'The Open Source Licensing War is Over' (infoworld.com) 128
It's time for the open source Rambos to stop fighting and agree that developers care more about software's access and ease of use than the purity of its license, reads a piece on InfoWorld. From the report: The open source war is over, however much some want to continue soldiering on. Recently Meta (Facebook) released Llama 2, a powerful large language model (LLM) with more than 70 billion parameters. In the past, Meta had restricted use of its LLMs to research purposes, but with Llama 2, Meta opened it up; the only restriction is that it can't be used for commercial purposes. Only a handful of companies have the computational horsepower to deploy it at scale (Google, Amazon, and very, very few others).
This means, of course, it's not "open source" according to the Open Source Definition (OSD), despite Meta advertising it as such. This has a few open source advocates crying, Rambo style, "They drew first blood!" and "Nothing is over! Nothing! You just don't turn it off!", insistent that Meta stop calling Llama 2 "open source." They're right, in a pedantic sort of way, but they also don't seem to realize just how irrelevant their concerns are. For years developers have been voting with their GitHub repositories to pick "open enough." It's not that open source doesn't matter, but rather it has never mattered in the way some hoped or believed. More than 10 years ago, the trend toward permissive licensing was so pronounced that RedMonk analyst James Governor declared, "Younger [developers] today are about POSS -- post open source software. [Screw] the license and governance, just commit to GitHub." In response, people in the comments fretted and scolded, saying past trends like this had resulted in "epic clusterf-s" or that "promiscuous sharing w/out a license leads to software-transmitted diseases."
And yet, millions of unlicensed GitHub repositories later, we haven't entered the dark ages of software licensing. Open source, or "open enough," software now finds its way into pretty much all software, however it ends up being licensed to the end user. Ideal? Perhaps not. But a fact of life? Yep. In response, GitHub and others have devised ways to entice developers to pick open source licenses to govern their projects. As I wrote back in 2014, all these moves will likely help, but the reality is that they also won't matter. They won't matter because "open source" doesn't really matter anymore. Not as some countercultural raging against the corporate software machine, anyway. All of this led me to conclude we're in the midst of the post-open source revolution, a revolution in which software matters more than ever, but its licensing matters less and less.
This means, of course, it's not "open source" according to the Open Source Definition (OSD), despite Meta advertising it as such. This has a few open source advocates crying, Rambo style, "They drew first blood!" and "Nothing is over! Nothing! You just don't turn it off!", insistent that Meta stop calling Llama 2 "open source." They're right, in a pedantic sort of way, but they also don't seem to realize just how irrelevant their concerns are. For years developers have been voting with their GitHub repositories to pick "open enough." It's not that open source doesn't matter, but rather it has never mattered in the way some hoped or believed. More than 10 years ago, the trend toward permissive licensing was so pronounced that RedMonk analyst James Governor declared, "Younger [developers] today are about POSS -- post open source software. [Screw] the license and governance, just commit to GitHub." In response, people in the comments fretted and scolded, saying past trends like this had resulted in "epic clusterf-s" or that "promiscuous sharing w/out a license leads to software-transmitted diseases."
And yet, millions of unlicensed GitHub repositories later, we haven't entered the dark ages of software licensing. Open source, or "open enough," software now finds its way into pretty much all software, however it ends up being licensed to the end user. Ideal? Perhaps not. But a fact of life? Yep. In response, GitHub and others have devised ways to entice developers to pick open source licenses to govern their projects. As I wrote back in 2014, all these moves will likely help, but the reality is that they also won't matter. They won't matter because "open source" doesn't really matter anymore. Not as some countercultural raging against the corporate software machine, anyway. All of this led me to conclude we're in the midst of the post-open source revolution, a revolution in which software matters more than ever, but its licensing matters less and less.
Hardly a new thing (Score:2)
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I call it capitalism-based advertising.
As with most developers, IANAL... (Score:2)
As developers, we are not lawyers and honestly many of the different flavors of licenses are so ambiguous it is not clear whether or how we can leverage "open source" software in our own projects/implementations.
I mean, I pick modules all the time from NPM, from Java Maven Central, from github, etc. I honestly don't know, regardless of the license stamped on it, if I can use the code, if I can modify the code, whether I can use it in personal projects or business projects, ...
I do understand that I can't ju
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mostly that it doesn't seem to apply to me the developer, and if it really did apply to me, then there'd be clear summaries/explanations attached to each one with a TL;DR section that explained it.
The thing with copyright law is that it applies to you, the developer, whether you sell or not. Legally speaking, there's no default permissive allowance just because you can freely download and use it for non-commercial purposes. If a code developer wants their code to be legally usable in a typical freely way, they have pick *something*, or else there's no legally defined path to use the code they provide apart from specific individual agreement between the user and the developer.
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Sorry, I should have been clear...
I'm distinguishing between the developer of the open source solution vs the developer who consumes the solution.
