groups of individuals and institutions. What is the range of opinion regarding the MIT license? From what I’ve seen, people are either fine with it, or mildly disgruntled. Exceptions are rare. And of course, corporations love having access to software libraries under this license. How about the GPL? Individual developers seem to be either ok with it, or enthusiastically in support. That’s cool—I’m sure we can all relate to those feelings. But a lot of, ahem, for-profit institutions simply will not get involved in GPL-licensed software. We’ve seen repeatedly the effects of their willingness to walk away, to invest in alternatives, etc. It seems obvious, if depressing, how things will move over time.
- zelphirkalt 6y ago
  But then again it is also obvious that greedy people will have more emotions involved when it comes to something that forces them to contribute back, so no surprise there. I think this is painting the picture in a too one-sided way. Here is another way to see it: While for-profits might develop their own alternatives, they will fail to make those GPL licensed in most cases, because that is what they wanted to avoid: Giving back to the society, that allows them to exist. So they will have proprietary code. The next company will do the same and so on, all while slowly the GPL licensed alternative creeps up on them, until finally it has caught up. It gets ever more expensive to not use GPL software, as free software slowly gains ground.
- indymike 6y ago
  Plenty of for-profits use, support and contribute to GPL'd software. I suspect that those who will not are a smaller set than companies who prefer not to.
throwaway50203 6y ago
> far more abstract principle of the home PC user being able to recompile their own software stack from source. I contributed hundreds of hours of work into libraries. They are used by the same companies that sell me locked-down devices that I cannot modify or even inspect. They even invade the my privacy and I cannot disable that. At least GPL tries to mitigate this problem. MIT turns volunteering into unpaid labor for some billionaires. Calling it "far more abstract principle" is quite absurd. These companies try hard to push the narrative that MIT is "practical" and GPL is "political" - guess why.
- qsort 6y ago
  > MIT turns volunteering into unpaid labor for some billionaires. Um... no? The idea behind MIT/ISC and the like is to let other people use your software, which they aren't automatically allowed to do because copyright is broken by default. There's a lot of software that I would like to use in my day job that I can't touch because it's GPL. This is by design. > These companies try hard to push the narrative that MIT is "practical" and GPL is "political" - guess why. I have no sympathy for FAANG, but that happens to be correct. GPL is explicitly political in its intent.
  - amw 6y ago
    MIT ends up just as political, it just does so by assuming society's default politics. It "just so happens" those default politics are great for billionaires.
    - crankyoldcrank 6y ago
      Ugh, they're also great for anyone that wants to feed themselves with their software, whether self employed or not. God forbid people use a license that makes it easier to turn a profit so they don't have to beg to stay afloat.
      - wizzwizz4 6y ago
        MIT actually makes it harder for people to profit from their software than GPL, because the developer of GPL-licensed code has the exclusive right (by law, as author) to produce proprietary forks of that code; if the code's MIT'd, somebody else could fork, clone the proprietary features and add a few more (preferably going against the original program's general philosophy in doing so, to reduce the chances of those features being introduced into the original), aggressively market, and basically steal the whole project and its user base… then the developer's unemployed, the whole thing's proprietary and some unethical organisation is profiting off the work of another. The “rolling release” model, where the latest version's proprietary but six months ago's version is libre, simply cannot be done with something like MIT unless you're willing to risk somebody else taking it all for themselves.
zelphirkalt 6y ago
> I think that's the fundamental reason open source licenses such as BSD and MIT have caught on - they centre on the need of the developer to get productive work done, not on the far more abstract principle of the home PC user being able to recompile their own software stack from source. That is reducing what GPL is about quite a lot. For example it is equally important, if not more, that modifications in most cases have to be contributed back to the community, which means getting companies to take part in the action, instead of simply using work of others, profitting from it and never contributing anything back.
- xyzzy_plugh 6y ago
  > For example it is equally important, if not more, that modifications in most cases have to be contributed back to the community, which means getting companies to take part in the action, instead of simply using work of others, profitting from it and never contributing anything back. This is wrong. There is no requirement to contribute back to the community, just the requirement that changes (or rather, the source with your changes) be made available to your users. This means they could mail CDs of their code to their paying customers only, if they so choose. A far cry from "contributing back to the community", closer to something like "a pain in the ass."
  - mimixco 6y ago
    Exactly. I don't know where the phrase "contribute to the community" came from but it's not in the GPL license text. All you have to do to comply is make your own source code available on request to users who accept your license, along with installation instructions to build the running product. That's not contributing anything to the other dev's community.
  - dec0dedab0de 6y ago
    And really that's a beautiful thing. If I'm going to rely on your software. I want a way to keep supporting myself if you go out of business or you deem my suggestions unworthy.
    - 6y ago
asimovfan 6y ago
You are comparing GPL to a product as if it should aim to reach some sort of market penetration. GPL is not necessarily for developers to get productive work done. It is for people to ensure maximum benevolence with their work for everyone and take the highest moral position. I believe what needs market penetration is this ideal, rather than the GPL itself. GPL is for people who already hold this kind of ideal. They are looking for exactly this. I don't say you shouldn't ever make money from your work or never use any copyright/MIT/BSD licenses. Most people are not filthy rich and need the money. What I am saying is GPL is not for this, and does not have the requirement to be convenient or framed in a different way than the heroic selfless endeavor it is, in any sense.
- codeguro2 6y ago
  > GPL is not necessarily for developers to get productive work done. Try getting some productive work done without the source. Like fixing a printer of a proprietary driver, for instance. No, the GPL is about exactly about getting practical work done. That's why it emphasizes so much on the 4 essential freedoms, and why 3 of those 4 freedoms are essentially the same thing "the freedom to tinker with the source code and share that information with other developers who can tinker with it some more and do the same".
bergstromm466 6y ago
> the intent of the law is genuinely to guarantee access to the fruits of one's intellectual labour This seems a naive take when considering that it's Corporations who hold the most Intellectual Property[1] (Patents and Copyrights) and are the 'customers' or beneficiaries of Intellectual Property laws and systems. It's Corporations who focus on IP acquisition (and thus monopolization) strategies (e.g. Google buying smaller startups to add their Intellectual Property to it's repertoire). ...in other words, the likelyhood of average Joe being helped by the Intellectual Property system to get access to the fruits of his labor is not a common situation at all. Most new innovations are the result of access and engagement with existing Corporate Intellectual Property (plus an expensive education). [1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.en.html

