Making the GPL more scary [LWN.net]

Making the GPL more scary

Posted Oct 19, 2018 20:34 UTC (Fri) by naptastic (guest, #60139)
Parent article: Making the GPL more scary

But this license is web-scale.

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Making the GPL more scary

Posted Oct 20, 2018 12:13 UTC (Sat) by laf0rge (subscriber, #6469) [Link] (2 responses)

I am a long-time reader of lwn.net and I think it has always been about quality journalism.

The title of this article is, for me, really stepping over some line.

First of all, there is nothing "scary" in the GPL. Like any license, you have to play by the rules. Nothing more, nothing less. So since the GPL is not generally considered "scary", you cannot make it "more scary".

Secondly, the MongoDB related discussions are about AGPL, not GPL. So if at all, it is about "making AGPL more scary".

Finally, it's neither the GPL nor the AGPL that is changed. Those licenses exist and their wording is unmodified until the FSF should ever release any future versions of those licenses.

So a more factual wording would have been along the lines of "some people want something more scary than AGPL". The result of "scarification" is not AGPL, but something originally based on AGPL which is not AGPL itself.

Making the GPL more scary

Posted Oct 20, 2018 20:23 UTC (Sat) by naptastic (guest, #60139) [Link] (1 responses)

(Did you mean for this to be a top-level comment, rather than a reply to another comment? Just making sure I didn't miss something / nobody missed that I was joking.)

Making the GPL more scary

Posted Oct 22, 2018 17:28 UTC (Mon) by laf0rge (subscriber, #6469) [Link]

sorry, indeed I mis-posted this at the wrong level of the hierarchy. My apologies.