Picking a license

[Steven D'Aprano]

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