I get that the developer who creates the code needs to have a license to protect their own investment...
But for the developer that wants to take all of these various pieces and integrate them into an application, they're often looking at a varying list of licenses with different restrictions, all to solve business problems. So it's not just a simple question of "C
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I agree that the licenses are verbose and nuanced and needlessly complicated due to some person nitpicking on one detail versus another. I was focused on the fact that, unfortunately, this statement doesn't pan out:
I do understand that I can't just sell those open source projects, but that's not the business I'm in, so that wouldn't affect me anyway.
Doesn't free you from having to worry about those verbose, nitpicky license choices by the developers of software you consume. Consuming the open source libraries means you have to know the gist of at least LGPL, AGPL, GPL, BSD-2, BSD-3, MIT, and Apache (others depending). About the only stuff y
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The problem with developers today is that they're so terrified of "reinventing the wheel" that all they spend all their time aggregating various third-party libraries in the hope that the product they want will eventually emerge, all under the delusion that this is saving them time and effort.
Try writing your own code, reserving third-party libraries for things you can't or shouldn't write yourself. Not only will the end result be significantly smaller, faster, more secure, and use fewer system resources,
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Try writing your own code... Not only will the end result be significantly smaller, faster, more secure, and use fewer system resources...
I do not believe that is generally true. TDD is not always in use, developers frequently do no performance testing on their own code, and it is all to easy to create insecure software.
These things can be possible if you have unlimited time, money and resources. Most projects are not so lucky...
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The irony is that including a third-party library often takes more effort than writing the feature yourself.
There's a story I often tell about my search for a 'date picker' control 20 years or so ago. I spent a whole morning searching for and evaluating various third-party solutions looking for anything suitable. I only found one that could have possibly been used, but it came with a massive dependency and wasn't a great fit anyway. After I gave up searching, it only took about an hour or so to write my
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And the same problems exist regardless of the code being used is open source or not. Say you want to use Qt, Parasolid, and Oracle SQL in your product. That's licensing, redistribution, and royalty terms of three different commercial products that you must comply with.
Open source only trips up companies because initially they think oh, it's available to download for free and so it must be free to use! Why they think open source code is different than proprietary I'll never know. Everything used must alw
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This is true, that commercial third party software is even more tricky (with open source, there's a large chance the rights holder will never notice, or will never care, versus commercial having people dedicated to identifying and enforcing.
To your point about businesses contacting an open source project for a different licensing term, my favorite remains:
"I give permission for IBM, its customers, partners, and minions, to use JSLint for evil."
This is ludicrous... (Score:3)
If a developer chooses no license, you can't touch it, no matter how it is. It's silly to declare that people shouldn't bother declaring license as long as they commit to github.
You could advocate for declaring public domain, or selecting a BSD-style license, or copyleft. However, code without any selection made is just untouchable.
The assertion that software without license nor public domain is pretty much in all software is false. It may be true that developers picked a permissive license without much care about it, but there is almost always a license. If there isn't a license/copyright statement, then it's still a non-starter for use.
If you want your code to be useful at all, you must declare your intent, otherwise the default is, legally, the user can't even use the code for private use.
Is that true in the US?. (Score:2)
Is that the case in the 'States? And if so, in which states in particular?
In Canada, employers are told in no uncertain terms to specify that their proprietary code is "all rights reserved", because there's British case law that failing to do so puts it into the public domain. German companies say the same, so I suspect that may be the law in the EU as well as the British Commonwealth...
"Deploying at scale" (Score:3)
Meh. 24GB consumer cards can run quantized models up to ~35-40B parameters with ease; the largest LLaMA 2 model is 70B and can be run on a pair of 24GB cards if quantized. Doesn't require some insanely expensive system with 8x H100 processors or whatnot.
Those insanely expensive systems are needed for training. It's tough enough to train even a 3B model on a 24GB card. Training large models takes a huge amount of VRAM. Otherwise you're stuck training LoRAs for preexisting models, which will change the behavior but not heavily impact the fundamental information on which the model is based.
Re: "Deploying at scale" (Score:2)
Fwiw I think the author means "at scale" here running it as a service for other people
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My point is that you can run services at scale on consumer cards, which are quite cheap. You don't need big expensive server cards. Those are for training.
There's a massive gulf in pricing between consumer cards and server cards. It would IMHO be a total waste of money to do inference on a 8x H100 system.
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Are you seeing people doing a lot of training/fine-tuning for LLMs? So far, I've been able to solve all my issues with clever prompt design and plugins, but I'm sure that will change at some point.
Thanks!
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I'm actually doing it right now with axolotl :) But god, it is SUCH a VRAM hog. Most people just train LoRAs because that's easier to do on a home system. If you want to train anything more than a 3B, maybe 7B model, you're going to be doing it on some big expensive server (probably one you're renting rather than owning).
