Contributions [LWN.net]

Contributions

Posted Sep 14, 2009 7:53 UTC (Mon) by trasz (guest, #45786)
In reply to: Contributions by njs
Parent article: Microsoft launches open source foundation (Linux-Watch)

Apple's "contribution" of Objective C back to GCC is one of the examples of how useless GPL actually is - it didn't bring anything actually useful to GCC. See this article for more details: http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1390172

Contributions

Posted Sep 14, 2009 14:18 UTC (Mon) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link] (2 responses)

How "useless" the GPL is? It brought about exactly its intended effects: the availability of the derived work. Whether the released sources were easily integrated upstream is somewhat independent of the licensing, despite what the author of that article would have you believe with his somewhat flimsy reasoning. At least everyone got to see the source code NeXT actually wrote.

Meanwhile, you're complaining (as I note you have done every time you have seen an opportunity to "counter" mentions of the GPL with advocacy of permissive licences - http://lwn.net/Articles/310925/ to provide just one example) that it somehow isn't fair that copyleft-licensed projects can make use of permissively-licensed code. Well, one would think that the numerous advocates of permissive licensing, as they so often urge others to use permissive licences so that they may "consume" such works and incorporate such code into larger works employing different (and frequently proprietary) licences, would be able to stomach their own medicine and live with the effects of releasing such code under such licences themselves. Following up words with actions - that kind of thing.

Or is the real issue here the regret that permissively-licensed code can have a life of its own out in the open, teasing its authors by being improved in full transparency rather than getting upgraded in some proprietary backroom?

Contributions

Posted Sep 18, 2009 21:57 UTC (Fri) by trasz (guest, #45786) [Link] (1 responses)

Intended effect would be for the code contribution to be actually useful. This example shows that forced contribution is not useful at all - who cares about the source code released, if it's missing one crucial part?

As for permissive licenses - I explained this already somewhere else: BSD projects often get important contributions from closed source projects (either code, money or employment), but they almost never get anything from the GPL-ed projects.

Contributions back

Posted Sep 19, 2009 9:09 UTC (Sat) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link]

One would have thought that people release code under the BSD so that others can use it, not so that others contribute anything back. After all there is no requirement to give anything back in the license (either in the text or in the spirit). But BSD people still feel free to complain when their users don't contribute anything back. For example you don't see people complaining in GPL projects that they don't get money or employment from proprietary companies, or when they use the code internally (and therefore they don't have to contribute back their changes).

In other words. Your dead horse sounds like "hey, I lend you my bike, no conditions -- hey, I lent you my bike, why don't you ever give me a ride on your car? The neighbor often does". At least with the GPL you are not hiding that you require code contributions in exchange.