From: Paul Rubin on
Steven D'Aprano <steve(a)REMOVE-THIS-cybersource.com.au> writes:
> It's certainly true
> that an MIT licence will allow you to maximise the number of people who
> will use your software, but maximising the number of users is not the
> only motive for writing software.

I'd say proprietary licenses where you spend billions on marketing and
lobbying get you the most users. Windows has orders of magnitude more
users than either Linux or BSD. FOSS under any license isn't about
maximizing users.
From: Carl Banks on
On May 9, 10:08 am, Paul Boddie <p...(a)boddie.org.uk> wrote:
> On 9 Mai, 09:05, Carl Banks <pavlovevide...(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> > Bottom line is, GPL hurts everyone: the companies and open source
> > community.  Unless you're one of a handful of projects with sufficient
> > leverage, or are indeed a petty jealous person fighting a holy war,
> > the GPL is a bad idea and everyone benefits from a more permissive
> > licence.
>
> Oh sure: the GPL hurts everyone, like all the companies who have made
> quite a lot of money out of effectively making Linux the new
> enterprise successor to Unix, plus all the companies and individuals
> who have taken the sources and rolled their own distributions.

Relative to what they could have done with a more permissive license?
Yes. GPL hurts everyone relative to licenses that don't drive wedges
and prevent interoperability between software.

You might argue that GPL is sometimes better than proprietary closed
source, and I won't disagree, but it's nearly always worse than other
open source licenses.


> P.S. And the GPL isn't meant to further the cause of open source: it's
> meant to further the Free Software cause, which is not at all the same
> thing.

It doesn't matter what the GPL "meant" to do, it matters what it does,
which is hurt everyone (relative to almost all other licenses).


> Before you ridicule other people's positions, at least get your
> terminology right.

I don't agree with FSF's defintion of free software and refuse to
abide by it. GPL isn't free software; any software that tells me I
can't compile it in with a closed source API isn't free. Period.


Carl Banks
From: Paul Boddie on
On 10 Mai, 03:09, Patrick Maupin <pmau...(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> On May 9, 6:39 pm, Paul Boddie <p...(a)boddie.org.uk> wrote:
> > but if they aren't pitching it directly at you, why would you believe
> > that they are trying to change your behaviour?
>
> Because I've seen people specifically state that their purpose in
> GPLing small libraries is to encourage other people to change their
> behavior.  I take those statements at face value.  Certainly RMS
> carefully lays out that the LGPL should be used sparingly in his "Why
> you shouldn't use the Lesser GPL for your next library" post.  (Hint:
> he's not suggesting a permissive license instead.)

Sure, but all he's asking you to do is to make the software available
under a GPL-compatible licence.

[...]

> rst2pdf was licensed under the MIT license before I started
> contributing to it, and there is no way I was going to even consider
> adding patches for a GPLed package (which would certainly have to be
> GPLed) into the rst2pdf repository.  (Say what you will about how
> sometimes differently licensed code can be combined, but RMS has to
> share quite a bit of the blame/credit for the whole combining licenses
> FUD.)

I think the FSF are quite clear about combining licences - they even
go to the trouble of telling you which ones are compatible with the
GPL - so I don't see where "FUD" comes into it, apart from possible
corner cases where people are trying to circumvent the terms of a
licence and probably know themselves that what they're trying to do is
at the very least against the spirit of the licence. Even then,
warning people about their little project to make proprietary plugins,
or whatever, is not really "FUD".

As for rst2pdf, what your modifications would mean is that the
software would need to be redistributed under a GPL-compatible
licence. I'll accept that this does affect what people can then do
with the project, but once again, you've mentioned at least one LGPL-
licensed project which was previously in this very situation, and it
was never actually GPL-licensed itself. Here's the relevant FAQ entry:

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#LinkingWithGPL

[...]

