Comment by engeljohnb
6 hours ago
> Open source is just big software companies stealing from innumerable volunteers
Whether you think this is true or not, MIT and BSD licenses still guarantee the four freedoms.
6 hours ago
> Open source is just big software companies stealing from innumerable volunteers
Whether you think this is true or not, MIT and BSD licenses still guarantee the four freedoms.
only if you already have the source, the GPL also guarantees that you can get the source even if you don't have it.
I guess that's a pretty good point I never thought about. I've never come across software released under a permissive license that didn't either come with the source code, or host it somewhere convenient like github.
Real world examples would often be embedded devices powered by open source that don’t distribute any code, preventing users from maintaining or modifying the devices.
Of course, vendors will often do this with GPLed code too, and lawsuits are relatively few and far between. (Many thanks to SFC/SFLC for putting scarce resources towards this when possible.)
Because of this, although I appreciate the open-endedness of the MIT/BSD licenses for end user software, I do prefer the GPL for anything that may become infrastructure.
Haven't you? There's quite a bit of closed-source software based on permissively-licensed code. You can get the upstream source for the permissively-licensed code, but not the modifications made to it. Windows (used to) use some BSD-licensed code for a few network utilities like nslookup.
2 replies →