There have been multiple accounts created with the sole purpose of posting advertisement posts or replies containing unsolicited advertising.

Accounts which solely post advertisements, or persistently post them may be terminated.

With GPL, you're programming Freedom. With MIT, you're programming for free.

Context:

Permissive licenses (commonly referred to as “cuck licenses”) like the MIT license allow others to modify your software and release it under an unfree license. Copyleft licenses (like the Gnu General Public License) mandate that all derivative works remain free.

Andrew Tanenbaum developed MINIX, a modular operating system kernel. Intel went ahead and used it to build Management Engine, arguably one of the most widespread and invasive pieces of malware in the world, without even as much as telling him. There’s nothing Tanenbaum could do, since the MIT license allows this.

Erik Andersen is one of the developers of Busybox, a minimal implementation of that’s suited for embedded systems. Many companies tried to steal his code and distribute it with their unfree products, but since it’s protected under the GPL, Busybox developers were able to sue them and gain some money in the process.

Interestingly enough, Tanenbaum doesn’t seem to mind what intel did. But there are some examples out there of people regretting releasing their work under a permissive license.

snek_boi ,

We are at risk

of losing many developers who would otherwise choose a license like the GPL. Fortunately, I’m glad to be surrounded by people, just like you, who care about licenses like GPL. By uploading this type of content and engaging with it, be show our commitment to it. I wish to suggest how we can deal with this threat.

We will lose developers who choose GPL if we use words that suggest GPL is “restrictive”. Sure, the word “restrictive” was avoided in this meme by using the word “copyleft”, but the cognitive jump from “permissive” to “restrictive” is minimal: just add an “opposite” and you’ve got “permissive is the opposite to restrictive”. It really is that simple. That’s how brain works (check out Relational Frame Theory to see how that works).

So what can we do about it?

Well, we can approach this with science. There is a historical global trend towards people being more meta-cognitive. That means that people are becoming more aware of how our thoughts interpret everyday reality and how to be intentional with our relationship with our thoughts so that we live better lives. We know this trend is happening to virtually everyone everywhere because of the work of brilliant sociologists like Anthony Giddens and Christian Welzel. Heck, even the history of psychology —going from noticing and changing behaviors (behaviorism) to noticing and changing behaviors and thoughts (cognitive-behaviorism), to noticing and changing the context and function of behaviors, thoughts, and emotions (functional contextualism)— reflects this trend.

We can use meta-cognition in our favor; we can use the meta-cognitive tool of framing to change how we think about GPL and MIT licenses. Effective communicators like influencers, political campaign experts, and influential activists use framing all the time. For example, instead of using the dangerous framing that suggests GPL is ‘restrictive’, we can use another one that truly displays the virtues of the license.

What would this other frame look like? I may not have a perfect answer, but here are some

ways of framing (thinking about) the relationship between licenses like GPL and MIT:

(ironically!!!, these were ‘suggested’ by an LLM; I wonder if these frames already existed)

  • “Investment-Protecting Licenses” vs. “Investment-Risking Licenses” (as in developers invest by working on projects that they could (not) lose the ability to contribute to)
  • “Community-Resource-Guarding Licenses” vs. “Exploitation-Vulnerable Licenses”
  • “Give-and-Take Licenses” vs. “Take-and-Keep Licenses” ⭐
  • "Freedom-Ensuring Licenses" vs. “Freedom-Risking Licenses” ⭐
  • "Contribution-Rewarding Licenses" vs. “Contribution-Exploiting Licenses”
  • “Open-Source-Preserving Licenses” vs. “Closed-Source-Enabling Licenses”

I’d be happy to hear what you think, including suggestions!

lemmynparty ,

There’s a fair bit of bias in those terms, which make GPL seem like a ‘better’ choice than an unrestricted license like MIT.
The truth is, GPL is restrictive to developers. Copying just one line from a gpl-licensed project will automatically restrict you to using only gpl-compatible licenses. I’d prefer to advocate for LGPL and similar licenses, as they seem to offer a better tradeoff between user and developer freedom.