DonHopkins 6y ago

“Copyleft (L)” sticker https://www.gnu.org/graphics/copyleft-sticker.html https://www.gnu.org/graphics/copyleft-sticker.html

bergstromm466 6y ago

"it wasn’t until the free software movement shed its rebellious roots and rebranded as the more business-friendly “open-source movement” that it really took off. One of the most crucial figures in this effort was Tim O’Reilly, founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, who built his business empire by identifying the pieces of the free software movement that could be commodified. Suddenly, corporations that had previously considered open source to be dangerously redolent of “communism” were starting to see its value, both as a way of building software and as a recruitment tactic. From there, an entire ecosystem of virtue-signaling opportunities sprang up around the marriage of convenience between the corporate world and open source: conference and hackathon sponsorships, “summers of code,” libraries released under open licenses but funded by for-profit corporations. If that counts as a victory, however, it was a pyrrhic one. In the process of gaining mainstream popularity, the social movement of “free software”—which rejected the very idea of treating software as intellectual property—morphed into the more palatable notion of “open source” as a development methodology, in which free and proprietary software could happily co-exist. The corporations that latched onto the movement discovered a useful technique for developing software, but jettisoned the critique of property rights that formed its ideological foundation. Yet it was precisely the weakness of that foundation that made the free software movement vulnerable to co-optation in the first place. The movement’s greatest limitation was its political naivete. Even as it attacked the idea of software as property, it failed to connect its message to a wider analysis that acknowledged the role of property rights within a capitalist framework. Free software pioneers like Stallman tended to approach the issue from an individualized perspective, drawn from the 1970s-1980s hacker culture that many of them came from: if you could change how enough hackers wrote and used software, you could change the world. This highly personalized model of social change proposed an individual solution to a structural problem, which necessarily neglected the wider social context." + "the neoliberal consensus of the last few decades has meant that the benefits of technological development have largely flowed to corporations, under the aegis of a strong intellectual property regime. As the free software movement came up against these prevailing economic forces, its more contentious aspects were watered down or discarded. The result was “open source”: a more collaborative method of writing software that bore few traces of its subversive origins." — Wendy Liu, https://logicmag.io/failure/freedom-isnt-free/ https://logicmag.io/failure/freedom-isnt-free/