> This is exactly the same situation that Carl was describing, only with
> two different open source packages rather than with a proprietary
> package and a GPL package.  The whole reason people use words like
> "force" and "viral" with the GPL is that this issue would not have
> come up if svglib were MIT and rst2pdf were GPL.  (Note that the LGPL
> forces you to give back changes, but not in a way that makes it
> incompatible with software under other licenses.  That's why you see
> very few complaints about the LGPL.)

Actually, the copyleft licences don't "force" anyone to "give back
changes": they oblige people to pass on changes.

[...]

> But I have definitely seen cases where people are offering something
> that is not of nearly as much value as they seem to think it is, where
> one of the goals is obviously to try to spread the GPL.

Well, even the FSF doesn't approve of trivial projects using the GPL:

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#WhatIfWorkIsShort

Paul
From: Paul Boddie on
On 10 Mai, 08:31, Carl Banks <pavlovevide...(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> On May 9, 10:08 am, Paul Boddie <p...(a)boddie.org.uk> wrote:
> > Oh sure: the GPL hurts everyone, like all the companies who have made
> > quite a lot of money out of effectively making Linux the new
> > enterprise successor to Unix, plus all the companies and individuals
> > who have taken the sources and rolled their own distributions.
>
> Relative to what they could have done with a more permissive license?

Well, yes. Some people would have it that the only reason why BSD
variants never became as popular as Linux (or rather, GNU/Linux, but
lets keep this focused) is because the litigation around the BSD code
base "scared people away". Yet I remember rather well back in the
mid-1990s when people using the same proprietary-and-doomed platform
as myself started looking into Unix-flavoured operating systems, and a
group of people deliberately chose NetBSD because of the favourable
licensing conditions and because there was a portability headstart
over Linux, which at the time people seriously believed was rather non-
portable. So, that "scary AT&T" myth can be sunk, at least when
considering its impact on what people were doing in 1994. Although the
NetBSD port in question lives on, and maybe the people responsible all
took jobs in large companies, its success on that platform and its
derivatives has been dwarfed by that of the corresponding Linux port.

> Yes.  GPL hurts everyone relative to licenses that don't drive wedges
> and prevent interoperability between software.

I can think of another case, actually connected to the above
proprietary platform and its practitioners, where software licensing
stood in the way of "just getting on with business" which is what you
seem to be advocating: a company released their application under the
GPL, except for one critical library which remained proprietary
software. Now, although you can argue that everyone's life would be
richer had the GPL not prohibited "interoperability" (although I
imagine that the application's licensing actually employed an
exception to glue everything together in that particular case), a
community never formed because people probably assumed that their role
would only ever be about tidying up someone else's code so that the
original authors could profit from it.

All the GPL is designed to do in such cases is to encourage people to
seek control (in terms of the "four freedoms") of all the technology,
rather than be placated by the occasional airdrop of proprietary
software and to be convinced never to explore the possibility of
developing something similar for themselves. The beneficiary of the
refusal to work on the above application was the GPL-licensed
Inkscape, which might not be as well-liked by many people, but it does
demonstrate, firstly, that permissive licences do not have the
monopoly on encouraging people to work on stuff, and secondly, that
actually going and improving something else is the answer if you don't
like the licensing of something.

> You might argue that GPL is sometimes better than proprietary closed
> source, and I won't disagree, but it's nearly always worse than other
> open source licenses.

For me, I would argue that the GPL is always better than "proprietary
closed source", recalling that the consideration is that of licensing
and not mixing in other concerns like whether a particular program is
technically better. In ensuring that an end-user gets some code and
can break out those "four freedoms" on it, it is clearly not "worse
than other open source licenses", and I don't accept that this is some
rare thing that only happens outside a theoretical setting on an
occasional basis.

> > P.S. And the GPL isn't meant to further the cause of open source: it's
> > meant to further the Free Software cause, which is not at all the same
> > thing.
>
> It doesn't matter what the GPL "meant" to do, it matters what it does,
> which is hurt everyone (relative to almost all other licenses).

This is your opinion, not objectively established fact.