TwiddleTwaddle ,

GPLs “restrictions” are freedom preserving though. It only restricts developers from keeping dirivitive code proprietary. In order to violate the GPL you’d have to choose to use GPL code and then choose not to release your modified versions of it under a similar copyleft license. It may seem counterintuitive, but having those restrictions results in more software freedom overall - similar to the paradox of intolerance.

I’m not saying MIT or so called permissive licenses are bad, but the permissive/restrictive language is just as loaded as the OPs suggestions. Both styles are needed, but copyleft licenses are better at promoting software freedom.

Edit: I do agree with you that LGPL serves an important role in promoting free/libre software where it would otherwise would never be used.

snek_boi , (edited )

There’s a fair bit of bias in the terms “restrictive” and “permissive”, which make MIT seem like a ‘better’ choice than a give-and-take license like GPL.

The truth is, MIT is risky for developers. Using just one line from an MIT-licensed project will automatically allow others to exploit your work without giving back. I’d prefer to advocate for balanced licenses that protect both user and developer interests.

lemmynparty ,

Ha, maybe I should have licensed my comment.

You’re wrong though.

Using code from an MIT licensed project will not allow others to exploit your work. MIT is compatible with almost all other licenses, so you can incorporate the code without needing to relicense your project.

If you meant that choosing to license your entire project with MIT would allow others to exploit your work, then yes, that’s the whole point of the license.

For some small projects, I’m completely fine with throwing it out into the world with no expectation of anything in return.

If a company ends out using my 50-line file conversion tool in their commercial product, I see that as a bonus thing to put on my résumé.

mhague ,

Permissive licenses are truer to the spirit of free software but copyleft, while kind of a copout, seems more pragmatic due to corporations. I wouldn’t avoid copyleft licensing on principle or anything but it feels incongruous to want to make something freely available to all but then nitpick over how they use it.

grue ,

Permissive licenses are truer to the spirit of free software

Yeah, which is why the person who popularized the concept of Free Software invented copyleft – oh wait.

“The spirit of Free Software” is freedom for the end user; as such, copyleft is much more truer to it. Remember, the whole thing started with the notion that Xerox shouldn’t be able to stop you from fixing your fucking printer by withholding the source code to it.

mhague ,

That’s what I said. Free licenses are for free software, while copyleft is for “free software.” Copyleft is because corporations like Xerox will act in bad faith, etc. Free licenses are for free software. Copyleft is for Free Software, The Movement. People aren’t cucks for not deigning to make every piece of code they write part of some statement.

grue ,

People aren’t cucks for not deigning to make every piece of code they write part of some statement.

Factually speaking they are, but I’ll concede that sometimes they don’t realize it.

julianh ,

MIT license is useful for a lot of stuff that is traditionally monetized. Game development tools, for example. I don’t think a game engine could become very popular if you had to release your game’s source code for free.

renzev OP ,

That’s a good point! The FSF also developed LGPL for this reason (their particular example was something like OGG that is meant to displace the proprietary (back then) MP3), but you example with game engines is also a good one!

uis ,

libvorbis, yes.

bjorney ,

Literally every library with any traction in any field is MIT licensed.

If the scientific python stack was GPL, then industry would have just kept paying for Matlab licenses

marcos ,

The same way, if the BSD internet stack was GPL, we wouldn’t have an internet at all.

uis ,

Meanwhile nobody uses BSD this day, everyone is on GPLed Linux

marcos ,

Yep, different licenses have different consequences.

Andromxda ,
@Andromxda@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

For a different reason tho

uis ,

Because companies weren’t sharing modifications under network stack that was originally BSD. I think the only advantage *BSD stack has over Linux is kqueue, which notifies also about amount of avaliable bytes in socket, what epoll doesn’t do.

uis ,

LGPL

woelkchen ,
@woelkchen@lemmy.world avatar

LGPL

Depending on the provisions of a console’s SDK, that may be not an option because you may be able to deduct some of the SDK’s working from the released source code and that may violate the NDA.

uis ,

NDAs are cancer

woelkchen ,
@woelkchen@lemmy.world avatar

Sure but that attitude doesn’t help game developers looking to make a living selling console games. Godot with its licensing, helped by Unity messing up big time, is about to become the entry level game engine… The engine universities and self-taught game developers will likely use it as learning tool. Godot got a big influx of donations even though it’s under a permissive license. Small indies don’t care to modify the core engine anyway. Most GZDoom games on Steam are living proof of that. Game logic in separate scripts isn’t covered by the interpreter’s license anyway.

uis ,

Godot got a big influx of donations even though it’s under a permissive license.

