7 ms·

> Would it outrage you for someone else to take your code ... and make millions while you make nothing? ... You shouldn't use the GPL if your response would be,

> Would it outrage you for someone else to take your code ... and make millions while you make nothing? ... You shouldn't use the GPL if your response would be, "Bully for them, I had fun and they made the world better." This is wrong. Copyleft licenses are concerned with freedom, not price. I don't care if somebody gets rich off my software while I don't. I don't want somebody to take the work I have done and turn it into proprietary software that other users may no longer have the freedom to inspect, modify, and share. THAT is why all my work is GPL or AGPL. It has nothing to do with whether you make money or those users spend money or I get a cut of some money. Now that we have so many SaaS startups, "turn it into proprietary software" includes "use it to build a service and never distribute the sources." GPL and AGPL protects my code from this happening, while licenses like MIT and BSD ("permissive" licenses) do not. Permissive licensing, in the context of SaaS, is functionally equivalent to proprietary licensing. Somebody benefits (not necessarily monetarily) from the use of my software without paying its price: improvements must be shared.

TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
> This is wrong. Copyleft licenses are concerned with freedom, not price. Precisely. The thought that someone might take the code I wrote and make it into a proprietary product, removing the freedoms I had, is horrible. But if someone made an free software product based on it and made millions, all the better for them!
- reitanqild 11y ago
  > The thought that someone might take the code I wrote and make it into a proprietary product, removing the freedoms I had, is horrible. I feel this argument is weak: even if I license my works under BSD, no one can make my BSD licensed code that has already been distributed into to a proprietary product, even not myself. To make that software that I licensed under BSD a proprietary product they would need to somehow convince all users of my software to get rid of all copies as well as convincing me to stop distributing it under a free licence. Building a proprietary product that includes my code does NOT remove anyones freedom to use my code, no?
  - Deejahll 11y ago
    This presumes that any modifications to "your" code that someone else makes should be none of your business. Seems fine on the surface. But what if your code writes files or communicates over the network? And what if, say, Microsoft takes your permissively-licensed code that is just beginning to gain popularity, changes one piece of it to make it incompatible with yours, and doesn't release their change? They use their massive marketing department or pre-bundling to get lots of Windows users to use it. Everyone is still free to use "your" version of the code, but nobody wants to, since it is incompatible with the more popular Microsoft version, now on its way to becoming "the standard." If you are okay with that, no rabid copyleft zealot like me has any place to criticize you. Release your code with a permissive license. That's fine. (Permissive licenses are considered "Free Software" by FSF and rms as well, after all.) But to me, that seems grossly unfair for code I spent my valuable time designing and developing, so I don't release my code under a permissive license. If Microsoft wants to build a product with the work I have done, it needs to convey the same freedoms to its users that I did. That's the cost.
    - geon 11y ago
      A very contrived example.
      - Deejahll 11y ago
        Oh yeah I just pulled that from a fever dream I had, that sort of thing never happens in real life. > "Embrace, extend, and extinguish", is a phrase that was used internally by Microsoft to describe its strategy for entering product categories involving widely used standards, extending those standards with proprietary capabilities, and then using those differences to disadvantage its competitors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish
        jahewson 11y ago
        And what permissively licensed software did Microsoft apply this policy to, exactly? Or is it just an unfounded fear?
- morganvachon 11y ago
