Sometimes there’s a benefit in getting open source code into proprietary software. Think libraries implementing interoperability APIs, communication protocols, file formats, etc
That’s what permissive licenses are for.
If some company wants to keep their code closed and they have a choice between something interoperable or something proprietary that they will subsequently promote, and the licence is the only thing stopping them from going for the open source approach, that’s worse.
Completely agree that a good breadth of everything else is suited to copyleft licensing though
If some company wants to keep their code closed
That’s the whole point, you’re leveraging the use of the commons so that it’s less feasible to keep your code closed. If they want to keep their code closed, they can spend a lot more manhours building everything from scratch.
This is a hypothetical that has no clear bearing connection to common practice.
In other words, I could just reverse this to contradict it and have equal weight to my hypothetical: devs should always use GPL, because if their software gets widely adopted to the point where companies are forced to use it, it’s better that it’s copyleft.
This seems like complaining that the BSD license does exactly what it intends to do.
ignorance is one thing, but it’s a whole nother level of loser behaviour to intentionally do unpaid work for big tech companies in your free time
“Unpaid work” is pretty much all OSS development. “Here’s a thing I made, anyone can use it for whatever they want as long as they give credit” is a very simple philosophy. Not everybody who works on OSS is opposed to the existence of closed source commercial software, and rather a lot of people don’t like viral licenses like the GPL. Really out of line to call people who contribute their time and effort to making free software available to everyone losers just because you disagree with their choice of license.
I take it that you’re in the first camp
You’re doing it for yourself/for fun/to better humanity
If some corporate fucks want to abuse that then it’s their problem not yours
You’re making it for fun. You’ve achieved your desired fun, and lost nothing if some rando takes it and makes another fun project, or big mega corp uses it.
What’s gonna stop them from just stealing it anyways? Why would they care about Joe Shmoe when they have infinite number the lawers you have? Also AI kinda makes this irrelevant because it will rewrite the code in a way that’s probably not protected, or at least provide enough shielding that their 10000 lawyers will.
Also also, what about all the mega corps that already use linux? That’s free an open source and they’re free to run their proprietary code on it. If you’ve ever contributed to linux, or any tool that’s built into a distro you’re not this supposed loser who’s done free work for a big tech company. It’s silly to complain about this.
Someone biulds a thing and puts it on the curb in front of his house with a sign:
I had fun building this and learnt a lot. Do with it whatever you want.
Then someone else comes along, takes it, and sells it.
I fail to see how the inventor was taken advantage of. They presumably thought about which license they want to use and specifically chose this one.
Taking without giving is always viewed negatively in social settings.
Maybe “taking advantage of” is wrong but then again, it is a dick move anyway.
If I’m putting BSD or MIT license on something, I’m explicitly saying you can use it however you want, you can change it however you want, you don’t have to share back, I just ask for credit for my part in it
It’s not taking so much as being given freely
Exactly this. I have a couple of small projects that are MIT licensed specifically because I don’t care how people use them or what they use them for. If someone finds it useful then they’re welcome to do whatever they want with it.
This idea that I’m being somehow hoodwinked or taken advantage of because the thing that I explicitly said could be used freely is being used in a way that doesn’t align with the values of some other completely uninvolved third party is beyond absurd.
I think you are missing the point. I am not saying it wasn’t. But if you makes a gift for your friend’s birthday, and they don’t bother at all to return the favor/attention, would you be upset as you would think it is kinda a dick move?
It’s a little different than that, isn’t it? More like: " look at what I built, here’s a step by step guide that makes it work. Do with it whatever you want." Some people want to use it for their job. Others might use it for personal use, or to build more open source projects.
This person takes advantage of people who are unaware that they could just get it for free as well.
However, if this person is putting in an effort to sell this item (like advertisement or creating a platform to distribute this item more easily) then I don’t see anything wrong in charging money for that.
That’s not really a common situation though. Sure, people might use the BSD license on something they did as a hobby, or just to learn things. But, the scenario described here is more like:
A group of people all have the same little problem, and they work together to come up with a solution for it. They solve the main problem, but their solution has a few rough edges and there are similar problems they didn’t solve, but they’re not motivated to keep working on it because what they have is good enough for their current needs. So, they put out some flyers describing how to do what they did, and inviting anybody who’s interested to keep working on improving their fix.
A company comes along, sees the info, and builds a tool that solves the problem but not quite as well, and for a small fee. They spend tons of money promoting their solution, drowning out the little pamphlet that the original guys did. They use as much IP protection as possible, patenting their designs, trademarking the look and feel, copyrighting the instructions, etc. Often they accidentally(?) issue legal threats or takedown notices to people who are merely hosting the original design or original pamphlets.
Maybe the original inventor didn’t get screwed in this scenario, but you could say that the public did.
I feel like most people base their decision on license purely on anecdotes of a handful of cases where the outcome was not how they would have wanted it. Yet, most people will never be in that spot, because they don’t have anything that anyone would want to consume.
If I had produced something of value I want to protect, I wouldn’t make it open in the first place. Every piece of your code will be used to feed LLMs, regardless of your license.
It is perfectly fine to slap MIT on your JavaScript widget and let some junior in some shop use it to get their project done. Makes people’s life easier, and you don’t want to sue anyone anyway in case of license violations.
If you’re building a kernel module for a TCP reimplementation which dramatically outperforms the current implementation, yeah, probably a different story
I once read that the license should be smaller than your code. Gives me a good baseline:
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Permissive license for small projects and little tests
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Copyleft license for big projects
Well, ideally you’re choosing your license based on the cases where it differs from others and not the majority of times where it doesn’t make a difference.
Someone aiming to make Free software should use a copyleft license that protects the four freedoms, instead of hoping people abide by the honor system.
Also, no one can 100% accurately predict which of their projects will get big. Sure, a radical overhaul of TCP has good odds, but remember left-pad? Who could have foreseen that? Or maybe the TCP revision still never makes it big: QUIC and HTTP/3 are great ideas, and yet they are still struggling to unseat HTTP/2 as the worldwide standard.
People who used left-pad deserved everything that happened to them. But, very valid point.
There is no honor system. If your code is open for commercial reuse, that’s it. If you have any expectations that are not in line with that, then yes pick a different license.
I guess I agree with you, I’m just phrasing it from a different perspective.
I read a story of someone that contributed to a BSD project, including fixes over some period of time, but later they ended up having to use a proprietary UNIX for work, that included their code, in a an intermediate, buggy state, but they were legally forbidden from applying their own bug fixes!
At the very least the GPL guarantees that if I am ever downstream of myself, I has fix my own damn mistakes and don’t have to suffer them.
I am still willing to contribute to BSD stuff, but vastly prefer something like the AGPLv3.
So it’s an argument against restrictive licenses? The more freedom the better? I mean Unix in this case had a too restrictive license?
Read above please. You cannot import GPL code into BSD licensed code without restricting the code distribution. In the other direction, you can do it and just add a notice about the license. It does not add restrictions to the distribution. Otherwise Linux distributions wouldn’t even have OpenSSH in base install images.
It’s an argument against a license that permits relicensing under a more restrictive license. (E.g. BSD)