Many opensource game engines received donations when Unity tried to rape gamedevs.

Game logic in separate scripts isn’t covered by the interpreter’s license anyway.

That’s why I said game engine can be LGPL. Even GPL, if game logic is loaded separately.

woelkchen ,
@woelkchen@lemmy.world avatar

Game engines can’t be LGPL because of console SDK NDAs. At best MPL.

glitchdx , (edited )

I’m an idiot making a thing, and I need to pick a license. Where’s a good place to talk to people more knowledgeable than myself on the subject?

EDIT: so my thing isn’t software, i probably should have mentioned that. I am making a ruleset and setting for something similar to but not exactly a tabletop rpg. The ORC license sounds promising, but the legalese makes my brain gray out. ChatGPT tells me to use a version of the Creative Commons license, but ChatGPT isn’t exactly reliable.

AceD ,

Wish someone would reply to this guy. I am also, a fellow idiot making a thing.

don ,

Some did, check the replies.

TheImpressiveX ,
@TheImpressiveX@lemmy.ml avatar

Not an expert by any means, but it depends.

Are you okay with people potentially making a closed-source fork of your code? If yes, then choose a permissive license like MIT, BSD, or Apache. If you do not want people to make closed-source versions of your code, and want all forks to remain open-source, then go with GPL.

Remember that choosing the GPL means other people, especially businesses, will be less likely to consider your project because that would mean they would have to make their versions open-source, which some people may not want to do.

EDIT: As always, this is not legal advice and I am not a lawyer.

AlpacaChariot ,

Just a small note that the businesses only have to open source their version if they release it. If they just use it internally then they don’t have to distribute the source code. So it depends on the use case.

Senshi ,

choosealicense.com

Very simple guide with in depth examples if you want further clarification.

woelkchen ,
@woelkchen@lemmy.world avatar

Rule of thumb: if your full license text is longer than your actual source code, you’ve probably picked the wrong license.

Senshi ,

That is actually a really bad rule, though you probably are only joking.

There are many examples of short, but very valuable code. Just think about anything math or physics related.

A totally new or even just a very efficient implementation of an already existing algorithm can be gigantic if others need to build upon it.

And many licenses are verbose not because they are complicated in intent, but merely because they need extensive legalese prose to cover against many possible avenues of attack.

woelkchen ,
@woelkchen@lemmy.world avatar

That is actually a really bad rule, though you probably are only joking.

No, I wasn’t.

There are many examples of short, but very valuable code. Just think about anything math or physics related.

A rule of thumb is not a strict law. I never disputed that there are certain edge cases. What has to be considered but is not on the radar of most people: Threshold of originality. A “valuable” 3 LOC bash script is likely not being able to be copyrighted in the first place. In cases where the work is tedious but not creative, the work may also not be able to be copyrighted (depending on jurisdiction). See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow whether a certain jurisdiction protects tedious work or not.

GreyEyedGhost ,

I’ll throw my opinions in here.

If you’re publishing a standard or a reference application, a permissive license makes sense. What better way to guarantee compatibility than being able to use the reference code in your product. This is what happened with the TCP/IP stack, and it was used in its original form in Windows for years.

If you’re making something that you want to build a community around, something more akin to the GPL may be more aligned with your goals. The nice part is, you can include MIT licensed projects as part of your GPL project. This means there is nothing stopping you from building your standard with a MIT license while building your community-driven application using GPL, maximizing the reach of your standard while reducing the risk to your community.

Note that either option opens you to EEE (Embrace, Extend, Extinguish), the GPL option just takes an extra step (clean room implementation of a published standard).

s_s , (edited )

Sometimes you just wanna get fucked. --MIT

Sometimes you want to start a beautiful family that makes the world a better place. --GPL

Match your license with your feelings about the project.

Just don’t, you know, pick the former and mistake it for the latter because your ego gets stroked. If you pick MIT, you increase your chances of collaborating, but get in and get out.

glukoza ,

You sound like someone i know xD

But I think gpl isn’t limited to software, or is it ? Anyhow, you have different varaites of Create Commons, depending on much limits you put, from 0(nothing) to 4(no commercial use, no remix etc.) they have license chooser on website here

JackbyDev , (edited )

My personal philosophy:

  1. Is this trivially small? Don’t bother licensing. People will just copy and paste regardless of what I do and I don’t care. But it gives you the option to change your mind later. Licenses are irrevocable. (I specifically mean not applying a license and maintaining all rights.)
  2. Is it a small part of a whole that people need to use? LGPL. But take this with a grain of salt. FSF says to prefer GPL.
  3. Otherwise, AGPL. If there was a more strict but also commonly used license I’d use it instead.
dan , (edited )
@dan@upvote.au avatar

Doesn’t bother licensing

That’s usually not what someone would want to do. The default if you don’t provide a license is essentially “all rights reserved”, and you’re not granting anyone else permission to use it in any way. Everyone that wants to use it has to get explicit permission.

If you really want “no license” then you probably actually want to release it as public domain.

JackbyDev ,

For truly small random pieces of code I’m putting online, yes, that is what I generally want. (Also, that’s sort of presumptuous to believe you know what I want better than myself.) I’m not going to hunt down people who are infringing on projects like this: github.com/JacksonBailey/julian

I made that because I was bored and thought I could easily solve a problem my wife described having at work. If someone copies and pastes it into their own project do I care? I mean, sort of? Not really. It’s just too small to worry about. Specifically leaving it unlicensed gives me.the freedom and flexibility to license it as I choose in the future and also pursue people using it if they refused to stop. (Although this example is particularly trivial. I probably wouldn’t do that. But that’s my whole point, I’m only choosing to do this with trivial code.) Applying a license doesn’t give me that flexibility though.

(Apologies for typos, I just woke.uo.and don’t have my glasses on either.)

dan ,
@dan@upvote.au avatar

I’m not going to hunt down people who are infringing on projects like this:

It’s more that people won’t use the code at all if there’s no license attached. For someone that’s looking for a snippet of code to reuse, it’s much easier to instead find a permissively licensed piece of code that performs a similar function, instead of contacting the author of the unlicensed code and trying to figure out what to do.

Also, that’s sort of presumptuous to believe you know what I want better than myself

Sorry - I meant to address it to readers of your comment rather than you. I edited the comment to make it clearer.

JackbyDev ,

I think you’re putting a lot of faith in people when you say that. When’s the last time you properly obeyed a license when copyijg and pasting from Stack Overflow? When’s the last time you think the average dev did?

Also, no hard feelings about the presumptuous thing. Idk why I got defensive.

And as an aside, I think I’ve heard that in some jurisdictions there is no concept of public domain and in others you cannot willfully put things into it. So licenses like CC0 or the awfully named Unlicense are better alternatives. (Bad name because Unlicense and Unlicensed are so close in spelling but wildly different.)

dejected_warp_core ,

The two licenses have distinct use cases, and only overlap for some definitions of “free” software. I also think both the comic artist and OP set up a fallacious argument. I’ll add that in no way do I support Intel’s shenanigans here.

The comic author takes one specific case of an MIT licensed product being used in a commercial product, and pits it against another GPL product. This ignores situations where MIT is the right answer, where GPL is the wrong one, situations where legal action on GPL violations has failed, and all cases where the author’s intent is considered (Tanenbaum doesn’t mind). From that I conclude that this falls under The Cherry Picking Fallacy. While humorous, it’s a really bad argument.

But don’t take it from me, learn from the master of logic himself.

commonly referred to as “cuck licenses”

This sentiment makes the enclosing sentence an Ad-hominem fallacy, by attacking the would-be MIT license party as having poor morals and/or low social standing. Permissive licenses absolutely do allow others to modify code without limit, but that is suggested to be a bad thing on moral grounds alone. That said, I’d love to see a citation here because that’s the first I’ve heard of this pejorative used to describe software licensing.

trolololol ,

Dude are you a bot?

hglman ,

Just a cooperate lawyer, so yes.

xenoclast ,

I know you meant copyright… but this made me laugh.

hglman ,

I actually ment corporate ha

xenoclast ,

Even funnier. Stupid English and it’s stupid words.

namingthingsiseasy ,

I was surprised that comment this got so many upvotes, so I’ll respond by saying that, with all due respect, I think your argument is much more fallacious than the one you are trying to debunk.