> > Before you ridicule other people's positions, at least get your
> > terminology right.
>
> I don't agree with FSF's defintion of free software and refuse to
> abide by it.  GPL isn't free software; any software that tells me I
> can't compile it in with a closed source API isn't free.  Period.

Well, if you can't (or can't be bothered) to distinguish between what
is known as Free Software and "open source", then I'm hardly surprised
that you take offence at people releasing software for one set of
reasons while you only consider another set of reasons to be valid
ones. Throughout this discussion I've been accused of not being able
to put myself in the position of the other side, but I completely
understand that people just want as much publicly available software
as possible to be permissively licensed, frequently for the reason
that it will "grease the wheels of commerce", that it reduces (but,
contrary to popular belief, does *not* eliminate) the amount of
thought required when combining works, and that "the boss" or "the
company lawyers" feel more comfortable with permissive licences,
perhaps because they are scared about what might happen to their
patent portfolio or something (in which case they might want to re-
read some of those licences).

It isn't news to me that some people emphasise developer "freedoms"
and others emphasise user "freedoms", and frequently advocates of the
former can only consider unrestricted personal gratification as
"freedom". But to argue for the latter, I don't need to argue about
how some style of licence is "better" according to some hastily
arranged and fragile criteria: it's clear what the goal of copyleft
licensing is; take it or leave it. There's no real disinformation
campaign or "propaganda"; the FSF aren't "forcing" people to do
anything, in contrast to various proprietary software licences and the
way that most people are more obviously "forced" to buy a Microsoft
product when they buy a computer (and be told that there's no refund,
that it's "part of the product", contrary to what the EULA actually
says for obvious regulatory reasons).

So, given an acknowledgement of the motivation for copyleft licensing,
the argument for applying it practically makes itself. I don't need to
bring terminology like "holy war" or references to Bin Laden to make
my case. I wonder, then, why people feel the need to do just that.

Paul
From: Patrick Maupin on
On May 10, 6:01 am, Paul Boddie <p...(a)boddie.org.uk> wrote:
> On 10 Mai, 03:09, Patrick Maupin <pmau...(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > On May 9, 6:39 pm, Paul Boddie <p...(a)boddie.org.uk> wrote:
> > > but if they aren't pitching it directly at you, why would you believe
> > > that they are trying to change your behaviour?
>
> > Because I've seen people specifically state that their purpose in
> > GPLing small libraries is to encourage other people to change their
> > behavior.  I take those statements at face value.  Certainly RMS
> > carefully lays out that the LGPL should be used sparingly in his "Why
> > you shouldn't use the Lesser GPL for your next library" post.  (Hint:
> > he's not suggesting a permissive license instead.)
>
> Sure, but all he's asking you to do is to make the software available
> under a GPL-compatible licence.

I'll be charitable and assume the fact that you can make that
statement without apparent guile merely means that you haven't read
the post I was referring to:

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-not-lgpl.html

> [...]
>
> > rst2pdf was licensed under the MIT license before I started
> > contributing to it, and there is no way I was going to even consider
> > adding patches for a GPLed package (which would certainly have to be
> > GPLed) into the rst2pdf repository.  (Say what you will about how
> > sometimes differently licensed code can be combined, but RMS has to
> > share quite a bit of the blame/credit for the whole combining licenses
> > FUD.)
>
> I think the FSF are quite clear about combining licences - they even
> go to the trouble of telling you which ones are compatible with the
> GPL

Yes, but one of the things they are quite clear on is that the overall
work must be licensed as GPL, if any of the components are licensed as
GPL. They claim this is true, even if a non-GPL work dynamically
links to a GPL work.

- so I don't see where "FUD" comes into it, apart from possible
> corner cases where people are trying to circumvent the terms of a
> licence and probably know themselves that what they're trying to do is
> at the very least against the spirit of the licence.