Open enough (Score:2, Insightful)
Not as some countercultural raging against the corporate software machine, anyway.
Anyone who repeats the FUD that open source (by which they mean "copyleft" style of licences, in context) is against corporations lose all credibility. They unquestioningly repeat all the FUD they've heard.
Propaganda and gaslighting (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry but this story reads like gaslighting and propaganda. Many developers - and users - care very much, and for good reason.
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Spot on. This story reads like, "Oh, you still care about licenses? Don't you know you're the only one? You should get with the times! We've all moved on."
Nice try, guys.
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If you squint, you can see the RedHat/IBM copyright on it.
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It is comedy gold... "Everyone should just shut up and do things MY WAY"
Sorry, but... (Score:2)
SaaS killed open source (Score:5, Interesting)
This article is late to the party.
SaaS software killed most of open source's movement momentum a decade ago. The vast majority of code being written at companies these days is as closed as ever -- and it's still on github. It's accessible to employees in a corporate account, hosted and run on a server somewhere, and only accessible to users in the form of API access.
In other words, it's closed source. Even if it depends or relies on hundreds or thousands of open source libraries or modules! Most early licenses simply didn't consider the SaaS model when they were devised. They were intended to prevent the distribution of binaries without the distribution of code.
But for the most part companies simply stopped distributing binaries. It's perfectly within most licenses to run the code on behalf of users without giving them access to their code or data.
The GPLv3 attempted to correct for this, but it never caught on -- this battle years ago was the first big sign that "open source" was going to be won by SaaS companies.
Re:SaaS killed open source (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, GPLv3 does nothing for SaaS scenario. You can still freely use GPLv3 and privately modify it for SaaS applications.
AGPL is the license that takes aim at SaaS, but it's rarely invoked.
Re: SaaS killed open source (Score:2)
Ah thank you! AGPL is what I was thinking of.
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> The GPLv3 attempted to correct for this, but it never caught on -- this battle years ago was the first big sign that "open source" was going to be won by SaaS companies.
What does the GPL3 have to do with this? The GPL (any version) is not, and never was, an open source license. Richard Stallman would roll his eyes in desperation if he heard you calling it as such.
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Every one of those closed-source SaaS systems, relies on plenty of open source components. I don't think open source is quite so dead as it may seem.
Time for closed source rambos... (Score:3)
OPEN SOURCE THEIR CODE!
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But they can't do that because then everyone would see how much code they've stolen. So they have to keep fighting. And now with AI generating code scraped from all sorts of sources, they know they absolutely have to keep their code secret
Huh? (Score:2)
Summary: Something that has no useful purpose* is supposedly the new definition of open source, and nothing else matters?
* As highlighted by the capital needed. Not to mention LLMs seem to be gimmicky at best and horribly power hungry.
Trying to hoodwink people with pretty words, eh? (Score:3)
Licenses are as important as ever. You will find out if you violate one and it matters to the person or company whose license you violated, or if you stupidly publish under an overly permissive license and find your work has been turned against you through embrace, extend, extinguish. There are powerful actors who want nothing more than for you to think licenses don't matter, so that they can take from you without giving back. Learn from the past or learn through your own mistakes.
Sure but as soon as it ends... (Score:2)
And will BOTH sides be laying down arms? (Score:3)
The battle isn't over until BOTH sides lay down their arms. Do you really see the big corporations ever stopping their push towards more and more easily-exploitable licenses?
No? Me neither. And that means either the "open source Rambos" keep pushing back in the other direction, or we all roll over and let the businessjerks call all the shots.
That is how it *always* happens in every domain. Democracy. Capitalism. Cultural "properties". As soon as the little guys doing the work stop actively pushing back, the powerful people exploiting it creep steadily forward until everything is shit again.
"Disclosed Source" is mostly Useless (Score:3)
A license that forbids use in a commercial use is no license at all for use cases that matter. This is disclosed source, not open source. It maybe helps some researchers, but even for them, I'd prefer they work with solely open source, since my tax dollars fund them, so I want to benefit directly from their output, which means giving me code that I can use without restriction.
an unparsable but still heartbreaking final speech (Score:3)
Why is this stupid troll thread on Slashdot? (Score:2)
The premise of the article is absurd and the piece unworthy of being deliberately spread by Slashdot or anyone else.
msmash lazy as usual.
Well... that's one person's opinion. (Score:2)
As a closed source software developer by day and more of an open source software user than a developer by night I am coming at this from more of an open source hardware perspective as that I do contribute to.
I pass on including or contributing to any non-commercial licensed projects. Sorry.. I think helping them would be a waste of my time and ultimately counter-productive.
Now, I'm not making anything to sell myself. But I was there to watch what happened with 3D printers. Sure, a lot of people that wanted
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What exactly is a "non-commercial licensed project?"
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It's like Open Source but you can't use it for any commercial purposes.