The comic author takes one specific case of an MIT licensed product being used in a commercial product, and pits it against another GPL product.

Yes, this is called an example. In this case, the author is using a particularly egregious case to make a broader conclusion: namely that if you release software under a “do whatever you want” license, it may come back to bite you in the future when it’s used in a product that you don’t like.

This comic is a warning to developers that choosing MIT/BSD without understanding this fact is a bad choice.

This ignores situations where MIT is the right answer, where GPL is the wrong one

It does not ignore those situations. All situations are multifaceted and need to take multiple considerations into account. The author is trying to argue that people should take care not to overlook the particular one to which he is trying to draw attention.

situations where legal action on GPL violations has failed

Just because legal efforts have failed does not mean that they are not worthwhile. There may be many cases where people avoided misappropriating GPL software because they did not want to deal with the license - there may be cases where people were less hesitant about doing so with MIT/BSD because they knew this risk was not there.

From that I conclude that this falls under The Cherry Picking Fallacy. While humorous, it’s a really bad argument.

Just because the author used a single example does not preclude the existence of others. That is a much more fallacious assumption that invalidates much of your argument.

and all cases where the author’s intent is considered (Tanenbaum doesn’t mind).

Just because Tanenbaum didn’t mind does not mean that other developers who mistakenly use MIT/BSD will not either. Also, it honestly shouldn’t matter what Tanenbaum thinks because we don’t know what his rationale is. Maybe he thinks malware is a good thing or that IME is not a serious issue - if that’s the case, do we still consider his sentiments relevant?

commonly referred to as “cuck licenses”

This sentiment makes the enclosing sentence an Ad-hominem fallacy

It does not, in fact. Just because the author used a slang/slanderous term to describe the licenses he doesn’t like does not mean that his logical arguments are invalid. Ad-hominem fallacies are when you say “the person who argued that is $X, therefore his logic is invalid”, not when he uses a term that may be considered in poor taste.

by attacking the would-be MIT license party as having poor morals and/or low social standing.

Misrepresentation. The author is not arguing that they have poor morals, he is arguing that they are short-sighted and possibly naive with regards to the implications of choosing MIT/BSD.

My conclusion: I appreciate the author for making this post. People should be more aware of the fact that your software could be used for nefarious purposes.

So unless you really don’t care about enabling evil people, you should be defaulting to using GPL. If people really want to use your copyleft software in a proprietary way, then it is easily within their means (and resources) to get an exemption from you. The fact that there is so much non-GPL software out there makes the GPL itself weaker and makes it easier for nefarious interests to operate freely.

(Not that I would ever release software under GPL myself. I think software licenses are stupid. But no license basically has the same non-derivative limitation as GPL so it doesn’t matter as far as I’m aware.)

xenoclast ,

I’d like to counter both these arguments with:

ssj2marx ,

situations where MIT is the right answer

Genuinely curious, when is this the case? If you’re programming on your own then it just takes the option of controlling what others do to your work off the table for no benefit - if you go copyleft and someone uses it and you don’t “mind” them using it then you can give/sell them an exemption while retaining the ability to go after uses that you don’t like.

dejected_warp_core ,

I’ve been in situations where I wanted to retain credit/ownership of ideas and code, but wanted to be able to use them in the workplace. So building a MIT/BSD licensed library on the weekend and then importing it on Monday was the only game in town. I get the portfolio piece and my job is easier as a result. But I stick to non-novel and non-patentable stuff - “small” work really, as Stallman is quoted here..

In some work environments, GPL or “GPL with an exception” would never get the kind of traction it should. Lots of places I’ve worked lack the legal and logistical framework for wrangling licenses and exceptions. It’s hard to handle such cases if there’s literally nobody to talk to about it, while you have automated systems that flag GPL license landmines anyway. The framing is a kind of security problem, not a license problem, so you never really get to start.