Legally, I don't think they can dictate the license terms of, e.g.
clisp just because it can link to readline. But practically, they DID
manage to do this, simply because Bruno Haible, the clisp author, was
more concerned about writing software than spending too much time
sparring with Stallman over the license, so he finally licensed clisp
under the gpl. clisp *could* use readline, but didn't require it;
nonetheless Stallman argued that clisp was a "derivative" of
readline. That case of the tail wagging the dog would be laughable if
it hadn't worked. In any case, Stallman's success at that tactic is
probably one of the things that led him to write the paper on why you
should use GPL for your library. (As an aside, since rst2pdf *can*
use GPL-licensed svglib, it could possibly be subject to the same kind
of political pressure as clisp. But the fact that more people are
better informed now and that the internet would publicize the dispute
more widely more quickly means that this is a battle Stallman is
unlikely to wage at this point, because if the leader of any such
targeted project has enough cojones, the FSF's inevitable loss would
reduce some of the FUD dramatically.)

> Even then,
> warning people about their little project to make proprietary plugins,
> or whatever, is not really "FUD".

I think that, legally, they probably don't have a leg to stand on for
some of their overarching claims (e.g. about shipping proprietary
software that could link to readline, without even shipping
readline). But morally -- well, they've made their position
reasonably clear and I try to abide by it. That still doesn't make it
"not really FUD." I'd call this sort of badgering "copyright misuse"
myself.

> As for rst2pdf, what your modifications would mean is that the
> software would need to be redistributed under a GPL-compatible
> licence.

That's parsing semantics rather finely. In practice, what it really
means is that the combination (e.g. the whole program) would
effectively be GPL-licensed. This then means that downstream users
would have to double-check that they are not combining the whole work
with licenses which are GPL-incompatible, even if they are not using
the svg feature. Hence, the term "viral."

> I'll accept that this does affect what people can then do
> with the project, but once again, you've mentioned at least one LGPL-
> licensed project which was previously in this very situation, and it
> was never actually GPL-licensed itself. Here's the relevant FAQ entry:
>
> http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#LinkingWithGPL

Yes, I've read that, but this is much more informative:

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLInProprietarySystem

"A system incorporating a GPL-covered program is an extended version
of that program. The GPL says that any extended version of the program
must be released under the GPL if it is released at all."

This makes it clear that the overall work must be GPLed. Now, all of
a sudden, downstream users cannot do some things they could have done
before. Can you not see that taking a preexisting MIT-licensed
project and adding code to make it GPL could negatively affect some of
its users and that that is not necessarily an unalloyed good?

> [...]
>
> > This is exactly the same situation that Carl was describing, only with
> > two different open source packages rather than with a proprietary
> > package and a GPL package.  The whole reason people use words like
> > "force" and "viral" with the GPL is that this issue would not have
> > come up if svglib were MIT and rst2pdf were GPL.  (Note that the LGPL
> > forces you to give back changes, but not in a way that makes it
> > incompatible with software under other licenses.  That's why you see
> > very few complaints about the LGPL.)
>
> Actually, the copyleft licences don't "force" anyone to "give back
> changes": they oblige people to pass on changes.

True, if pedantic. I meant "give back" in the more general sense.

> [...]
>
> > But I have definitely seen cases where people are offering something
> > that is not of nearly as much value as they seem to think it is, where
> > one of the goals is obviously to try to spread the GPL.
>
> Well, even the FSF doesn't approve of trivial projects using the GPL:
>
> http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#WhatIfWorkIsShort

Sure, that's a pragmatic view -- copyright might not even be permitted
on something that short that is mainly functional. However, length is
not the only arbiter of trivial. To stay with the same example,
personally, I would consider readline "trivial" within the context of
a lot of software which might use it, regardless of whether the
readline implementation itself used all sorts of fancy neural net
technology to predict what word the user was going to type or
whatever. But whether it was trivial or not, if I ship software that
*could* link to it but doesn't *require* it (like the case of clisp)
without shipping readline, I think it's FUD and an attempt at
copyright misuse to call my software a derivative work of readline.
But obviously YMMV

Regards,
Pat