Picking a license
in [Python]
|
Prev: 2to3 issues with execfile on python 3.0 on files with encoding
Next: Extract a bordered, skewed rectangle from an image
From: Paul Boddie on 9 May 2010 13:08 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. It's not worth my time picking through your "holy war" rhetoric when you're throwing "facts" like these around. As is almost always the case, the people who see the merit in copyleft-style licensing have clearly given the idea a lot more thought than those who immediately start throwing mud at Richard Stallman because people won't let them use some software as if it originated in a (universally acknowledged) public domain environment. Paul 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. Before you ridicule other people's positions, at least get your terminology right.
From: Paul Boddie on 9 May 2010 13:23 On 9 Mai, 07:09, Patrick Maupin <pmau...(a)gmail.com> wrote: > > See, for example, Apple's > support of BSD, Webkit, and LLVM. Apple is not a "do no evil" > corporation, and their contributions back to these packages are driven > far more by hard-nosed business decisions than by any expectation of > community goodwill. This being the same Apple that is actively pursuing software patent litigation against other organisations; a company which accuses other companies of promoting closed solutions while upholding some of the most closed and restrictive platforms in widespread use. Your definition of "do no evil" is obviously more relaxed than mine. Paul
From: Paul Boddie on 9 May 2010 14:02 On 8 Mai, 22:05, Patrick Maupin <pmau...(a)gmail.com> wrote: > On May 8, 2:38 pm, Steven D'Aprano <st...(a)REMOVE-THIS- > > > > No, you don't *owe* them anything, but this brings us back to Ben's > > original post. If you care about the freedoms of Cisco's customers as > > much as you care about the freedoms of Cisco, then that's a good reason > > to grant those customers the same rights as you granted Cisco. > > But I *do* grant them the same rights -- they can come to my site and > download my software!!! Of course they can, but it doesn't mean that they can run that software on the Cisco equipment they've bought, nor does it mean that the original software can interoperate with the modified software, that the end-user can enhance the original software in a way that they prefer and have it work with the rest of the Cisco solution, or that the data produced by the Cisco solution can be understood by a user- enhanced version of the original solution or by other software that normally interoperates with the original software. People often argue that the GPL only cares about the software's freedom, not the recipient's freedom, which I find to be a laughable claim because if one wanted to point at something the GPL places higher than anything else, it would be the "four freedoms" preserved for each user's benefit. Really, copyleft licences are all about treating all recipients of the software and modified versions or extensions of the software in the same way: that someone receiving the software, in whatever state of enhancement, has all the same privileges that the individual or organisation providing the software to them enjoyed; those "four freedoms" should still apply to whatever software they received. That this is achieved by asking that everyone make the same commitment to end-user freedoms (or privileges), yet is seen as unreasonable or actually perceived as coercion by some, says a great deal about the perspective of those complaining about it. [...] > So, that gets back to my argument > about what I like to see in a package I use, and how I license things > according to what I would like see. For me, the golden rule dictates > that when I give a gift of software, I release it under a permissive > license. I realize that others see this differently. Yes, but what irritates a lot of people is when you see other people arguing that some other random person should license their own software permissively because it's "better" or "more free" when what they really mean is that "I could use it to make a proprietary product". [...] > To me, the clear implication of the blanket statement that you have to > use the GPL if you care at all about users is that anybody who doesn't > use the GPL is uncaring. Well, if you want the users to enjoy those "four freedoms" then you should use a copyleft licence. If you choose a permissive licence then it more or less means that you don't care about (or have no particular position on the matter of) the users being able to enjoy those privileges. I believe you coined the term "uncaring", but I think Mr Finney's statement stands up to scrutiny. Paul
From: Steven D'Aprano on 9 May 2010 14:03 On Sat, 08 May 2010 13:05:21 -0700, Patrick Maupin wrote: [...] > certainly the > risk of discovery if you just use a small portion of GPL code and don't > distribute your source must be very small. There are certainly fewer > companies getting away with MIT license violations, simply because the > license is so much harder to violate. Do you really think it is harder for copyright infringers to copy and paste a small portion of MIT-licenced code and incorporate it into their code than it is for them to do the same to GPL code? [...] > If I produce something under the MIT license, it's because I > want to give it away with no strings. A reasonable position to take. But no strings means that others can add strings back again. You're giving people the freedom to actively work against the freedoms you grant. This is very similar to (e.g.) the question of tolerance and free speech. In the West, society is very tolerate of differing viewpoints. Does this mean that we should tolerate intolerant and bigoted viewpoints? Does tolerance for other points of view imply that we should just accept it when the intolerant tell us to change our behaviour? Perhaps some people think that tolerance implies that we should quietly acquiesce whenever the intolerant, racist, sexist and bigoted demand we give up our tolerance and free speech in the name of tolerating their hateful beliefs. I prefer David Brin's philosophy: "We have to go forth and crush every world view that doesn't believe in tolerance and free speech." If you value tolerance, then tolerating the intolerant is self-defeating. And if you value freedom, then giving others the freedom to take freedoms away is also self-defeating. In the long term, a free society may come to regret the existence of MIT-style licences -- to use a rather old- fashioned phrase, these licences give comfort and support to the enemy (those who would deny freedoms to everyone but themselves). But in the short term, as I have said, one can't fight every battle all the time, and MIT-style licences have their place. 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. > If I'm > going to use any prebuilt components, those *can't* be licensed under > the GPL if I want to deliver the final package under the MIT license. An over generalisation. It depends on the nature of the linkage between components. For instance, you can easily distribute a GPLed Python module with your application without the rest of your application being GPLed. [...] > To me, the clear implication of the blanket statement that you have to > use the GPL if you care at all about users is that anybody who doesn't > use the GPL is uncaring. I think that's a silly attitude, and will > always use any tool at hand, including sarcasm, to point out when other > people try to impose their own narrow sense of morality on others by > painting what I perceive to be perfectly normal, moral, decent, and > legal behavior as somehow detrimental to the well-being of the species > (honestly -- ebola???) In context, you were implying that "freedoms" are always a good, and that more freedom always equals better. I provided a counter-example of where more freedom can be a bad. What's so difficult to understand about this? -- Steven
From: Paul Boddie on 9 May 2010 14:07
On 9 Mai, 19:55, Steven D'Aprano <st...(a)REMOVE-THIS- cybersource.com.au> wrote: > > Patrick said that Apple is NOT a "do no evil" company. Yes, apologies to Patrick for reading something other than what he wrote. I suppose I've been reading too many Apple apologist commentaries of late and probably started to skim the text after I hit the all-too-often mentioned trinity of "BSD, Webkit, and LLVM", expecting to be asked to sing the praises of Apple's wholesome "commitment" to open source. Paul |