JackbyDev ,

and all cases where the author’s intent is considered (Tanenbaum doesn’t mind).

I think you’re ignoring that most people wouldn’t want their code used like that. Just because the author doesn’t mind doesn’t make that typical. Look at Mongo and Elastic. They felt the need to use an arguably non-free license for their code because of perceived abuses. AppGet is another example of something similar.

woelkchen ,
@woelkchen@lemmy.world avatar

I think you’re ignoring that most people wouldn’t want their code used like that.

That’s why you should read and understand a license before choosing it. MIT license is just a couple of lines of easy language, so it’s not like you need a degree to understand basic English. Anybody who’s surprised by the contents of the MIT license has no sympathy from me. Reading the text requires no more than one minute of time.

JackbyDev ,

People generally aren’t surprised by the effects of the MIT license, they’re surprised by the behavior of other humans. Less permissive licenses protect against that.

woelkchen ,
@woelkchen@lemmy.world avatar

People generally aren’t surprised by the effects of the MIT license, they’re surprised by the behavior of other humans.

Wait, people give other people the right to make proprietary variants of released source code and then are surprised when they exercise that right?

Less permissive licenses protect against that.

No, other licenses don’t protect against not understanding which rights are granted. The GPL, for example, allows to make proprietary web services using GPL code and to never release any modifications to that code. Many people were very surprised many years ago that some web-based messenger could use Pidgin’s libpurple to connect to ICQ etc. without ever giving anything back.

JackbyDev ,

Wait, people give other people the right to make proprietary variants of released source code and then are surprised when they exercise that right?

It’s more like being angry when people try to abuse charities and get money when they don’t need it. Like growing an apple tree in your yard and telling people they’re free then being upset when someone comes and takes all of them. Or a better example, being angry about people taking all the candy from a Halloween bowl.

No, other licenses don’t protect against not understanding which rights are granted.

That’s not what I meant, I meant protect against people taking advantage of your code in a way most people would view as wrong. (Just because something isegal doesn’t mean people believe it is right.)

Also, that’s why I use AGPL.

nomadjoanne ,

Tannenbaum is fucking asshole. Isn’t he the idiot that told Torvalds “you certainly would have failed my class if you submitted your OS as a final project?”

The guy deserves no respect.

HappyFrog ,

I find MIT to be good for libraries as you can get companies using it and working on it. However, apps and binaries should be copyleft to not get fucked over.

douglasg14b ,
@douglasg14b@lemmy.world avatar

This is what LGPL is for.

You can still use a library like a library freely, without restriction, but you are keeping your IP protected from being copied cloned and modified elsewhere.

nUbee ,

When I think of Copyleft licenses, I just think of it as “Use this program as you see fit, but if you share/redistribute it, you may not add any restrictions to it.”

I don’t understand why there are communities that hate GPL so much. It is such a powerful license that practically guarantees that the program will be free for any who wants it, it just won’t allow someone to add restrictions to it.

I’ve heard arguments against the GPL like: “It’s too restrictive!” Only if you want your program to be muddled with any kind of program that doesn’t respect freedom. Saying the GPL is too restrictive to developers is like saying the 13th amendment of the US Constitution is too restrictive to slave owners.

douglasg14b ,
@douglasg14b@lemmy.world avatar

I’m going to guess because of the tools that don’t use LGPL.

Which makes them quite limiting and kind of controversial since you have to adopt their license from my understanding, even if used as a library.

I try and use LGPL on all my projects since it allows others to use the Library as a library, and anyone that wants to modify or use the source has to copy left.

nickwitha_k , (edited )

Really?..

Just about every FOSS and Source-Available license that I’ve seen is perfectly valid. As a software developer, one has the option to choose how they wish to license their software. This can be based upon one’s personal philosophical view or what seems most appropriate for the piece of software.

Not everyone is motivated by profit. Most software that I develop personally is permissively licensed because IDGAF as long as I have enough to get by. If I write some code that makes someone else’s life better or easier, that’s more than enough for me.