Two llama are better than three hundred and twenty (Score:2)
Still not clear to me what the legal basis is for Facebook or anyone else in believing people are legally required to respect license claims to any publicly available AI model. Neither do I understand what "open source" has in common with freely available bags of weights. There is no "source code" so what does calling this open source even mean?
All that aside from what I recall only commercial use restriction for Llama-2 kick in at the 700 million user mark which excludes the vast majority of commercial u
In other news... (Score:3)
This is like Vladimir Putin declaring that the war has been won, without notifying the Ukrainians about it.
Whatever... (Score:2)
If you're an open source developer, you can choose to license, or not license, your code however you want. There's no reason we should *all* have any particular attitude about open source licensing. To each their own.
I guess Matt didnâ(TM)t get the memo (Score:2)
Matt Asay clearly doesnâ(TM)t understand that Meta / Facebook is the mediaâ(TM)s punching bag. Using negative media press about Meta as a jumping off point for an article about âoedefacto open source licensingâ is an oddly non-sequitur jump.
In addition, does Matt actually understand what the issue is with pseudo-open source LLMâ(TM)s? He seems to think itâ(TM)s an issue of being pedantic about licensing, but my understanding is that the issue is actually more about how one goes
This guy works at Mongo? (Score:2)
Setting aside the uhm, rhetorical quality of this article, this is an utterly bizarre take for a Mongo employee to take.
There's a very pay no attention to the man behind the curtain quality to that reality. Mongo's business pretty thoroughly depends on their license so Amazon can't just run whatever they want. Their head of developer relations has to know his argument is nonsense. I suspect they just want people calling things like what Meta is doing open source so the door is open for Mongo to be similar a
Re:Nah, BSD license is still superior & non-vi (Score:5, Insightful)
As the other stories posted here shows, there's nothing stopping people from taking BSD licensed code and patenting the ideas in it and then suing people.
All you need to do is take a look at Linux vs BSD. Look how much effort companies willingly pay to improve Linux, and look at where Linux is today. Conversely, Apple, and a whole bunch of other companies, have exploited the BSDs, like FreeBSD, and what have those BSDs got to show for it? They complain about how Linuxisms is creeping into everything, and how the BSDs have to keep up. Well, tough shit. That's what having a critical mass of developers does.
Re:Nah, BSD license is still superior & non-vi (Score:4, Interesting)
You have to be a complete and utter moron [to] accidentally GPL your code.
Or you have to be developing a large proprietary product that runs on Linux. My company spends lots of time and money ensuring that our turnkey application (and many others), which is a large COTS product we've augmented with millions of lines of enhancements, stays in compliance with the GPL, including having a full-time IP attorney on staff to help us stay in compliance (not find loopholes!). When we've made enhancements to GPL code, we've contributed them back; in a large company that jealously guards its secret sauce, that involves lots of paperwork.
We use a COTS product to analyze our code base and look for things that might be out of compliance. In one case that it flagged, an obscure library we built from source for inclusion in our product was covered by fourteen licenses, including the GPL, and my favorite license name of all time, the "Do Whatever the Fuck You Want" license. We lucked out on that one--the next major version of that library was only covered under the MIT license, so to stay in compliance, all we had to do was upgrade. When a piece of code is covered by the GPL and a more permissive license, but doesn't specify the conditions under which each one applies, it gives our attorney headaches.
We don't want to cheat, and we put our money where our collective mouth is. And we're neither a rare case nor a particularly progressive company. No large company wants to be the first one to test the GPL in a high-profile court case where they're the Big Evil Profiteers spitting in the faces of the people who wrote code and give it away for the greater good.
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Sure. Source code brought into a product from *any* source must be properly licensed and proven by legal to be use-able in a proprietary product. So GPL code is no different than code from any other source. It must be licensed, either under the original terms, or under negotiated special terms. All of this shows what utter bunk the article is. The code matters yes, but the source of the code absolutely does matter, now more than ever. Especially now with AI-generated code coming from who knows where.
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Do you think it would be any easier if you licenced some code from Oracle to include in your project?
Any publisher of any reasonable size is going to need an IP attorney doing something similar.
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You're right, it'd be just as hard, but the GP's point is still false: Your code can get accidentally GPL'd without everyone on the project being morons.
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No it cannot! The mods today seem to want to mod this down, but that's not how copyright works. If you use GPL'd code in an way that violates the GPL it simply means you've violated someone's copyright and you are now liable for legal damages. After settling those liabilities, you have three choices:
1. License your derived code under the GPL to comply with the license of the borrowed code
2. Remove the offending code (write your own code!)
3. Negotiate with the copyright holders a proprietary license that
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A late reply, but option 1 is the same regardless of the open or closed source license. This has nothing to do with the GPL being viral or not. If you don't like the other two options, you must always comply with the original license, no matter what it is. Your assertion does not change this fact.
