I’m a very much pro free software person and I used to think that GPL is basically the only possible option when it comes to benefits for free software (and not commercial use), but I’ve recently realised this question is actually much more ambiguous.
I think there are two sides to this issue:
- GPL forces all contributions to stay open-source which prevents commercialisation* of FOSS projects, but also causes possible interference of corporate software design philosophy and all kinds of commercial decisions, if contributions come from companies.
- MIT-like permissive licenses, on the other hand, easily allow for making proprietary forks, which, however, separates commercial work from the rest of the project, therefore making the project more likely to stay free both of corporate influence and in general.
So it boils down to the fact, that in my opinion what makes free software free is not only the way it’s distributed but also the whole philosophy behind it: centralisation vs. decentralisation, passive consumer vs. co-developper role of the user etc. And this is where things start to be a bit controversial.
What do you think?
*UPD: wrong word. I mean close-sourcing and turning into a profitable product instead of something that fulfils your needs
I can tell you about a project I was working on at a previous job.
There were open source kicad files for a thing we needed. We wanted to modify it slightly and then include it in our finished product and also offer it individually for tinkerers or as a replacement part. But they were licensed under GPL3.
Because of the license, instead of contributing some improvements to the existing prpject, our engineers were instructed to just look at it and learn from it and then do a completely new internal project from scratch. They were told to make sure it could not be detected as a derivative and never use the existing files. And then to include our planned improvements. Just so that we could avoid licensing it as GPL3 and were free to do it however we wanted.
So the end result is, a new proprietary thing got created, the company got money, the customers don’t get the source, the existing open source project got no contributions, even though it got exploited in a sense. There were other MIT licensed (and other licenses) projects where we have just contributed instead.
Don’t ask me why exactly the management/legal was so against GPL3. I’m not really into understanding it deeply, but my takeaway from this is similar to OP.
Interesting! I think having any code licensed under GPL could cause a cascading effect of having to open source even more code, whereas with MIT you can just stop making it open at any point
This “poisoning”, effect is the reason the LGPL and AGPL licenses exist.
Was this done according to proper clean-room design principles? If so, then imo the GPL is still working as intended. The company had to spend a fuckton of money and time getting one engineer to read the source and describe what was done to other engineers, and then ensure that one engineer never ever worked on the project again.
If they didn’t do that then they violated the GPL and someone should report them to the SFLC.
I guess it depends on the goal the author has. If the goal is to let big companies pay their employees for contributions to open source, then it seems GPL3 is not the right license. Which is also the reason why Linux is licensed under GPL2 btw.
If the goal is to make companies avoid contributing and then copy it while claiming they did proper clean-room design (lets be honest, it happens all the time and rarely does anybody hear of it or bring it to court) … then yeah it works as intended.
“How dare my neighbor put a fence around his pool! I tell you, ever since he did that, my kids can’t swim there and we’ve had to figure out something else to do.”
More like, neighbour invites everybody to their pool, but if you go, you have to sign a legal agreement that you invite everybody to your whole house.
Of course I wouldn’t go if I don’t want everybody in my house - so I can just build a pool myself and use that.
At no point was I ever mad or appaled by the neighbours decision (nor did I insinuate that in my comment above). The neighbour is allowed to put any condition on the pool visit that they want to. But this is a discussion about whether such condition is beneficial to the pool owner or not and in what ways.
It has pros and cons and is not as onesided as you claim.
Incorrect. No one gets access to the rest of your company’s source code. It’s just that, since they gave you a ton of wonderful stuff for free, you have to do likewise if you’re going to build on their stuff. If you don’t want that, then go find some other swimming pool so to speak (which it sounds like you’ve done).
It boggles my mind how people think this is unintended. “My company tried to build on GPL3 software, but IDK if the authors realized this, but we’re not allowed to do that unless we share our contributions back in turn! What an error! As soon as they find out, they’ll surely change the licensing to one that is more amenable to what we want to do in terms of reselling their source code to people without complying on our end with the GPL!”
I can pretty much guarantee you, this will not be a surprise to the people who licensed their code GPL. We have been having this conversation for decades. Your input as to whether it’s “beneficial” to them to restrict you from doing what they don’t want you to do is noted.
nobody said that