mimixco 6y ago

The premise that copyleft licenses force or encourage devs to "contribute back to the community" (the most common claim) is ridiculous. Contribute what? And to whose community? Let's say you've written a library and published it under GPL and it gets used in a cellphone or an automobile. The "community" of users for that paid product is not the same as the users for your dev library. In fact, most commercial software innards don't have a "community" at all. I think that's a complete fiction. What they have is customers who pay. When the automaker changes that code, do you really want it back? Are you really going to publish their automobile version or cellphone version of your library back into your "community?" If its a simple bug fix, you might, but again this big company isn't republishing your software just to fix your bugs. They've modified it for their application. Do you want or need their mods? Are their devs in the same "community" as yours? I don't think so. GPL tries to reach into the surrounding and supporting code that the commercial entity writes and somehow force that company to "contribute" that code back to a non-existent community of people. What right does the first developer have over any code that the second dev wrote? That idea that the first author could reach into my code or my product and have anything to say about it is antithetical to the values of open source software right from the start. Non-permissive licenses use the tools of the enemy to try to do something that sounds good on the surface but in practice is immoral and largely unenforceable. I would argue that, far from encouraging liberal software use and development, restrictive FOSS licenses like GPL and its cousins prevent a great deal of software from ever being commercialized and also prevent great products from reaching users because no one bothers to commercialize them. If you love our industry, please help your fellow devs by giving them the maximum ability to use your work in their own work so that they can create businesses, pay the bills, hire other devs, and so on and so forth.

craigsmansion 6y ago
> GPL tries to reach into the surrounding and supporting code that the commercial entity writes and somehow force that company to "contribute" Well, maybe that "commercial entity" could have picked a different library to begin with, and your rant has no bearing on the GPL at all? > When the automaker changes that code, do you really want it back? Well, if you buy that car, yes?! Because that's the very stipulation you set forth when you published the library. > If you love our industry, What a load of bollocks.

specialist 6y ago

Do any of these copyleft (FOSS) licenses address royalties? I was wondering how FOSS teams could get their fare share of revenue from cloud providers. It just seems reasonable that AWS would pay royalties to the elasticsearch, postgres, rabbitmq teams. For examples. Am noob, just started foraging for details. I didn't quickly find anything, so started reading about how the music industry handles royalties, because that's copyright. Stuff like sampling, covers, airplay. Next, I'll probably read about royalties for patents. Thoughts?

Kye 6y ago
None address it as far as I can tell. Their goal is usually to ensure people have the code to change how their software and hardware works and are able to actually make those changes. The original GPL tried to address the first concern. GPL 3 was an update made in light of companies like Apple, Amazon, and Google (and Tivo) making billions off open source software and not contributing much if anything back to the original project while not letting people touch the operating system--usually based substantially on open source code--on their hardware.
mr_tristan 6y ago
Is the MongoDB SSPL license an example of such a "royalty friendly" license? https://www.mongodb.com/licensing/server-side-public-license https://www.mongodb.com/licensing/server-side-public-license I've heard of this in a couple of other places, I'm not aware of a common approach just yet. And I'm not sure how it's played out.
phkahler 6y ago
>> Do any of these copyleft (FOSS) licenses address royalties? No. The goal of copyleft is to ensure that the users of software are free to do what they want with it. Royalties would encumber that freedom. The only freedom not allowed is giving the software to someone else without granting them the same freedoms.
- specialist 6y ago
  How's that working out? As I said, I'm pondering fairness. Something practical, a la Hintjens (zeromq). Like maybe dual licensing. Edit: Hintjens has some advice about using trademarks to maintain control. I'll go back and check if his strategy talks about getting paid.