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A late reply, but option 1 is the same regardless of the open or closed source license.
Not really. It seems pretty damn GPL specific: "1. License your derived code under the GPL to comply with the license of the borrowed code"
It is coercively forcing you to relicense your code. That's not the sort of remedy most licenses pursue.
This has nothing to do with the GPL being viral or not.
Actually it seems the very definition of viral.
If you don't like the other two options, you must always comply with the original license, no matter what it is. Your assertion does not change this fact.
The fact remains that this particular cited remedy is viral. Combining GPL'd code with other code requiring GPL licensing of the other.
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This is part of my job. The problem is not what to do. We know about zillion of different licenses and how to comply with them. The problem is that once your project gets to nontrivial size, using a combination of COTS products, other FOSS you've included by building from source (which may in turn include other things), and a lot of code you've written yourself, knowing which licenses apply to which parts of your product gets very complicated, which is why companies like Black Duck get paid to figure that o
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Or you have to be developing a large proprietary product that runs on Linux.
Running your proprietary program on Linux has exactly zero GPL implications. You can remove, "...that runs on Linux" from your sentence, as it is completely out of place and is totally irrelevant to anything.
You can also substitute, "...that runs on Windows" or "...that runs on Macs" or "...that runs on BSD" for "...that runs on Linux", and it would not change anything meaningful.
You can also substitute, "..stays in compliance with all the licenses of the proprietary software we use" for "...stays in compli
Code scanning for licences (Score:2)
Or you have to be developing a large proprietary product that runs on Linux. My company spends lots of time and money ensuring that our turnkey application (and many others), which is a large COTS product we've augmented with millions of lines of enhancements ...
and my favorite license name of all time, the "Do Whatever the Fuck You Want" license.
At a previous job I had to train others in an environment where management wanted to avoid GPL code "because its viral". So they'd find a library that was GPL & their 1st instinct was to change the licence!
My manager also wanted me to change the name of the "Do Whatever the Fuck You Want" license because they were offended. Nope, that's the name, they didn't have an abbreviation like GPL.
Finding an apple and calling it an orange won't change the code or license. If they want to avoid the GPL, they ne
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Or you have to be developing a large proprietary product that runs on Linux.
Oooh. The absolute BEST kind of FUD. Well done sir.
Running on Linux imposes no licensing concerns.
Just in case it is not clear:
If your application runs on Linux, your application does not need to be concerned with Linux licensing.
(I am looking for a job spreading FUD. What is the current pay like?)
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That's not FUD. It's a simple fact. I gave multiple examples of what kinds of things can happen when you get serious about license compliance.
It was certainly not meant to be a deterrent to developing a product that runs on Linux, nor was it meant to imply that other platforms don't also have licensing complexity. My original point still stands: If you're making a proprietary, non-free (speech or beer) product, you have to be very careful that no part of it violates the GPL, and that's not always easy to de
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It was certainly not meant to be a deterrent to developing a product that runs on Linux, nor was it meant to imply that other platforms don't also have licensing complexity.
What license complexity does Linux have?
If you're making a proprietary, non-free (speech or beer) product, you have to be very careful that no part of it violates the GPL, and that's not always easy to determine.
What are you on about? Unless you explicitly include GPL licensed code in your proprietary product, you have no licensing issues to deal with.
Since you seem to have doubled down on your FUD, I want to know who is paying you. I would be even more curious why they think it is worthwhile to try and affect/effect opinions here of all places. Why not some mass-market venue?
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I'm not being paid by anyone to disseminate anything anywhere, especially here. Go make up a better conspiracy theory.
What am I on about? I'll say it again, slowly.
1. Stipulated: Unaltered Linux itself does not have license problems (Red Hat notwithstanding).
2. Sometimes a company develops an application that runs on Linux.
3. That application may be intended for sale as a proprietary, closed-source commercial product.
4. That application may be based on other proprietary code, maybe under a source license.
5.
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There's nothing viral about GPL. You can't catch it accidentally. You have to be a complete and utter moron accidentally GPL your code.
What makes GPL "viral" is when closed source calls out to GPL code the GPL license places open source demands on the closed source. This problem is solved by a more reasonable LGPL license which is GPL without the vampire clause. Many but not all GPL'd libraries tend to be LGPL for this reason.
For example originally the GNU TLS library was GPLd making it impossible for any closed source project to use even if they made no changes to the underlying TLS code.
What makes GPL undesirable is not that people don
You DO NOT have to be an utter moron to GPL code (Score:2)
You DO NOT have to be a complete and utter moron accidentally GPL your code.
All it takes is copying and pasting a snippet of code from StackOverflow. How do you know where that code sample came from? How do you know what its license is? StackOverflow can't or won't tell you!
All it takes is using "Code Complete" or similar tools that do not tell you how much code is being reused, where it came from, or what license it has!
