I should know better
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| tuxchick Mar 22, 2007 10:46 AM EDT |
than to read Mad Penguin anymore, and especially Rob Enderle's mini-Me, Matt Hartley. "...encourage creation while inhibiting growth at the same time." Errr...what? Let's see, how many users and developers are there of BSD-licensed code? How many for the GPL? Let's just file that one under "duhhh." "Imagine, if you will, a world where the Linux kernel was licensed under a more liberal licensing scheme, where the kernel was open for all to view, edit and add to. At the same time, however, proprietary components could be added to it. Purists will argue that this "dirties" the quality of the kernel" Good, bring in the "purists" strawman. Never mind the well-known technical reasons against closed binary kernel blobs, or the many advantages of FOSS to everyone except professional paranoiacs who base their businesses on keeping everything secret. The real problem, which the author dances around but doesn't quite articulate, is some folks cry themselves to sleep over not being able to exploit all that great GPL code the way they really want to, which is to take it, lock it up, and claim it for their own. |
| bigg Mar 22, 2007 10:56 AM EDT |
> to read Mad Penguin anymore, and especially Rob Enderle's mini-Me, Matt Hartley. Guess I'm one up on you. I read the summary, scratched my head, saw that it was Matt Hartley and didn't bother reading it. If you want to work with proprietary code, go and build on top of Windows. Didn't work? Guess you just figured out the GPL. |
| azerthoth Mar 22, 2007 11:29 AM EDT |
Here is a bit of humor. I decided that I wanted to read the article anyway. I'm at work so I'm XP and IE7, the article WOULD NOT open. Madpenquins site would, but even if I clicked the link there it still wouldnt. A quick copy and paste into FF (shhh I'm not supposed to have it installed) and up pops the article. After reading it though I realize that it wasnt worth even that much effort. How much credability can you give to someone talking about the GPL when he puts a question mark after what the intials LGPL stand for? With that much research invested in what something is and means, obiously we just have to take his word that he actually knows what he is talking about. yeesh. |
| dinotrac Mar 22, 2007 11:46 AM EDT |
>Let's see, how many users and developers are there of BSD-licensed code? Careful there, TC -- Postgres is BSD licensed. Apache isn't BSD licensed, but it's license looks more like BSD than it does like GPL. I would bet we could put together a pretty good list of very popular software that is BSD-licensed, or using a license that is some variation of BSD. |
| DarrenR114 Mar 22, 2007 12:08 PM EDT |
@Dino Not mention an entire toolchain that is without GPL |
| tuxchick Mar 22, 2007 12:26 PM EDT |
Careful about what? I'm not dissing BSD-licenses. Just disputing mini-me's claims that more 'liberal' licenses lead to more growth. If that were the case, we'd be seeing BSD-type licenses dominate, instead of the GPL. |
| dcparris Mar 22, 2007 1:20 PM EDT |
There were a few articles not long ago about this. The bottom line was that the GPL does more to foster growth than do the BSD licenses. Theo de Raadt had commented how difficult it is to get people to keep the code open. There is a reason why many people don't really think too highly of Apple. I believe they do give back - at least to some extent. However, they don't always give back (or don't give back everything). They like the way we share but don't necessarily want to share back. |
| tracyanne Mar 22, 2007 1:24 PM EDT |
I just read the article. I don't see the author's or the company that he refers to, problem. If the company want to take advantage of OSS and keep some components proprietary, all they have to do is use one of the other licenses, like the Mozilla license which seems to me to be a perfect fit for what they want to do. The company in this case may actually be the builders of Xara Xtreme, with their Linux version. In which case the issue over their paranoid secrecy has been solved. Someone has already ported the FOSS part of Xara for Linux, which is licensed under the GPL, to use Cairo components in place of the proprietary CDraw component. |
| dinotrac Mar 22, 2007 1:53 PM EDT |
Rev - The GPL is a lovely license. So are BSD and the brothers/sisters/cousisn of BSD. What determines whether one is better than the other is which one best achieves your goals, and goals vary. |
| swbrown Mar 22, 2007 6:17 PM EDT |
> What determines whether one is better than the other is which one best achieves your goals, and goals vary. Yes, but back on topic, it's pretty clear that the volume of GPL code being produced completely dominates the volume of BSD code being produced, so the assertion that it inhibits growth compared to BSD is empirically BS. |
| dinotrac Mar 22, 2007 6:31 PM EDT |
>so the assertion that it inhibits growth compared to BSD is empirically BS. Agreed. |
| dcparris Mar 22, 2007 6:42 PM EDT |