Wait. What am I saying? This is the Internet and, according to the rules of corpo social media, we’re all supposed to be dicks to each other to further “engagement”. WHICH ONE OF YOU SAVAGES IS USING TAB INDENTATION INSTEAD OF BLOCKS IN YOUR LICENSE FILES?!?;!!!111one

robigan ,

I like your idea about using permissive licenses as long as it helps people. But as you said, “if … that makes someone else’s life better or easier …”, what would you do if someone used it to hurt people instead? I’d personally feel like shit if my software were used for that, and as others said in this post, they’d prefer to have entities request an exemption rather than have their code used in ways they don’t approve of. So what say you?

nickwitha_k ,

what would you do if someone used it to hurt people instead? I’d personally feel like shit if my software were used for that, and as others said in this post, they’d prefer to have entities request an exemption rather than have their code used in ways they don’t approve of. So what say you?

I’ve a few thoughts on this:

  • Anyone who wants to use anything that I release for harm, will probably do so regardless of license. Bad actors are going to act badly. Plus, chances are that they’d see no legal repercussions as underdogs winning in court is the exception, not the rule. The legal system is heavily stacked against the little guy.
  • I tend to specifically avoid working on things that are weaponizable to reduce the chance of ethical conflict.
  • The projects that I’ve released or plan to release tend to be pretty esoteric. The one that saw the most interest was years ago and it was an adapter between abandoned gallery plugin and an abandoned social media CMS thing. It would take some great creativity to hurt people with that, other than making them read my horrible code from that era. My current projects are more about FPGA and mixed reality stuff.
  • Once I’ve created something and shared it freely, it is no longer wholely mine. I cannot dictate how one uses it, anymore than a musician can dictate how someone listens to the radio. As long as one abstains from creating tools intended to harm (or that can be predictably turned to harm), I don’t see legitimate ethical culpability. We only have control over ourselves.
robigan ,

Interesting, I see why you’re saying that who wants to do harm with your code can do so however they want. Although licenses are the rules of the system which gives a fighting chance to stop such abuse if I can. Not that the system works properly most of the time, but it doesn’t mean it never will.

nickwitha_k ,

Exactly. Bad actors are going to act badly. Unfortunately, something that we have to accept as reality (and something that some political philosophies fail to plan for). Bad actors will break the rules and, if they are wealthy, they will more often than not get away with it in the current state of affairs.

However, I would say that you bring an interesting point. It would be worthwhile, philosophically to have a “Pacifist MIT” license, being permissive but explicitly denying legal use to MIC.

MystikIncarnate ,

I’ve seen busybox in a lot of software that’s not free. One notable example is VMware. It runs on top of esxi as a package to provide command line functions to VMware hosts.

I’m pretty sure (IDK, I don’t do development for vmw) that it’s running on top of VMware’s kernel, and they have binaries that you execute from busybox that interface with the vmkernel to accomplish things.

I don’t have all the details and I’m far from an operating system guru/developer/whatever. I think that’s permissible under copyleft, since they’re not running things that you paid for on top of busybox, but I have no idea. I’m also not a lawyer, but they’ve been doing it forever, as far as I know.

Does anyone know more about it? I’m just surprised that smaller fish have fried for infringement, but someone like VMware is shipping busybox without reprocussions.

Maybe it’s not busybox? Maybe it’s something that just looks and acts like busybox? Idk.

best_username_ever ,

There’s nothing Tanenbaum could do

Tanenbaum doesn’t seem to mind

Today OP was very dumb and showed his ignorance of the concept “I do whatever I fucking want.” Don’t be like OP.

people regretting releasing their work under a permissive license

They’re free to change the licence of future versions. OP also failed at understanding the concept of licences. He’s such a silly moron!

renzev OP ,

They’re free to change the licence of future versions.

Why do you act like I don’t know that? The issue here is that once you realize that the license you chose does not reflect your intentions, the damage has likely already been done. From the article I linked:

I didn’t have the foresight to see this coming. I didn’t think people so lacked in the spirit of open source. I wanted to promote community contributions, not to have them monetized by other people who don’t even provide the source to their modifications. I wanted to grow the tools as a community, not have closed source forks of them overtake my own open source versions.

TheEntity ,

They’re free to change the licence of future versions.

