Picking a license

[Patrick Maupin]

On May 9, 5:05 pm, Paul Boddie <p... at boddie.org.uk> wrote:
> On 9 Mai, 21:55, Patrick Maupin <pmau... at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > On May 9, 12:08 pm, 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.
>
> > So, people overstate their cases to make their points.  That happens
> > on both sides.
>
> Overstate their cases? The "GPL hurts everyone" is a flat-out
> falsehood.

Well, just like in some cases it makes us all richer, in some cases it
also makes us all poorer.  See my prior example about svglib.

> > > 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.
>
> > No, you appear to have a kneejerk reaction much worse than Carl's.
> > You have assumed you fully understand the motives of people who point
> > out issues with the GPL, and that those motives are uniformly bad, and
> > this colors your writing and thinking quite heavily, even to the point
> > where you naturally assumed I was defending all of Apple's egregious
> > behavior.
>
> I skimmed your post in that particular case and apologised for doing
> so.

Apology accepted.

> How have I not understood the motives of people who do not like the
> GPL? The GPL sets out a number of conditions on the use of a
> particular work; these conditions are not liked by some people
> typically because it means that they cannot use that work as part of a
> proprietary product or solution, just as the authors of the licence
> intended;

As I have shown in another post, in one case, I wanted to contribute a
fix for making one piece of GPLed software work better with another
case of MIT licensed software.  The fact that one piece was GPLed and
the author didn't have a repository and was relatively unresponsive
via email, combined with the fact that I was too lazy to start a new
repository just to maintain a fork of one small library, means that I
didn't devote any time to fixing bugs and making the GPLed software
better.  A "proprietary product or solution" never entered into the
picture.

> various people would prefer that authors license their works
> permissively, precisely because this lets them use such works in
> proprietary software;

You also are ignoring the fact that a lot of people practice what they
preach on the other side of this issue.  Since I don't want to make
other people jump through these sorts of licensing hoops, I license
stuff under the MIT license.  MIT, BSD, and Apache are "universal
donor licenses" and just like type O blood, I think this increases the
value of the code licensed under them.

> some of the rhetoric employed to persuade people
> to permissively license their work involves phrases like "more
> freedom" (which are subjective at best, although never acknowledged as
> such) or the more absurd "holy war", evidently.

Well, I think the reason "more freedom" is used is because RMS has
attempted to co-opt the word "freedom" and I think "holy war," though
inflammatory, accurately portrays the kind of language RMS uses to
attract his followers. YMMV

> I once attended a talk by someone from the FSF Europe, a few years ago
> now, where the inevitable assertion that the BSD licences were "more
> free" was made by an audience member. In my experience, such people
> are very reluctant to acknowledge the different philosophical
> dimensions of "freedom", whereas people who apply copyleft licences to
> their works have typically had to confront such issues even before
> being asked over and over again to relicense them.

Well, the whole reason I got involved in this thread was I felt that I
was, by association, being accused of not caring about others'
"freedom" so this is a pot/kettle issue.  Also, when you're deeply
involved in an issue, you might miss or ignore insults hurled by
others seemingly on your side; it's always easier to spot the logical
fallacies made by members of the opposing side, and come to the
conclusion that your side is smarter, more moral, and generally
superior.

> > As far as my throwing mud at Stallman, although I release some open
> > source stuff on my own, I make a living writing software that belongs
> > to other people, and Stallman has said that that's unethical and I
> > shouldn't be able to make money in this fashion.  Sorry, but he's not
> > on my side.
>
> A lot of people seem to take issue with the GPL because they don't
> like Stallman, but that only leads to their judgement being clouded as
> a consequence. When Stallman's warnings become fulfilled, as has been
> the case with things like BitKeeper, this only serves to infuriate
> people further, often because they know they could have ignored the
> messenger but should not have ignored the message. Most people writing
> software are doing so for other people, and many people are doing so
> as part of a proprietary process. Thus, the only way to interpret what
> Stallman has to say (should you not wish to reject it completely) is
> to consider it as some kind of absolute guidance, not some kind of
> personal judgement.

Oh, but I do consider the licenses separately, and describe when I
think they are appropriate.  Again, if you're addressing half the
debaters, you're missing the people on your side (not necessarily in
this particular thread) who quote Stallman and Moglen as if their word
is the final word on everything.  Even in the example you quote here,
it was obvious what was going to happen with bitkeeper to the most
casual observer, so I don't think that by itself shows incredible
powers of observation on Stallman's part.  I also think that if
Stallman didn't exist, we would have invented him -- it was time for
that particular philosophy.

> > > 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.
>
> > And, again, that's "free" according to a somewhat contentious
> > definition made by someone who is attempting to frame the debate by co-
> > opting all the "mother and apple pie" words, who is blindly followed
> > by others who think they are the only ones who are capable of thoughts
> > which are both rational and pure.  I'm not saying everybody who uses
> > the GPL is in this category, but some of your words here indicate that
> > you, in fact, might be.
>
> No, I am saying that the Free Software movement is a well-defined
> thing - that's why the name uses capital letters, but it could be
> called the "Planet of the Zebras movement" for all the name should
> reasonably distract from what the movement is actually about - and
> that it has a very different agenda from the "open source" movement
> which advocates very similar licensing on the basis of things like
> higher software quality and other "pragmatic" consequences of using
> such licensing.

But you're missing the point that it is called the "Free Software"
movement precisely for all the religious/political reasons that piss
some people off.  People wouldn't get all hot and bothered about it if
it were the Planet of the Zebras movement, but RMS never would have
called it that.

> As for the terminology, I've already noted that I prefer the term
> "privileges" to "rights" or "freedoms" because it communicates that
> something is gained.

That's a reasonable starting point, but you still need a way to
distinguish who is getting the privileges -- in the case of the GPL,
it's often the non-programming general public, whereas in the case of
the MIT license, it's anybody who wants to do the software equivalent
of mash-ups, whether they want to generally share with the public or
not.  Even that's not quite right -- the GPL allows me to make any
kind of mash-up I want as long as I don't want to share it with
*anybody* else; it's only when I want to share that it becomes a
problem if I used the wrong ingredients inside my mash-up.  That's
where the "force" and "viral" words come from -- Microsoft doesn't
force me to use their license if I code to their API and don't
distribute their code, but the FSF's viewpoint is that any linking
(static or dynamic) forces me to use the GPL on my code even if I'm
not distributing the GPLed code I'm dynamically linking to.  (Legally,
I think that's probably wrong, but that's their opinion, and
apparently the opinion of a lot of their adherents, so morally it
would be wrong for me to go against their wishes.)

> Again, some people assume that the natural state
> of a work is (or should be) a free-for-all and that the GPL revokes
> privileges: this is a misrepresentation of how copyright and licensing
> functions.

As I said earlier in the thread, the OP's question was not "no license
or GPL" but rather "MIT or GPL" so the relevance of a non-licensed
alternative wasn't really a point of this particular discussion.

Regards,
Pat