All it takes is using part of someone's MIT licensed or BSD licensed GitHub repository
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All it takes is copying and pasting a snippet of code from StackOverflow.
This is fucking bullshit.
First of all, DON'T COPY PASTE random bits of code you find on the internet.
And if that were true, then if people posted PROPRIETARY code, then you would be liable to heavy lawsuits from the owners of that code. There's nothing specific about the GPL that makes it legally dangerous to copy code you find anywhere on the internet.
The FACT is StackOverflow has T&Cs regarding the code snippets that gets posted on their site. And I would say most of the short snippets there
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All you need to do is take a look at Linux vs BSD. Look how much effort companies willingly pay to improve Linux, and look at where Linux is today.
Linux is where it is due to legal problems with BSD at a key moment. People wanted "unix on a PC", they generally did not give a crap about the politics/religion that came with the GPL. A lawsuit tied up BSD, letting Linux get to a useable state before BSD. So people started using Linux, the first practical "unix on a PC". Emphasize practical, licensing a commercial "unix" doesn't count.
Corporation have basically taken over Linux, they pretty much guide and direct its development. Its a long long time si
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Why should I stop using the MIT license that I've been using for the last 30 years?
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He prefers everyone to use his viral license. :D
Re:Nah, BSD license is still superior & non-vi (Score:4, Insightful)
He already answered that.
His argument is that if you GPL license your code you can still sell your code to companies, while if you release it under the MIT license then you have little ability to charge for the code to people who want to use your code in proprietary offerings.
I'm not sure I agree with that as a strategy, but it is correct if that is a path you want to go down.
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Correct. Bizzare that mods decided it was flamebait. Guess the truth hurts.
As you say, as the copyright holder you can license your code however you want, whenever you want. You cannot retroactively change the license on code you've already distributed, though. So if you release your pet project under MIT, that's great, but if it suddenly becomes important and attracts the attention of big companies, such as Microsoft, even if you wanted to make a little money on it you couldn't. Sure you can relicense
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As you say, as the copyright holder you can license your code however you want, whenever you want. You cannot retroactively change the license on code you've already distributed, though.
You misunderstand. The original repository stays the same, be it GPL or MIT. However as the owner you are free to create a new repository with the same code but a different license. Dual licensing has long been a thing, you just need separate repositories and clear ownership.
So if you release your pet project under MIT, that's great, but if it suddenly becomes important and attracts the attention of big companies, such as Microsoft, even if you wanted to make a little money on it you couldn't.
Untrue, owner dual license, separate repositories.
Starting with the GPL protects your future options as well as your code.
No, it protects FSF options. Hence the blank check to future GPL versions the FSF may issue. The GPL is constructed to maintain the politics/religion of the FSF. Now, if that's your chur
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There is absolutely no requirement for separate repositories. Code can be dual licensed from a single source.
Depending on your use case, there may be advantages to having separate repos, but there will also be costs (additional maintenance overhead being an obvious one) so in general I would avoid this unless there are other reasons it would be beneficial, beyond licensing.
That seem tricky, the GPL does not play well with other licenses. That might only work for GPL compatible licenses.
In the case I am most familiar with they have a script that replicates the file hierarchies and copies the files while replacing their normal corporate license header with a GPL license header. They work in the normal corporate repository. They run the script at milestones they want to tag. Not much overhead.
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If they are both public and you say "The code is available via license A or license B" and the code in the two repos is identical and freely available, ...
They are identical except of the license headers embedded at the beginning of the source files.
I think it would be hard to argue in court that if someone is using it under license B but happened to download it from repo A, they are somehow in violation of both licenses.
Only one license was delivered with the source code. That is the one and only license the developer is bound to. Advocates of the restrictive license could make no demands of someone who downloaded the permissive license.
If the actual code is identical and either license can apply, I don't believe a header comment would affect that.
You are mistaken. Only one license was delivered, and only that license is explicitly or implicitly agreed to.
You also undercut your own logic. If one could be bound to a license one never down
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The situation I am referring to is multi-licensed software where the end-user has a free choice as to which license they use. This is something you see a lot of and has the advantage of giving the end user the choice of picking the license that best suits their needs.
Again, we have the simple declaration of choice by choosing the appropriate repository up front, or we have the more complicated option of somehow declaring which license will govern after a download.
In these cases, there is absolutely no need for separate repositories to handle the multi-license situation.
Other than simplicity and less ambiguity of one's choice.
The situation you are describing seems to be the opposite way round, whereby it is the distributor who makes the choice as to which license is used by the client.
No. You go to the project's website. It says there is a permissively licensed version of the code and a restrictively licensed version of the code, and offers links to both. The user chooses the link that fits their needs.
