Comment by gilrain
1 day ago
> more open choice because it forces the project
A true morality must be based on consent, not coercion. Humanity may not be there yet, and therein lies the argument for force (and thus copyleft); but the ultimate goal should always be to reduce its necessity.
It’s not coercion. You’re free to not use it, or alternatively do what these folks did, write your own. Coercion would be forcing people to use it through some mechanism, which clearly isn’t possible with GPL.
I see this, and the spiritual example that immediately comes to mind is that which is labeled as "crime". Would it be more moral that a murderer must first consent to being judged and sentenced, or that there is a system which automatically comes into play to hopefully deter but also punish it when it happens?
Allowing closed-source to exist is always the less moral choice for many reasons (one example being ecological sustainability)
Is this not the paradox of tolerance restated in different terms?
BSD license is unrestricted, it tolerates taking open source and closing it, thus always being at risk of things closing down.
GPL license doesn’t tolerate taking from open source and closing it, thus ensuring things stay open.
The BSD license is why we have Valkey and not a purely closed-source Redis. It would have been much easier to perform the rugpull if Redis had initially been GPLed.
And how exactly did the BSD license make creating Valkey easier? GPL and BSD licenses both have the source in the open. Anyone creating a fork, can easily do so for either BSD or GPL licensed projects. Since Redis is a database, which the user won't be using a binary of, even using a fork of a supposedly GPL-licensed Redis would not require you to share your modifications with your user, same as BSD.
4 replies →
On top of badreligion42’s point, that both licenses allow forking just as easily - don’t you have the rugpull part backwards?
Afaik BSD licensed stuff can be re-licensed under any more closed licenses at any time, where as to re-license GPL, you need consent from every single contributor.
But i’m not familiar with the redis-valkey story so, maybe there is some nuance i am missing?
2 replies →
How would you rugpull a GPL Redis?
The paradox clears itself up if you look at what tolerance actually is. It's simply not interfering with people's agency over themselves. Given that your right to self-agency doesn't entitle you to restrict others' self-agency, behavior that does try restricting others' agency is automatically not included in "tolerance."
Sure, yeah - like most “paradoxes”, it’s not actually a paradox unless you only look at it from one specific viewpoint.
> BSD license is unrestricted, it tolerates taking open source and closing it, thus always being at risk of things closing down.
There is no such risk. If someone wishes to make a closed source derivative of the BSD-licensed original, it does not deprive anyone of the original. That remains there, just as open as before.
It deprive us of their improvements, while they get to build off other people’s work.
With the GPL, if you want to modify, and built on others work, you have to share.
Share and share alike, vs take if you like share if you like.
It deprives for example the LLVM community to profit from PlayStation compiler optimizations.