Comment by ants_everywhere
6 days ago
I say this all the time, but the point of the permissive licenses is you're making a donation to private industry.
There are reasons to do this, for example if you believe that private industry adopting some technology is good and you want to make that happen.
But people keep seeming surprised by the fact that these donations aren't reciprocated (or at least people don't seem to plan for them to never be reciprocated). It sounds to me like the AGPL license was more consistent with their goals.
Not quite. The point of permissive licenses is that you're making a donation to everyone. If private industry uses your donation fine, if not that's fine too. But it's certainly true that if you have a problem with private industry using something you freely gave them, permissive licenses aren't for you.
If you wanted to make a donation to everyone, you'd use a copyleft license.
The point of permissive licenses is to grant the ability to exclude people from the enjoying the benefit of improvements.
I.e. they're not for creating public goods. They're grants for making it easier to create excludable goods.
> The point of permissive licenses is to grant the ability to exclude people from the enjoying the benefit of improvements.
I find this comment to be incredibly disingenuous, and just plain false.
Excluding people would only be done if someone took a permissive license and then re-licensed it to something more closed... you've entirely made up a malicious assumption about what people do with the software. And you're even assuming people ARE doing something like this with the software.
A permissive license simply lets you do just about anything you want with it. Some will agree this is more "free". But, freedom TO vs freedom FROM is a common argument.
5 replies →
I think we need to distinguish using and abusing. IMO a private corporation taking the source to make a commercial project and refusing to give anything back (whether patches, money, or otherwise) is abusing.
When corporations utilize the code and make a good faith effort to contribute back something, no matter how trivial, they are using the source.
Just because it’s legal doesn’t make it right and I feel confident given the current state of the world saying that we should start expecting more from corporations. The idea “they only exist to make money” is how you break the social contract.
> a private corporation taking the source to make a commercial project and refusing to give anything back (whether patches, money, or otherwise) is abusing.
What I'm saying is that's the point of the license. That's why universities use the licenses (e.g. MIT, Berkeley) and why Apache uses it. They're designed to stimulate the private sector by moving IP from research into industry (universities) or by industries pooling resources to make software purchases cheaper (Apache).
I don't think it makes sense to describe using them in this way as abusive or bad faith.
> IMO a private corporation taking the source to make a commercial project and refusing to give anything back (whether patches, money, or otherwise) is abusing.
I don't agree. Releasing under a permissive license is explicitly saying "dDo what you want with this, including using it commercially without giving back". And if you're saying that, you can't cry "abuse" when someone does exactly what you told them they could do. Because that's what you've done: the license terms explicitly say that.
"Legal" has nothing to do with it; if you want other people to have to contribute their changes publicly, you use a copyleft license. If you don't care, you use a permissive license, and then there's no such thing as "abuse", as long as people follow the letter of the license.