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Also, I forgot to respond to this:
You also undercut your own logic. If one could be bound to a license one never downloaded, couldn't they more easily be bound to a file that was delivered but not chosen? Your dual license argument only works if the downloader has a choice. Choosing a repository up front is declaring that choice, just as declaring a choice on one of the two delivered licenses in your scenario.
Each license indicates what the licensee is allowed to do and what obligations they have. For each applicable license, so long as the licensee is meeting the requirements, they are abiding by that license. If the licensee follows the requirements of all applicable licenses, then they are compliant.
You are assuming the licenses are compatible. I am not.
If they comply with the requirements of just one license, then they are compliant. If they do not meet all requirements for at least one license, they are non-compliant.
And this leads to the ambiguity I warned of earlier. Now the restrictive license could make a claim upon you when you only have interest in the permissive license.
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I am neither assuming that the licenses are compatible, ...
If the licenses are not compatible you cannot comply with "all applicable licenses".
... nor do I see any inherent ambiguity just on licensing terms alone.
Again, one makes a mistake and is not compliant with the intended permissive license. But in your scenario this person is not compliant with both licenses, so you may be sued with respect to the more restrictive license. Better to start with code that only mentions the license one cares about and avoid any possible entanglement with the license one is not interested in.
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If the licenses are not compatible you cannot comply with "all applicable licenses".
You don't need to comply with all of them - just any one of them.
Wrong context, you had asked where you assumed the license were compatible.
But in your scenario this person is not compliant with both licenses, so you may be sued with respect to the more restrictive license.
It sounds like you are conflating license enforcement with contract law.
No, I am pointing out how separate repositories removes ambiguity that can lead to problems, exposure.
I am really struggling to come up with a licensing situation that would cause any of the problems you are alluding to ...
Agreed, and such shortcoming can be costly in court. Better to avoid exposing oneself. Keep it simple. Keep it as unambiguous as possible.
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He already answered that.
His argument is that if you GPL license your code you can still sell your code to companies, ...
He is wrong about that. The owner of code can always release it under a different license, the GPL does not convey any advantage there.
These more modern permissive license are often selected because they are preferred by developers looking forward to commercial opportunities.
GPL is a legacy license, it doesn't fit the needs of the community as well as the more modern permissive license. Hence the latter being chosen so much more often.
while if you release it under the MIT license then you have little ability to charge for the code to people who want to use your code in proprietary offerings.
The GPL permits no such thing. The owner has to release their code
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Why should I stop using the MIT license that I've been using for the last 30 years?
Because you are a heretic and not embracing the politics/religion of the FSF.
Re:Nah, BSD license is still superior & non-vi (Score:4, Insightful)
Note that GPL "locks up" BSD code as much a commercial code "locks up" BSD code.
It's one of the biggest beefs I have with the GPL. They claim you can't "lock up" GPL code, which is true. But GPL projects take from BSD projects all the time, and even worse, the BSD project cannot get back improvements from the GPL project, making it a case where the GPL has "locked up" BSD code.
Now, some GPL developers notice this ad provide back BSD licensed patches, but that's generally not the norm.
As for me, my personal code is dual licensed 3-clause BSD and GPLv2. Note, I didn't say GPLv2+. The 3-clause BSD blocks use in GPL projects, while GPLv2 allows it only as a GPLv2 licensed code. I get where people are with GPLv3 and others, but it doesn't mean I have to accept it. Thus, 3-clause BSD/GPLv2 means it's free to be used anywhere, even in GPLv2 projects, but excludes GPLv3.
Heck, GPLv3 is one of the reasons why we have SMB1 still taking up space in Windows. Samba went GPLv3 just before adopting SMB2 so now we're stuck with a tons of NAS devices that are locked to the GPLv2 licensed version of samba.
Funny how even "free" licenses can cause us to be stuck with insecurity. (No, I'm not blaming samba devs, it's just an interesting unintended consequence that we're stuck having to support SMB1 even though even Microsoft wants to move off from it).
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Sure but the BSD was designed to allow any sort of lock up like that, whether it's locking it open or locking it closed. At least with GPL'd code using BSD code the code is still open and visible. It doesn't just vanish into a proprietary black hole.
The NAS issue is interesting, but you really can't blame that on the GPLv3. The NAS device makers could certainly produce new firmware with a modern version of samba in it and comply with the license. They just don't want to and don't care. They can use the
GPL largely a legacy license. (Score:2)
GPLd code absolutely does not force anything to be GPL ... 1. Comply with the GPL and re-license your own code to be compatible
Ie option 1 coerces you to relicense your code as GPL. Hence the GPL is viral. The existence of other options does not change this, this viral nature remains regardless of whether it is 100% effective or not. The likely simplest and least costly option remains number 1.
In my mind, the GPL should always be the default for anyone who writes code for fun, or makes things on github to scratch their own itches.
GPL is largely a legacy license. New projects are overwhelming choosing more permissive licenses that better suit their needs. Commercial options are often one of these needs.
