Picking a license

[Paul Boddie]

On 10 Mai, 08:31, Carl Banks <pavlovevide... at gmail.com> wrote:
> On May 9, 10:08 am, Paul Boddie <p... at 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