Picking a license

[Patrick Maupin]

On May 9, 1:03 pm, Steven D'Aprano <st... at REMOVE-THIS-
cybersource.com.au> wrote:
> 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?

No, but there is less incentive for them to hide their tracks.

> > 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.

Only on modified versions.  The internet is a wonderful thing.  A
smart user can certainly find my original package if he is
interested.  A dumb user -- well, maybe I don't want to support them
anyway.

> 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."

Okaaaaay, but I think, given most current fair use interpretations,
most software licensing doesn't implicate free speech concerns.  In
any case, GWB's attempt to impose tolerance and free speech on the
rest of the world shows that going forth and crushing may not, in some
cases, be the best policy, especially when the crushing involves
trampling the very rights you are trying to promulgate.

> If you value tolerance, then tolerating the intolerant is self-defeating.

Possibly, but you need a measured response.  We don't patrol the roads
to make sure that nobody driving down them is a KKK member. We deal
with KKK members according to their words and/or actions.  If you
value personal responsibility, you let people make bad choices and
then suffer the consequences of their own actions.  (Like letting me
license my stuff under MIT :-)

> And if you value freedom, then giving others the freedom to take freedoms
> away is also self-defeating.

As I wrote in an earlier post in this thread, a lot of the discussion
gets down to the age old question about whether someone is really free
if he is not allowed to sell himself into slavery.  This is a very
interesting philosophical question that has had many words written
about it.  I personally don't think the answer is black-and-white, but
then I'm not much of a religious fanatic about anything.

> 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).

Or in the long term, a free society may come to realize that the
license incompatibilities pioneered by the FSF and embodied in the GPL
set free software development back by two decades by making an
incremental approach difficult.  Or it may be that the way things are
going is the normal chaotic market approach that actually speeds
things up and is actually the optimum way to get there from here.  The
future is very difficult to predict, and even, in a few years, with
20-20 hindsight, it will be difficult to accurately speculate on what
might have been.

> 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.

I think we're in violent agreement that both permissive and GPL
licensing have their place.  Certainly, the GPL is a more comforting
license to some people, and any license that encourages more good free
software to be written is a great thing.  A developer ought to be able
to license his creation under a license of his choosing, and from my
perspective the whole purpose of the debate in this thread is to make
points for and against various licensing schemes to help the OP and
others in their decisions.

> > 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.

I agree that's probably true.  However, if you read and parse Stallman
and Moglen very carefully, they don't *want* it to be true and in some
cases deny that it's true.  The fact that a lot of people who use the
GPL take their word for this and also believe it means that it may be
morally wrong to make this sort of software combination even in some
cases where it is legally permissible, so in general I assume that if
someone distributes something under the GPL (as opposed to the LGPL)
then their intention is that any system that uses their software as a
component is also GPL.

> > 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?

Well, for one thing, it was not my intention to imply that more
freedom is always good.  I was answering the phrase "Unless you place
such a low value the freedom of your users" which is, IMHO, somewhat
inflammatory language, with equally inflammatory language.  Obviously,
the truth is somewhere in the middle.

Regards,
Pat