  BSD doesn't remove any freedoms from the original software author, and in fact it unshackles them from having to publish all future development, allowing them to go proprietary in the future if they wish to. To put it another way, once you license something under GPL, it is forever GPL. That's a strength of that license in the sense that it has allowed so much excellent and important software to grow and flourish. On the other hand, when you license something under BSD, at any point you have the power to take it to another license or make it proprietary. That's the "permissive" part that many people (including GPL advocates) don't get. The source code itself is still open as long as the original author wishes it to be. Under the GPL, the source code is open for all eternity, even if the original author changes her mind later. Another aspect of this (and it was mentioned elsewhere in this discussion) is that, even if a company comes along and turns your BSD licensed code into their own proprietary product, you still get to keep your code and continue to improve it. All they've really done is forked it; if they are a good citizen they will even contribute improvements back to you. I think the classic example of this is Mac OS X, which is based in part on FreeBSD. When Apple forked FreeBSD into the base of their new commercial OS, the FreeBSD project didn't magically disappear. Here we are 15 years later and both the commercial OS X and the open source FreeBSD are flourishing. Development of FreeBSD didn't die the day OS X was born.
  - gbog 11y ago
    Ok but I would like to know if Mac os taking FreeBSD code did benefit to Free BSD. Edit: tried to add more but some js breaks everything on my phone
    - toast0 11y ago
      OS X uses the FreeBSD userland, but it was more or less a one time pull, the kernel is radically different, so it would be hard to keep things synced; as a result, I doubt there has been a lot of contributions of patches backwards. However, Apple and FreeBSD both had license problems with gcc, and Apple sponsored LLVM, which benefits FreeBSD as well. Maybe there's a cultural benefit for FreeBSD as a result of OS X exposing people to the FreeBSD userland, although running into limitations that have been fixed upstream more than ten years ago may give people the wrong ideas.
ChristianGeek 11y ago
> I don't care if somebody gets rich off my software while I don't. This is either incredibly naive or incredibly stupid. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume the former. To spend your time like most of us do, getting paid to make someone else wealthy, is one thing. Getting paid nothing to make someone else wealthy is little more than voluntary slavery. Don't want/need the money? Fine, then give it to a worthwhile charity and make the world a better place. But at least make your time and effort count for something. Edit: Grammar
- jdreaver 11y ago
  This is the naive comment. It takes a lot of effort to start a company and make money off of something, even if you didn't make the original version. If people are willing to pay millions of dollars for software, and someone comes along and builds something that fits that demand, then why shouldn't they? Some people make software for fun, or to help others. If my software helps someone make millions, then cool, good for them. Personally, I would certainly monetize free software I made if I saw the opportunity. However, some people might already be wealthy and want to play with their kids or something instead of chasing a new startup opportunity, so they shouldn't care if someone else makes millions off of their software. You are acting very arrogant when you assume everyone's values line up with yours.
- Deejahll 11y ago
  > This is either incredibly naive or incredibly stupid. In order to interpret that one sentence the way you did, you had to: - divorce it from the context where the software was released as copyleft - ignore that person getting wealthy must share their source code - willfully misinterpret "don't get rich" as "get paid nothing" - presume that money given to some charity is more of a societal good than software - presume that that the creation of free software "counts for nothing" But please do continue to abuse me as "incredibly" naive and/or stupid, and make comparisons to "slavery!" It might not feel like a genuine Hacker News discussion if you didn't.
- serf 11y ago
  The scope of motivation that drives you to code is extremely narrow. Some people code to enjoy themselves. Let's not forget that this profession is also a hobby for many.
dgreensp 11y ago
In that case, the parent could have asked, "Would it outrage you if someone slapped a GUI on your code and released it as freeware?" I think they didn't because even fewer readers would see the harm in that.
danbmil99 11y ago
> This is wrong. Copyleft licenses are concerned with freedom, not price. I have long been annoyed by this canard. Yes, someone can create a piece of code, slap a GPL license on it, and charge $10,000 a copy. In the real world, that developer will make exactly $10,000, because their first user is free to share the code with the rest of the world at zero cost. "Free as in free speech and beer, not just free beer." FTFY
- cbr 11y ago
  redhat?
  - anonbanker 11y ago
    Ardour?
  - throwawaykf05 11y ago
    Red Hat makes most of their money providing services around their distro, rather than from selling the distro itself. (Source: Friends at RH).
- runamok 11y ago
  Is that true? You could not have a clause that allows people to see source but pay to run it? I know Chef now has a new revenue model where version 12 is free but if you want various modules enabled like a webui you need to pay.

TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago

> This is wrong. Copyleft licenses are concerned with freedom, not price. Precisely. The thought that someone might take the code I wrote and make it into a proprietary product, removing the freedoms I had, is horrible. But if someone made an free software product based on it and made millions, all the better for them!

reitanqild 11y ago
> The thought that someone might take the code I wrote and make it into a proprietary product, removing the freedoms I had, is horrible. I feel this argument is weak: even if I license my works under BSD, no one can make my BSD licensed code that has already been distributed into to a proprietary product, even not myself. To make that software that I licensed under BSD a proprietary product they would need to somehow convince all users of my software to get rid of all copies as well as convincing me to stop distributing it under a free licence. Building a proprietary product that includes my code does NOT remove anyones freedom to use my code, no?
- Deejahll 11y ago
  This presumes that any modifications to "your" code that someone else makes should be none of your business. Seems fine on the surface. But what if your code writes files or communicates over the network? And what if, say, Microsoft takes your permissively-licensed code that is just beginning to gain popularity, changes one piece of it to make it incompatible with yours, and doesn't release their change? They use their massive marketing department or pre-bundling to get lots of Windows users to use it. Everyone is still free to use "your" version of the code, but nobody wants to, since it is incompatible with the more popular Microsoft version, now on its way to becoming "the standard." If you are okay with that, no rabid copyleft zealot like me has any place to criticize you. Release your code with a permissive license. That's fine. (Permissive licenses are considered "Free Software" by FSF and rms as well, after all.) But to me, that seems grossly unfair for code I spent my valuable time designing and developing, so I don't release my code under a permissive license. If Microsoft wants to build a product with the work I have done, it needs to convey the same freedoms to its users that I did. That's the cost.
  - geon 11y ago
    A very contrived example.
    - Deejahll 11y ago
      Oh yeah I just pulled that from a fever dream I had, that sort of thing never happens in real life. > "Embrace, extend, and extinguish", is a phrase that was used internally by Microsoft to describe its strategy for entering product categories involving widely used standards, extending those standards with proprietary capabilities, and then using those differences to disadvantage its competitors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish
      - jahewson 11y ago
        And what permissively licensed software did Microsoft apply this policy to, exactly? Or is it just an unfounded fear?
morganvachon 11y ago
BSD doesn't remove any freedoms from the original software author, and in fact it unshackles them from having to publish all future development, allowing them to go proprietary in the future if they wish to. To put it another way, once you license something under GPL, it is forever GPL. That's a strength of that license in the sense that it has allowed so much excellent and important software to grow and flourish. On the other hand, when you license something under BSD, at any point you have the power to take it to another license or make it proprietary. That's the "permissive" part that many people (including GPL advocates) don't get. The source code itself is still open as long as the original author wishes it to be. Under the GPL, the source code is open for all eternity, even if the original author changes her mind later. Another aspect of this (and it was mentioned elsewhere in this discussion) is that, even if a company comes along and turns your BSD licensed code into their own proprietary product, you still get to keep your code and continue to improve it. All they've really done is forked it; if they are a good citizen they will even contribute improvements back to you. I think the classic example of this is Mac OS X, which is based in part on FreeBSD. When Apple forked FreeBSD into the base of their new commercial OS, the FreeBSD project didn't magically disappear. Here we are 15 years later and both the commercial OS X and the open source FreeBSD are flourishing. Development of FreeBSD didn't die the day OS X was born.
- gbog 11y ago
  Ok but I would like to know if Mac os taking FreeBSD code did benefit to Free BSD. Edit: tried to add more but some js breaks everything on my phone
  - toast0 11y ago
    OS X uses the FreeBSD userland, but it was more or less a one time pull, the kernel is radically different, so it would be hard to keep things synced; as a result, I doubt there has been a lot of contributions of patches backwards. However, Apple and FreeBSD both had license problems with gcc, and Apple sponsored LLVM, which benefits FreeBSD as well. Maybe there's a cultural benefit for FreeBSD as a result of OS X exposing people to the FreeBSD userland, although running into limitations that have been fixed upstream more than ten years ago may give people the wrong ideas.

ChristianGeek 11y ago

> I don't care if somebody gets rich off my software while I don't. This is either incredibly naive or incredibly stupid. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume the former. To spend your time like most of us do, getting paid to make someone else wealthy, is one thing. Getting paid nothing to make someone else wealthy is little more than voluntary slavery. Don't want/need the money? Fine, then give it to a worthwhile charity and make the world a better place. But at least make your time and effort count for something. Edit: Grammar

jdreaver 11y ago
This is the naive comment. It takes a lot of effort to start a company and make money off of something, even if you didn't make the original version. If people are willing to pay millions of dollars for software, and someone comes along and builds something that fits that demand, then why shouldn't they? Some people make software for fun, or to help others. If my software helps someone make millions, then cool, good for them. Personally, I would certainly monetize free software I made if I saw the opportunity. However, some people might already be wealthy and want to play with their kids or something instead of chasing a new startup opportunity, so they shouldn't care if someone else makes millions off of their software. You are acting very arrogant when you assume everyone's values line up with yours.
Deejahll 11y ago
> This is either incredibly naive or incredibly stupid. In order to interpret that one sentence the way you did, you had to: - divorce it from the context where the software was released as copyleft - ignore that person getting wealthy must share their source code - willfully misinterpret "don't get rich" as "get paid nothing" - presume that money given to some charity is more of a societal good than software - presume that that the creation of free software "counts for nothing" But please do continue to abuse me as "incredibly" naive and/or stupid, and make comparisons to "slavery!" It might not feel like a genuine Hacker News discussion if you didn't.
serf 11y ago
The scope of motivation that drives you to code is extremely narrow. Some people code to enjoy themselves. Let's not forget that this profession is also a hobby for many.

dgreensp 11y ago

In that case, the parent could have asked, "Would it outrage you if someone slapped a GUI on your code and released it as freeware?" I think they didn't because even fewer readers would see the harm in that.

danbmil99 11y ago

> This is wrong. Copyleft licenses are concerned with freedom, not price. I have long been annoyed by this canard. Yes, someone can create a piece of code, slap a GPL license on it, and charge $10,000 a copy. In the real world, that developer will make exactly $10,000, because their first user is free to share the code with the rest of the world at zero cost. "Free as in free speech and beer, not just free beer." FTFY

cbr 11y ago
redhat?
- anonbanker 11y ago
  Ardour?
- throwawaykf05 11y ago
  Red Hat makes most of their money providing services around their distro, rather than from selling the distro itself. (Source: Friends at RH).
runamok 11y ago
Is that true? You could not have a clause that allows people to see source but pay to run it? I know Chef now has a new revenue model where version 12 is free but if you want various modules enabled like a webui you need to pay.