Merging bcachefs

Posted Jun 20, 2023 13:38 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: Merging bcachefs by rahulsundaram
Parent article: Merging bcachefs

> All these organizations are fine with GPLv3 obviously.

Let me see. Facebook. No. Apple. Never. Amazon. Not there. Netflix. Of course not. Google. Obviously no.

Sorry, but that's failure in my book. It puts you into a stark bind: either you avoid most desirable (and most lucrative!) employers or you can use the code you wrote. Otherwise someone else would be able to use and not you.

I can see why these people would hate GPL: it's, quite literally, forces them to choose between their own code and “dream job”.

Not good, not good at all.

Now, for other people who already made that decision and are not interested in joining FAANG-style companies… for these GPL is desirable and trade-offs are fine.

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Merging bcachefs

Posted Jun 20, 2023 14:17 UTC (Tue) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (2 responses)

> Sorry, but that's failure in my book.

That's fine, do you have any evidence that it is failure in the book of Samba developers? Because that's the only part that matters to this discussion.

Merging bcachefs

Posted Jun 20, 2023 18:38 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

> That's fine, do you have any evidence that it is failure in the book of Samba developers?

There's a presentation from one of the Samba developers about how GPLv3 failed to bring better compliance and is not helping at all.

Merging bcachefs

Posted Jun 20, 2023 20:50 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

> Because that's the only part that matters to this discussion.

Wow. Just… wow. have you already forgotten that it was you who joined discussion about Sun engineers and promised some mythical solution to their worries.

And now you turn around and say that what they think is irrelevant and only ones who support FSFs jihad matter?

I'm starting to understand why people may dislike GPL. Once upon time FSF did a lot help people dealing with their practical issues: GNU software for Solaris and, later, Linux, then CygWin and many such things helped to solve many practical problems.

But with friends like these… who proclaim opinions of other people just don't matter if they refuse to join their holy jihad… who needs enemies?

And not everyone is wise enough, like Linus, and can separate GPLv2 (really superb hack on top of copyright system) from people who invented that hack (and then eventually ruined GPL with introduction of GPLv3) and who are, today, more of bane then an asset.

Merging bcachefs

Posted Jun 22, 2023 8:04 UTC (Thu) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link] (1 responses)

> Sorry, but that's failure in my book. It puts you into a stark bind: either you avoid most desirable (and most lucrative!) employers or you can use the code you wrote.

Once upon a time listing all the companies that made and sold BSD-based appliances was a who’s who of the industry.

Once upon a time Java was the future and the whole big data stack was built on Open Source (*not* Free Software) Java bits (Hadoop, etc). Now Python (definitely not Free-Software hostile) stole the big data show.

All those ecosystems have dramatically shrunk, the companies that remain mostly release Linux and Free-Software based products.

Open Source (as opposed to Free software) is a dead end that gets repeatedly estinguished by the greed of companies that insist on it. So maybe it pays more short term. Long term it condemns its participants to the anguish of being replaced by something else whose proponents share more with one another.

The corporations themselves do not care overmuch one way or another. Change of tech, change of techies. The only ones fooling themselves OSS vs Free Software matters for business are those techies. In the end money talks (Google’s awowed distaste for the GPL won’t make it dump Linux in GCP or Android as long as it makes them money; Microsoft has seen the *lucrative* side of cancerous GPLed Linux a long time ago).

Merging bcachefs

Posted Jun 22, 2023 20:05 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

> Now Python (definitely not Free-Software hostile) stole the big data show.

Uh... Whut? Python is quite explicitly OpenSource, not Free Software. It has a permissive license, and there's nary a GPL-ed package in sight. All the recent AI work is built on permissively licensed packages.

> Open Source (as opposed to Free software) is a dead end that gets repeatedly estinguished by the greed of companies that insist on it. So maybe it pays more short term.

What you're saying is completely false. It's Open Source that wins long-term because it's a superior development model. Proprietary forks (and models like "open core") can exist for a while, but they eventually either become obsolete and die off, or get integrated into the open code.

This is doubly so when the software gets complicated. You can't really develop a meaningful proprietary fork of Kubernetes, simply because your "secret sauce" changes will likely be insignificant compared to the overall functionality. And if they are significant, you'll have to keep up with the firehose of new functionality that is released for each new official version.

And finally, Open Source allows companies to collaborate on non-core functionality. My previous company worked in the solar industry, and we as hell wouldn't release our proprietary simulation algorithms, but we contributed quite a few patches to miscellaneous projects (because why not?).

To paraphrase an old Soviet joke, the goal of FSF is to make sure that there's no proprietary software, the goal of Open Source is to make all software open sourced.