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Comment by chha

9 years ago

This is quite an improvement from the olden days when a certain Microsoft executive described the GPL as a cancer, and open source in general as a thing to avoid

47 comments

chha

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josteink  9 years ago

> This is quite an improvement from the olden days when a certain Microsoft executive described the GPL as a cancer, and open source in general as a thing to avoid

Absolutely.

And don't take this the wrong way... I much appreciate the improvements. But there's still a very strong trend that Microsoft code contributions tend to be in MIT or similarly permissively licensed projects. They still tend to avoid the GPL where possible.

(Disclaimer: Have contributed code and patches. I don't personally don't mind permissive licenses)

  • bad_user  9 years ago

    The problem of these licenses is that they don't come with patents grants. Which given that this is Microsoft we are talking about, it's a big deal.

    Of course, their projects does come with a patents license, in addition to the copyright license, but it's unclear to me whether this license applies to derivative works for example. I'm not a lawyer of course and I have a very limited understanding, but interpreting their license as an English text, I really don't think it applies to derivate works. Would like an analysis of somebody knowledgeable, because a project that can't be safely forked isn't open source. Here's their license: https://github.com/dotnet/corefx/blob/master/PATENTS.TXT

    Anyway, my point is that I would have preferred something like the Apache License, which is still permissive, but was written by lawyers that know what they are doing and has an explicit patents grant in it. You see, people think of BSD and MIT as being "permissive", but that's only true as far as the copyright law is concerned. Patents are a whole different thing.

    • tracker1  9 years ago

      Yeah, but when MS used their own MIT-like license with patent grant and nuclear patent option, people hated it. They have made certain guarantees in the past wrt ASP.Net bits and other areas... MS seems to have been mostly in favor of live and let live wrt patents on their open-source software, it would be a colossal mistake for them to sue over patent use on their open-source software, short of defensively against someone suing them over patents.

WayneBro  9 years ago

GPL is a cancer. That's why people vastly prefer something more like the MIT license these days.

  • EdSharkey  9 years ago

    Yes. If you're the original copyright holder, you only give others cancer with the GPL. As the the copyright holder, you are licensing your code to others and as such, you subject yourself to whatever terms you want. But those who accept the terms of your copyleft license are bound to all the cancerous viral terms you set.

    As a user, I prefer licenses like MIT that just give the code away with some reasonable strings attached. As a pip-squeak creator, I have to admit the copyleft licenses are attractive - the more viral and toxic (like AGPL), the better! I like being able to show off my clean and valuable code and have some reasonable expectation that no big corporation will rip me off. But then, universities and hobbyists will have full run of my code and that suits me fine.

    Am I greedy? Am I stingy to think of my code this way? Should I be happy that anyone would see fit to use my code and thus maximize that chance by licensing with MIT? Or is no value ever generated with all the codes being completely free and open? I wrestle with this.

douche  9 years ago

If you're trying to write commercial software and make money off of it, the GPL is a cancer.

MIT or the MS-PL is much more practical.

  • syshum  9 years ago

    To translate

    if you are attempting to exploit other peoples code with out giving anything back to the people that created the code then GPL is a cancer

    >MIT or the MS-PL is much more practical.

    This depends on the project

    I normally license my libraries, code I intend to be included in other software under BSD or MIT, but full developed software that is intended to be used as is gets GPL.

    • rubber_duck  9 years ago

      >if you are attempting to exploit other peoples code with out giving anything back to the people that created the code then GPL is a cancer

      That's bullshit - GPL requires you to open source your derived work as well - which plenty of people have a problem with commercially - it doesn't mean you don't want to contribute anything (quoting you) back.

      Even with the LGPL there are scenarios where sharing your code is not an option because of real world constraints (eg. NDAs), for example you need to modify the LGPL code to port to a closed platform. That doesn't mean you can't contribute back other improvements, but anything platform specific can't be released and therefore you can't comply with LGPL.

      In general GPL creates a lot of problems to which GPL supporters just plug their ears and mantra "if you were truly free you wouldn't have those problems". Liberal licenses remove those problems and incentives to share back are there without the license requirement, you get your stuff maintained in the mainline and don't have to rebase on every update and reduce conflicts further down the development. LLVM is an excellent example of this where even traditionally closed companies OSS stuff because it's such a chore to keep up with latest. An example of a project being choked by GPL is Blender - a tool that has great potential to be a fully featured OSS 3D authoring package is struggling to fund developers because it can only sustain itself from government grants - nobody is interested in investing in it commercially because of the GPL. If it allowed for commercial plugins the OSS core would undoubtedly see significant contributions from those developers as well.

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    • moron4hire  9 years ago

      I had considered doing the same thing, but I think pragmatically I'm never going to be able to build a "support" business around my libraries. Hell, I'm not even really interested in that type of business. I've spent most of my career as a consultant, i.e. mostly getting treated like a cost center, so it's not a difficult stretch to see that too much focus on the code as a product unto itself will lead to the same results.

      My only chance of getting out of that is probably building my own products and partnering with a group of people who are good at marketing. I think, in large part, selling copies of software is a dead end business. There are some contrary examples, but I think they probably more prove the rule. Does anyone pay for Sublime Text for any reason other than "to support the developers" (i.e. not "because I need this software")? Video games have to be released on a regular schedule. Adobe has all the image processing patents. I think in all cases, people are buying something other than a literal copy of the software. So why not just sell that other thing directly and skip the noise?

      On the other hand, assuming I end up making the libraries any good, someone else with a business of supporting software and the mercenary nature of refusing to help people with problems who don't have any money to pay, could probably snipe me in my own software.

      So with that in mind, libraries I write always come out under the full GPL-3.0. Nobody deserves to close their use of my code. It has turned some people off (and I think that has more to do with their misunderstanding of what the GPL is practically about than any ostensible flaws in the GPL), but they can go start their own VR framework project for all I care.

    • douche  9 years ago

      Thanks for putting words in my mouth. How many people would have used jQuery, if it was GPL? Full-on GPL taints your software, such that you have to be extremely careful not to use any libraries that are GPL'd if you want to release it under any other sort of license. Sure, you can get exemptions, but can you imagine the clusterfuck if, say, the NPM community defaulted to using GPL? Trying to trace back and make arrangements with the owners of thousands of tiny libraries would be insane.

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  • belorn  9 years ago

    "If you are a software repository, proprietary license is toxic waste."

    "If you write software, proprietary content is a time bomb waiting to kill everyone involved."

    Does this kind of language really help anyone? Do you want to be called a toxic waste distributor? Do you like to plant bombs in peoples projects, killing them?

  • hjek  9 years ago

    "Many people believe that the spirit of the GNU Project is that you should not charge money for distributing copies of software, or that you should charge as little as possible-just enough to cover the cost. This is a misunderstanding.

    Actually, we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can. If a license does not permit users to make copies and sell them, it is a nonfree license. If this seems surprising to you, please read on."

    from http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html