Few other open source licenses offer protection to keep your code open and free while at the same time preserve the potential to sell your code in a proprietary fashion.
That requires being the original author of the code, and in such a
Re:Nah, BSD license is still superior & non-vi (Score:5, Interesting)
OTOH, there's a reason why Linux ended up more mainstream than BSD.
It's basic game theory: Big businesses are more willing to contribute to the project under GPLv2 because they know that their competitors can't take the work private, make it incompatible, and then use it as exclusive leverage to compete against them.
Re: Nah, BSD license is still superior & non-v (Score:3)
Though boy, Red Hat is trying their plucky little best!
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But they try, time and again. There's lots of FOSS GPL code gone private. Code sharing is different than code theft. Thieves try to subvert licensing all the time, citing hubris, foam, and goo about how it doesn't make it a difference.
It does.
Capitalism in FOSS is pretty strictly defined, and they don't want to play by the rules, just snack on that tasty code, burp, and transfer funds. It's been this way for ages, and the wars over what license does what will continue. Code is tasty. Hours and efforts are l
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I think the lawsuit had more to do with things. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org].
Re:Nah, BSD license is still superior & non-vi (Score:5, Interesting)
Webkit (Score:2)
Nothing else to be said really.
Re: Nah, BSD license is still superior & non-v (Score:2)
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Sqlite, while really great and everything, isn't exactly rocket science. Much of it was developed by one guy. Big companies aren't exactly dedicating major resources adding to it. They're mainly using it for free.
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Programmer's choice... Depends on who you're writing for.
Definition: loss of control -- end-user decides what happens on his machine.
A/V codec implementation? Users are other programmers, end-user loss of control is minimal. permissive is OK. The TCP stack IMO falls into this category.
Mail parsing library? Users are other programmers, end-user loss of control is quite high. Permissive questionable.
Mail client? Users are end-users. Loss of control is total. Permissive not OK.
As a programmer, you should also
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The BSD/MIT license is the best, if not the only license people should use if they want their code to be adopted. This is the best choice for useful libraries and software that are not patent encumbered.
Pick GPL/LGPL if you know the end product is likely to be repackaged and used for evil (eg ffmpeg, MAME, ScummVM) because that is essentially what happens, and the purpose of making it GPL it to ensure you can thwart the theft of the code.
But ultimately GPL is a political license. Committing to GPL, means yo
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The BSD/MIT license is the best, if not the only license people should use if they want their code to be STOLEN.
FTFY.
These 'do whatever you want' licenses do little more than guarantee that your once free code is locked up in a binary, robbing the end user of the rights that you wanted them to have!
BSD is particularly awful:
3. All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software must display the following acknowledgement: This product includes software developed by [the University of California, Berkeley] and its contributors.
The bit I put in brackets is often changed, but a surprising number of developers don't bother. I guess they didn't bother to read the license before slapping it on their project.
If you want a permissive license that still protects the rights of end users, you should take a look at the LGPL [fossa.com].
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You're making a huge assumption that most people are selfish assholes. Fortunately, the world has woken up and realized that selfishness harms and corrupts everything.
This is why licenses like the GPL and LGPL are actually far more premissive than "actual giving your work away" as you claim. See, the only thing those licenses don't allow you to do is take the same rights you've been granted away from others.
You just want to take other people's work and pull the ladder up behind you. We see through your t
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I love how you think that's an insult. McCarthy is dead and so is his hateful bullshit. Pathetic. Welcome to the losing side of history.
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Yawn...
Do you know why communism allegedly doesn't work? It's because of selfish assholes. Full stop. Get rid of the selfish assholes and just about any economic system will work. Let selfish assholes run rampant, and no economic system is sustainable. Selfish assholes are killing capitalism as we speak.
As you're clearly on the side of selfish assholes, being a selfish asshole yourself, you and your kind can fuck right off. The world is over your bullshit.
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Sure the BSD license has enabled widespread uptake of some components like openssl and openssh. The problem now with openssl is no one who uses it in their software and products wants to do any of the work to maintain it and bug fix it. The zero effort part of complying with the license just might be part of the problem. So I'm not completely sure I want any uptake of the code I write if that is the case!
As a person cranking out pet hobby projects, the GPL protects my freedom more than any other license.
Endless rent seeking (Score:2)
That's basically what this all amounts to.
Everyone wants to get paid for existing, rather than delivering value. And truthfully, no one wants to pay for value, they pay because they are forced to. Making money writing software for anything but a corporate overlord is unlikely. Those days are long gone.
A world where there was no rent-enabling copyright and patent law on software, that would be an interesting world.
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Just another part of the endless corporate propaganda war against copyleft.
They love BSD and similar licenses because they can take whatever they like without any obligation to give back.
They hate the GPL and other copyleft licenses because using copyleft code incurs that obligation. They'd prefer to use it without paying the price.