Permissive licenses, community, and copyleft
Permissive licenses, community, and copyleft
Posted Oct 19, 2015 20:45 UTC (Mon) by vomlehn (guest, #45588)In reply to: Permissive licenses, community, and copyleft by Cyberax
Parent article: Permissive licenses, community, and copyleft
The original poster said (with my emphasis):
It's not just ideology.
So, you don't have an argument with that person.
I'm one of those that strongly prefers to contribute to copyleft projects because I like knowing that the time and effort I put into that contribution won't be taken and used by someone who doesn't pay for it with their contribution. And--this is key--I see that such projects get more stuff done. That is not ideology, it's economics--I get a bigger bang for the expenditure of my time and energy
If your experience is different, that's judgement. Which is still not ideology.
I'm presently working on a project that is substantial in size and which I own completely. There are only two choices I'm considering for licensing: make it it proprietary or use GPLv2. I'm pretty sure it will be the later because it just won't be able to gain a user base in any other way and allowing proprietary forks will starve it of creative input. Which is entirely practical and not ideology.
Posted Oct 19, 2015 20:58 UTC (Mon)
by pizza (subscriber, #46)
[Link] (2 responses)
Is there a particular reason you've excluded GPLv3? (Genuinely curious here; I personally prefer v3 over v2)
Posted Oct 19, 2015 21:30 UTC (Mon)
by vomlehn (guest, #45588)
[Link] (1 responses)
My personal viewpoint is that legally requiring giveback is simply allowing better enforcemnt of the human norm. There have been quite a few interesting studies over the past decades about just how deeply we human are built for cooperation and getting along. I simply want to encourage that. A legal requirement to give back allows the use of lawyers (useful tools, on occasion) to dig deep within an organization to discover whether violations are occurring. Otherwise, you'd never know. (Well, not strictly true, ask the Busybox folks how they discover violations).
I really like GPL3's clearer language (wish I could get a GPLv2 that was so clear) but I disagree that licensing is the way to enforce people's right to run whatever they want on hardware they own. Knowing whether you are allowed to load your own software on a device that you bought and nominally own is immediately visible to anyone. This allows market forces to come into play and, in this case, I think I can trust the free market, eventually, with enough education.
And what if market forces aren't enough to ensure all devices are open? Well, then The People have spoken and we will get what we deserve.
Posted Oct 19, 2015 22:41 UTC (Mon)
by pizza (subscriber, #46)
[Link]
A way to achieve this is to use "GPLv3 plus an exception" -- that way you get the clearer language, but you can explicitly waive the hardware-related clauses.
But thanks for your explanation!
Posted Oct 20, 2015 4:56 UTC (Tue)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link] (1 responses)
However I also want the possibility of building commercial products and extensions. It's my firm belief that only in this way can software development survive and thrive.
Posted Oct 20, 2015 7:06 UTC (Tue)
by debacle (subscriber, #7114)
[Link]
In my view, "free vs proprietary" and "commercial vs non-commercial" are orthogonal.
Posted Oct 22, 2015 17:39 UTC (Thu)
by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
[Link]
PLEASE add some bugfix extensions!
That, unfortunately imho is the elephant in the room with GPL. It has some important bugfixes, but adds a host of non-copyright requirements too.
One bugfix in particular - under the GPL v2, if you provide binaries and source as two separate downloads, it triggers the "source for three years" requirement :-( If the user doesn't download the source, the wording of v2 means you have to keep the source publically available.
Not sure quite how you'd word it, but I would have thought a simple "If you make the source available with the binaries, the failure of a user to download source will not trigger clause X.X" (whichever it is).
That's the main problem I'm aware of, others may point out more.
Cheers,
Permissive licenses, community, and copyleft
Permissive licenses, community, and copyleft
Permissive licenses, community, and copyleft
Permissive licenses, community, and copyleft
Permissive licenses, community, and copyleft
>
> However I also want the possibility of building commercial products and extensions.
Permissive licenses, community, and copyleft
Wol