Which was my point. I wasn't worried about which was *better*, but which was more likely to cause growth - the GPL, most likely. It's funny, to me, to hear people talk about the restrictions of the GPL. What a hoot! |
| dinotrac Mar 22, 2007 7:20 PM EDT |
>but which was more likely to cause growth - the GPL, most likely. I'm not remotely convinced that's true. I believe that RMS, the FSF, and Linux have as much to do with adaptation of the GPL as the terms of the license itself. To put it another way, if RMS were evangelizing about the BSD license, the GNU tool-chain were licensed under BSD, and Linux the same, growth would still be pretty much what it is. I believe that developers choose (or write) licenses. I don't believe that they see licenses and are then moved to develop. |
| dcparris Mar 22, 2007 7:22 PM EDT |
As I said, Theo is the one bemoaning the lack of contributions, not Linus. |
| swbrown Mar 22, 2007 8:01 PM EDT |
> To put it another way, if RMS were evangelizing about the BSD license, the GNU tool-chain were licensed under BSD, and Linux the same, growth would still be pretty much what it is. Maybe you should ask the Wine project what they think about that. |
| dinotrac Mar 23, 2007 1:40 AM EDT |
>Maybe you should ask the Wine project what they think about that. You don't think the people doing Wine would have started the project if there were no GPL? |
| DarrenR114 Mar 23, 2007 5:59 AM EDT |
I'm not so sure that BSD-style licenses inihibit growth. As way of anecdotal evidence, I offer: the Apache, Tomcat, and Geronimo. The Apache License is very similar in style to the BSD-style license. And that doesn't seem to have hurt the propagation and adoption of Apache. Just my $0.02 - take it for what it's worth. |
| swbrown Mar 23, 2007 7:31 AM EDT |
>>Maybe you should ask the Wine project what they think about that.
>
> You don't think the people doing Wine would have started the project if there were no GPL? Wine switched to the LGPL later in the game (from a BSD-like permissive license) as they got fed up with the growth issues stemming from the destructive forks (relicensed forks). They claim development sped up significantly after doing it. It's basically a case study in how the GPL/LGPL promote growth by preventing self-destructive behavior of the market. |
| Bob_Robertson Mar 23, 2007 8:01 AM EDT |
Linus also was recently quoted in an interview saying that the GPL.2 boiled down to "give the code back", something that the BSD license doesn't do. He's also said that if he had known about BSD he wouldn't have started Linux, but I'm not sure that had anything what so ever to do with the license. All that said, let's turn it around and look at it from the other side: Microsoft _LOVES_ the BSD license. If my greatest nemesis says, "Please, use this. We have no problem with you using this", that is the one thing I am not going to do. Or if I do, I will first find out what they like about it, and see if I can do without that which benefits my nemesis. The "benefit" of the BSD license is that the code is less restricted in the "upstream" direction. It can be re-used without attribution in a binary-only distribution. Only the source code must retain the BSD license in comments. So can F/OSS projects and communities live without that little bit more freedom, which those who would destroy those same F/OSS communities love so much? "Those that give up essential Liberty for a little temporary safety, deserve neither." But is redistribution of code without attribution an essential Liberty? |
| dinotrac Mar 23, 2007 8:41 AM EDT |
>Wine switched to the LGPL later in the game (from a BSD-like permissive license) as they got fed up with the growth issues stemming from the destructive forks (relicensed forks) So, the BSD license didn't keep anybody from developing WINE. Developers who were working on it decided to switch to something else. Sounds reasonable to me, but I fail to see how it supports a hypothesis that BSD inhibits growth any more than the article can support a hypothesis that GPL inhibits growth. |
| tuxchick Mar 23, 2007 8:45 AM EDT |
woa, these threads do wander! How about we try a different perspective: most FOSS licenses (there are so many OSI licenses I dasn't say "all") support growth and creativity a meelyun times more than closed, proprietary licenses. The article itself is just a muddy, feeble justification of the 'businesses really really want to lock up FOSS code and maybe we should let them' school of thought. |
| dinotrac Mar 23, 2007 9:12 AM EDT |
TC - Absolutely. The critical element : free or not free. The flavors of free are far less (not un) important. |
| swbrown Mar 23, 2007 6:41 PM EDT |
> Sounds reasonable to me, but I fail to see how it supports a hypothesis that BSD inhibits growth any more than the article can support a hypothesis that GPL inhibits growth. As I said, destructive forks (relicensed forks). Can you not see why destructive forks hinder progress? It slowed Wine down, and it slowed XFree86 down. In Wine's case, to move forward out of destructive fork territory, they relicensed LGPL. In XFree86's case, the market eventually died and the destructive forks went away. |
| dinotrac Mar 24, 2007 4:55 AM EDT |
I don't know anything about destructive forks, having never seen one. I seem to recall the ability to fork being a strength of free software. In fact, your mention of XFree86 is curious. The fork of X.org was not very good for the XFree86 project, but it certainly was good for the state of X on the Intel (ish) architecture and for Linux. Or, for that matter, the fork of Joomla from Mambo. TigerCRM from SugarCRM. |
| dcparris Mar 24, 2007 7:11 AM EDT |
Dino, he's not talking about all forks - just the ones where someone forks the project under a non-free license. You know, like Apple does with FreeBSD. |
| dinotrac Mar 24, 2007 7:22 AM EDT |
>just the ones where someone forks the project under a non-free license. Yeah, I know. But those are hardly destructive. They leave the original project in place. What they really are is irksome. People who are serious about freedom should understand that freedom allows people to irk you. The only way to prevent being irked is to tighten down the screws. |
| swbrown Mar 24, 2007 6:34 PM EDT |
> But those are hardly destructive. They leave the original project in place. The problem is that they compete /against/ the Free version. This means the Free version is having to deal with developer headhunting, anti-competitive practices, etc. and when a destructive fork fails, all the effort that went into it is usually lost. Splitting the workforce and letting one half of its progress whither and die, as happened many times with XFree86 for example (AccelX, MetroX, etc.), hasn't proven to be a very efficient way to write Free Software. :) |
| dinotrac Mar 24, 2007 6:40 PM EDT |
swbrown - That darned freedom. So annoying. Seriously, though, forks are both good and bad. As noted before, the X.org fork was bad for XFree86, but good for the rest of us. The real danger comes when a free project simply isn't good enough to compete. |
| swbrown Mar 24, 2007 8:22 PM EDT |
> Seriously, though, forks are both good and bad. Destructive (relicensed) forks are pretty much always bad. Can you think of a destructive fork that turned out well for the Free Software version? I can't. |
| dinotrac Mar 24, 2007 8:49 PM EDT |
>Can you think of a destructive fork that turned out well for the Free Software version? Given that I don't believe there is such a thing as a "destructive fork", the answer would have to be no. |
| swbrown Mar 24, 2007 10:16 PM EDT |
> Given that I don't believe there is such a thing as a "destructive fork", the answer would have to be no. You're free to pretend the term means something else, but the question still stands: can you think of a /relicensed/ fork that turned out well for the Free Software version? To avoid having to argue pointless topics like semantics again, here are some useless arguments that avoid answering the question in advance: 1) Argue semantics with something like "Well, Apple's Darwin is Free Software, and so was FreeBSD, so they're both the Free Software version". 2) Argue misdirection with something like "Well, Konqueror was GPL, but by publishing changes as part of a huge blob with no comments, it was effectively a 'destructive' fork too by your standards". 3) Argue the wrong question with something like "Well, x.org and XFree86 are effectively related by a relicensed fork, and the GPL-compatible version is doing great". |
| dinotrac Mar 25, 2007 2:53 AM EDT |
swbrown - Well gosh - And I suppose Rainy Days and Mondays never will get you down if you a) define Rainy Days as only those days on which it rained for 24 consecutive hours, b) raining means raining sufficiently hard that you would get thoroughly soaked going from the house to the car without some form of rain gear, c) that your car must be outside in the driveway, and the driveway must be a "normal" driveway, not some "super" driveway, d) that Mondays include regular "I must get up and go to work" Mondays, not holidays, vacations, working-from-home, or boss is out of town on a business trip, or YOU are out of town on a business trip Mondays. e) cannot include Mondays after a Friday-off 3 day weekend because the glow from the extra off will skew your results, f) "down" must be sufficiently down to make the entire day miserable, g) but clinical depression cannot be included because, well, you're always down, right? h) Taking your meds religiously is not sufficient to overcome g, i) Listening to Country and Western music or old Leonard Cohen songs invalidates your argument, and j) You must deal with the fact that, on any Monday, it's not Monday on the other side of the international dateline. |
| swbrown Mar 25, 2007 11:58 AM EDT |
I know I've made a solid point when you refuse to answer. :) |
| dinotrac Mar 25, 2007 1:48 PM EDT |
>I know I've made a solid point when you refuse to answer. :) I don't know. You've never made one. |
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