mimixco 6y ago

Taking away the political terms like contribute and community (which are not in the GPL license text), the actual license requires the 2nd developer to do two things that are contentious. Release the source to his own mods to the first person's code... AND release the build instructions. If you read the license, this is explicitly specified. Even if the second developer isn't evil, he may be willing to release his mods to the first person's code, but there can be several technical and business reasons that he cannot release his build process to his customers. BTW, nothing in GPL requires that the second guy communicate with the first one in any way. There is no "community contribution." It only says he has to make a copy of his source available to his customers on request. That's a pretty huge delta from the idea of folks sitting around in a community and improving software. To actually use the second guy's code, you'd have to diff it from the first! There is no requirement that the code have any comments or documentation. It cannot be intentionally obfuscated, but it can be obtuse by design. Again, none of this implies any community of people working to improve some theoretical software. And that's because the second person is likely building very different software from the first! The first person and his community probably don't need or want most of the second guy's code. And if there's a community of devs for the second guy's product, well that's kind of his problem. The real burdens that GPL places on the second dev are pretty bad problems. Releasing the build process and the surrounding code which is not related to the first guy's product is a huge problem. You don't have to be evil to see that. There are also many, many cases where the second person is making something that improves the first product but doesn't compete with it. It's in a different technical niche or customer application and in that way, they're not related. (Same software in a TV and a fridge, for example.) Does the TV company care about the fridge people's mods? No, not really. Unless there are some bugs or real improvements in the TV software that the fridge people could make. Since this does happen if the TV code base gets big enough, eventually you see paid software companies like Google and Red Hat who go ahead and fix errors and make improvements in the free software they use. But this only happens when there is a certain critical mass of users or an overlap between the use cases of the base code. Nothing in the fridge people's proprietary software would be of any help to the TV users! There is no great "GitHub in the sky" where all the mods to the TV code for a fridge or some other thing come together to make the "great, perfect TV software!" That just isn't how software development works.

worldmerge 6y ago

On this topic is it possible to show the source code of your product but retain the copyright on it? Like some of the electronics my grandmother had came with a manual that had their full schematic in them. I want to make products that come with the schematic and source code but retain my copyright. I want to build products that empower you to fix it if it breaks and make it last a long time. Is that possible?

vagrantJin 6y ago
That line of thinking died a ling time ago. Take a toaster. I dont think you should need to buy 2 toasters in a lifetime and yet Im over the 10 mark. A simple machine to heat bread with a timer and spring mechanism. How hard can it be to fix...we've all probably thought to ourselves.
- worldmerge 6y ago
  >That line of thinking died a ling time ago. Hopefully companies go back to it. Hopefully I can have a positive impact and maybe that will cause others to try it.
- conk 6y ago
  A toaster is a simple device but the physics involved in the safe operation is not trivial. You’re dealing with resistive heating elements that get incredibly hot and exposed conductive wires with lethal voltages present. The liability and risk around repair is so high that I’m not surprised there’s no support for field service of it. I have 2 toasters at my house, one pulls 600W while on, the other 1400W. Both toast 2 slices of bread and are otherwise the same. If someone accidentally installed the 1400W elements in the 600W toaster something would melt and possibly start a fire. I’m all for promoting the repair of consumer devices but toasters are one device that I don’t think the general public has the knowledge and skill to repair safely.
- eeZah7Ux 6y ago
  > That line of thinking died a ling time ago That line of thinking has been removed from global consciousnesses because it was less profitable.

unabst 6y ago

I would love if something like this caught on. "5% royalties due on profits derived from this product." So if something is given away free, nothing would be due. But if something were used for profit, part of that profit would have to be paid upstream. And that would be profit for that node which, if used the same license, would have 5% of that trickle upstream. This could be an automatic process and handled through an open registry. Anyone could take anything, register, and then pay their "taxes". If you wanted to donate anything you made, make that an option also. Of course there are an infinite amount of "what if" scenarios, but that's the gist of it based on the following philosophy: No one should need permission to copy anything or profit from anything. But they should share their earnings if they "opt in" to capitalism.

tomasreimers 6y ago

If you've never seen it, I HIGHLY recommend Lessig's talk on "Free Culture" from OSCON 2002 (the book too). It's one of the first talks that got me into software copyrights, and covers a lot of ground into an area many of us (or at least I) probably only know at a surface-level: https://youtu.be/5HiW9ZCpnK8 https://youtu.be/5HiW9ZCpnK8

tomasreimers 6y ago
Ah sorry! Messed up that upload (it didn't have audio). Correct upload here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uH4RskpUFiA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uH4RskpUFiA