Only if they are still the only contributor. Once you have more contributors, it gets far tougher to change the licence.

renzev OP ,

How does it work with contributors? Does absolutely everyone have to consent to having the license changed? If one of the contributors doesn’t consent, can the maintainer “cut out” their contributions into a separate program and redistribute it as a plugin with the original license?

QuazarOmega ,

You can keep all the lines of those who didn’t accept to the change with the original license, it will end up as a bad mix, but it’s doable if the licenses are compatible

woelkchen ,
@woelkchen@lemmy.world avatar

Does absolutely everyone have to consent to having the license changed?

Very minor changes (like fixing typos in comments) aren’t copyrightable, so these changes don’t require approval. When LibreOffice was relicensed, IIRC they they had some cutoff regarding lines of code.

dariusj18 ,

Pretty sure that with a permissive license you can just change the license of future versions as you want. Ex. v1 MIT license with thousanda.of contributors, v2 Commercial license with contributions from anyone who agrees to contribute to the new version and license. (Anyone can fork v1 and start their own licensed project)

widw , (edited )

Controversial opinion: Copyleft is actually more free than permissive licenses.

Because the way the GPL works is how the world would be if there were no licenses and no copyright at all. Because then anything made public is free to use. And if I were to reverse-engineer a binary then I could still add that code to my software.

But since we live in a world where we play make-believe that you can make something public and still “own it” at the same time (e.g. copyright) and where using reverse-engineered code can still get you into legal trouble, the GPL is using their own silly logic against them (like fighting fire with fire) to create a bubble of software that acts like a world without any licenses.

Permissive licenses don’t do that, they allow your open software to just get repurposed under a non-free paradigm which could never occur in a world with no licenses. And so ironically permissive licensing in a world that is (artifically) non-permissive by default does not reflect a world with no licenses, and is thus less free than Copyleft.

grrgyle ,

Well you’ve convinced me. I always thought copyleft sounded cool, but never thought of it in this way of more/less free

woelkchen ,
@woelkchen@lemmy.world avatar

And if I were to reverse-engineer a binary then I could still add that code to my software.

That’s actually an important factor for ancient software whose source code was lost. A developer could, for example, declare all their old Atari 2600 games to be under GPL by just announcing it in their news blog. Collectors could then hunt for the binary files and decompile them. Decompiled software is still a derivative work, so that source code would still be under GPL. Sadly I’m just aware of one case from years ago where I can’t even remember the specifics who and which software it was but he was like “I found some floppy disks from the 1980s, I lost the source code but binaries under GPL, so have fun”.

woelkchen ,
@woelkchen@lemmy.world avatar

Interestingly enough, Tanenbaum doesn’t seem to mind what intel did.

Yeah, duh. Intelligent people read licenses before they pick one.

But there are some examples out there of people regretting releasing their work under a permissive license.

That’s like signing a contract before reading it and then complaining that it contains provisions that surprise you when they are enacted. I’m baffled on a regular basis by how many people understand FOSS licenses only on the basis for hearsay, for example when people insist that GPLed source code must be made available free of charge for everyone. The GNU project has a FAQ about the GPL that spells it out that this is not the case and yet hardly anyone discussing FOSS licenses has even read the FAQ.

rottingleaf ,

TIL openssh, xorg, apache, nginx, all of *bsds are cuck-licensed.

While GPL-licensed linux, used by every corp out there, is not.

but since it’s protected under the GPL, Busybox developers were able to sue them and gain some money in the process.

Don’t need to steal anything. Lots of today’s usage doesn’t involve giving a binary to the customer. Thus Google, FB and who else don’t have to share any of their internal changes to Linux.

interdimensionalmeme ,

Someone please SUE ANYCUBIC AND CREALITY FOR STEALING KLIPPER !!! Make them give back to the community that created their business !!

laurelraven ,

I don’t know much of anything about Anycubic, but isn’t pretty much everything Creality releases open? How are they withholding from the community?

interdimensionalmeme ,

Last I checked, they haven’t release the source of their modified / bastardized version of klipper

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • [email protected]
  • random
  • lifeLocal
  • goranko
  • All magazines
    •