|
|
Subscribe / Log in / New account

Permissive licenses, community, and copyleft

Permissive licenses, community, and copyleft

Posted Oct 15, 2015 2:38 UTC (Thu) by jra (subscriber, #55261)
In reply to: Permissive licenses, community, and copyleft by Cyberax
Parent article: Permissive licenses, community, and copyleft

As this is the season for political debates (in the USA at least), let me steal from a politician I disliked immensely.

"There you go again".

This item isn't about GPLv3. No one mentioned GPLv3 in the comments until *you* brought it up.

What's that old saying ?

“A fanatic,” says Winston Churchill, “is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject.”

PLEASE STOP TALKING ABOUT GPLv3 ! EVERYONE KNOWS YOUR OPINION AND NO ONE HERE CARES.


to post comments

Permissive licenses, community, and copyleft

Posted Oct 15, 2015 2:41 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (6 responses)

Uhm, I distinctly see this in the article:
> All of you are enabled to change things. You can take an Apache-licensed project and go make a GPL version of it.

This implies GPLv3 - you can't convert Apache 2 into GPLv2.

> “A fanatic,” says Winston Churchill, “is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject.”
Like, you know, FSF?

Permissive licenses, community, and copyleft

Posted Oct 15, 2015 5:25 UTC (Thu) by Karellen (subscriber, #67644) [Link] (5 responses)

"Like, you know, FSF?"

I know, right? Sheesh. It's like Greenpeace - they always keep going on about the environment. Why can't they ever mention the benefits of eco-destruction, or just talk about something else entirely for a change? And if only the ACLU would mention something other than "civil rights" every once in a while?

Why /are/ these _organisations_ that are specifically dedicated to a single cause, so dedicated to a single cause?

Permissive licenses, community, and copyleft

Posted Oct 15, 2015 6:43 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (1 responses)

> I know, right? Sheesh. It's like Greenpeace - they always keep going on about the environment. Why can't they ever mention the benefits of eco-destruction, or just talk about something else entirely for a change? And if only the ACLU would mention something other than "civil rights" every once in a while?
They both sometimes throw a baby with bathwater and harm their cause as a result. So yes, they are good examples.

Permissive licenses, community, and copyleft

Posted Oct 22, 2015 8:14 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

> They both sometimes throw a baby with bathwater and harm their cause as a result. So yes, they are good examples.

Which is why I won't touch Greenpeace with a barge-pole. They seem to prefer sound-bites and PR coups to actual solid science and, you know, actually achieving something.

Unlike, for instance, the RSPB (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds). While ideologically opposed to hunting, they recognise that hunters have money, and more to the point, hunters DON'T WANT to drive their prey to extinction. So while they wouldn't do it from choice, they do work with hunting organisations in order to achieve habitat protection. A classic example is they bought a reserve (can't remember which one). On various occasions, a great fuss was made that shooting regularly took place on the reserve. But when they bought the land, the shooting rights were unavailable (or too expensive, or whatever). Faced with the choice of losing the land or permitting shooting, they bought the land with the intention of dealing with the shooting later. And they have.

And I get the impression a lot of people (Linus included) seem to have the same impression of the FSF, as I have of Greenpeace. It's a shame, RMS is a great prophet. But more and more he seems unable to grasp the bigger picture.

Cheers,
Wol

Permissive licenses, community, and copyleft

Posted Oct 18, 2015 17:19 UTC (Sun) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

The same Greenpeace which was most recently in the news for permanently defacing ancient ruins with political graffiti large enough to be read from a plane?

I'm not sure if you chose that example out of naivety or irony.

Permissive licenses, community, and copyleft

Posted Nov 5, 2015 17:21 UTC (Thu) by nye (subscriber, #51576) [Link] (1 responses)

>I know, right? Sheesh. It's like Greenpeace - they always keep going on about the environment. Why can't they ever mention the benefits of eco-destruction, or just talk about something else entirely for a change?

Greenpeace have the blood of *millions* of innocents on their hands due to their fundamentalist opposition to life-saving technology, making them arguably the most villainous group of people in the world today, so I think they're a fairly weak example.

Permissive licenses, community, and copyleft

Posted Nov 5, 2015 18:16 UTC (Thu) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

Millions of innocent lives killed by Greenpeace? Citation most definitely needed.

(if the citation is some weird rant pro or contra GMOs, feel free to spare us)

Permissive licenses, community, and copyleft

Posted Oct 15, 2015 13:40 UTC (Thu) by airman (subscriber, #7341) [Link]

Well, I for one am interested in what Cyberax said, and I cannot say that I "know" his opinion.
Ah, and I could also do without the shouting if it's not too inconvenient for you.
Have a nice day.

Permissive licenses, community, and copyleft

Posted Oct 15, 2015 17:46 UTC (Thu) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link] (2 responses)

I'm interested. I hadn't considered the future of a GPL forks vs. a proprietary fork. Cyberax's point seems to be a good one, and was even backed up with evidence.

Permissive licenses, community, and copyleft

Posted Oct 21, 2015 4:45 UTC (Wed) by ayers (guest, #53541) [Link] (1 responses)

For a proprietary fork to be recontributed to a permissive upstream, that code needs to be relicensed. The same can be done with a fork under any version of the GPL. You loose nothing by forking under the GPL. You need to go through the same hoops (copyright assignments/CLAs), if you plan on contibuting back to the ecosystem that allows proprietary and free software forks. But I suppose those that value copyleft forked because thier intent is a community based on copyleft, or they would have contributed upstream in the first place. So eventhough there is nothing technical stopping GPL forks to contribute to a permissive upstream the same way a proprietary fork would, it would defeat the purpose of the copyleft fork.

Permissive licenses, community, and copyleft

Posted Oct 21, 2015 7:28 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

This article explicitly talks about relicensing projects to kill off the non-copyleft licenses. I don't think CLA applies in this case.


Copyright © 2025, Eklektix, Inc.
Comments and public postings are copyrighted by their creators.
Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds