Comment by acoustics
17 hours ago
Permissively licensed software is intentionally designed to be used by anybody for any reason with essentially no restrictions beyond attribution. Advocates of permissive licenses explicitly reject the argument that commercial users ought to have any kind of obligation to the authors. "Thief" seems like a category error here.
For people who want to make money down the line, what is so hard about selling commercial licenses? Or better yet using GPL so that your software is still open source but the big commercial users will still want to pay you for a separate license?
WordPress is GPL - the GPL, like all "Open Source" (using OSI's definition) licenses enables commercial use, and that is a subset of one of the FSF's core principles (The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose).
I haven't been following this conflict: have the terms of the GPL been broken?
By WPE - I don't think anyone has even claimed that informally - since they don't distribute software and WordPress is GPL not AGPL it would be hard to. Moreover they (according to themselves) use an unmodified version of WordPress which would make it next to impossible. Of course according to Matt they use “something that they’ve chopped up, hacked, butchered to look like WordPress” but “is not WordPress.” And is a “cheap knock off” or a “bastardized simulacra of WordPress’s GPL code.” [1] but there's still no claim that they distribute that simulacra.
By Matt - no one has claimed it formally but I think there's at least a plausible claim that he has violated part 6 with his attempts at extortion, which requires "You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein". Especially clearly as it pertains to any existing nominative use's of the WordPress trademarks within the unmodified WordPress code (which trademark law in no way prohibits WPE from using, and Matt demanded were changed).
[1] Taken from the complaint https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.43...
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The opinion that those who consume should contribute back is not wrong, and as an open source contributor I fully agree, but it should be understood that anything free is going to be taken. We are an imperfect people in an imperfect world, after all.
I don’t put old furniture on the curb with a FREE sign expecting someone to knock on my door and offer $100 for it. I expect it to be gone without a trace. If I want something, even if it’s 1% of the value, then I’ll have a yard sale. It’s no different here.
Licensing is a form of conveying expectations. Putting an MIT license in my repo conveys that I expect absolutely nothing in return, just like the free sign on the stuff I tossed out.
> We're made to feel like we should open source things and not retain exclusive rights to commercialization.
Who is telling you that you have to write open source software? Millions of programmers around the world make a living writing software with much more restrictive licenses (including simply All Rights Reserved). I write proprietary code, and I don't feel any pressure to stop doing that. Somebody on the internet telling me that I should write open source software instead is not an issue. They can't stop me from making money writing code.
Edited to add: I don't own the rights to my code but I am fairly compensated for it. If I were to write code that I have direct ownership of, the above principles would still apply.
> CC-BY-SA-NC isn't OSI approved and you get told you're "not open source" if you try to use it or licenses like it.
CC-BY-SA-NC is indeed not open source, but that doesn't mean you can't use it.
> We're made to feel like we should open source things and not retain exclusive rights to commercialization, because that's not open.
The overwhelming majority of software is not opensource. Somehow the people writing and presumably making a living from them get by just fine.
> And I'm sick of the "but actually his license enabled that" excuses. It's victim blaming.
Publishing code under an opensource licence and then going hysterical about people using that code as allowed by the licence is suggestive of a mental disorder.
> You won't call them "thief", but I will.
Well, then we've found the problem. You ideologically disagree with the framing of free software. That's fine!
Millions of people use Linux every day, run iPhones with BSD code and run software made with open source libraries. They download Javascript resources and freely-licensed Unsplash JPEGs to populate a webpage interpreted with a KHTML fork. If you think they're stealing, that's an extremist ideology that is not reflected in the spirit of any open source project I'm aware of.
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