Me during a vendor product technical demonstration:
0: So, this is basically a wrapper around all these other open sourced products?
1: Yes! But you get our secret sauce - the thing that makes us special! That you don't get just using the open sourced products directly.
0: Oh cool! Can I see the source code of that secret sauce and your runbooks around those open sourced products?
1: No, alas. That is protected IP and closed source.
0: 😲 Did you just admit publicly to violating a massive amount of GPL and other copyleft and open source licenses?!
1: Uhh... we should get our lawyers to answer that question....
@tinker Does it violate the GPL to use closed-source software to schedule, integrate, and/or launch open-source software (assuming you don't modify any of the GPL'd code)?
I wouldn't have thought so — otherwise you'd get into all kinds of trouble running FOSS in, say, MacOS or VirtualBox — but also, I'm not interested in doing it.
@david_megginson - IANAL, but:
If we look at the license of Nmap, for example, we see this:
[Derivative works include]
Is designed specifically to execute Covered Software and parse the results (as opposed to typical shell or execution-menu apps, which will execute anything you tell them to).
Includes Covered Software in a proprietary executable installer. The installers produced by InstallShield are an example of this. Including Nmap with other software in compressed or archival form does not trigger this provision, provided appropriate open source decompression or de-archiving software is widely available for no charge. For the purposes of this license, an installer is considered to include Covered Software even if it actually retrieves a copy of Covered Software from another source during runtime (such as by downloading it from the Internet).
And if you produce a derivative work you must:
"if you distribute copies of such a program, whether gratis or for a fee, you must give the recipients all the rights that you have. You must make sure that they, too, receive or can get the source code. And you must show them these terms so they know their rights."
@tinker Interesting — so they're trying to extend the virality to wrappers.
For my part, I just release everything into the Public Domain when it's my choice — any kind of license is basically a threat to sue users if they don't follow my rules, and
I don't believe in making threats.
I can't afford to sue anyone anyway (with litigation, nobody usually wins except for the lawyers).
@david_megginson - You'd want to use a "permissive" license such as the MIT licence then.
And to be clear "any kind of license is basically a threat" is absolutely not true. Thus the point of permissive licenses (as opposed to copyleft licenses".
Some folks won't use your code if there is no licence because there is no clear understanding of what they can and can't do.
You don't have to care about that at all, of course, but choosing to have "no licence" is a very specific choice that has very specific ramifications.
OSS licenses are a whole thing. BSD, Apache, etc. are more permissive, GPL is deliberately most restrictive.
consult a lawyer who specializes if you need to care; it's not trivial stuff.
for your original question, yes, GPL is intended to force you to open source the entire product/project if you use any GPL software in it. the RMS virus, as some call it.
@paul_ipv6 @tinker I've been dealing with this stuff for over 30 years, back to when Richard Stallman asked to add one of my elisp modules to the Emacs repo and then insisted on a letter of permission from my employer. (!) I also had a friendly online debate with Eric Raymond later in the 90s about whether we really needed to rebrand free software as "open source".
But after all that, I still find the whole FOSS license landscape unnecessarily complicated. Sometimes we're our own worst enemies.
"I still find the whole FOSS license landscape unnecessarily complicated. Sometimes we're our own worst enemies."
yes. yes we do.
problem is all sorts of smart people who figure that because they are smart with tech, they know law, business, and contracts. add in disagreements about "the right solution to keeping the code 'pure'" and there we are.
i've been doing internet for decades, most in some way touching/using OSS and i think it's mostly a good thing. but it sure isn't easy. or free.
@paul_ipv6 @tinker Yes. And I think it's also a symptom of how little coders understand the world outside coding —while some FOSS license users share RMS's ideological mission (for better or worse), most seem to be afraid that someone else will "get rich" from their code, not realising the enormous gulf (in time and money) between a pile o'code in a software project and an actual marketable product.
This is a very American vision about the matter.
Nobody care of people getting rich with their code (or at least, very very few people give a shit about that,, outside the USA).
The problem is cultural: code is culture and everyone should be allowed to access any code and build on that.
#copyleft licenses are just tools to this aim. The problem with #RMS is that, despite his huge culture, he's still too aligned with American value system (aka #Capitalism) to really understand the limits of #GPL routinely used by #BigTech corporations to exploit #FreeSoftware developers on one hand, and to expoil the users of the freedoms his licenses are designed to grant (and many other too!)
"Worse" for who?
I'm very happy too if someone find a way to get rich through the code I donated to humanity.
But if to get rich he write closed (or patent-protected or..) source software that prevent me or anybody else to study and modify such code, I'm not happy anymore.
That's why I use the #HackingLicense, despite the stigma on #copyleft license proliferation: http://www.tesio.it/documents/HACK.txt
I don't give a shit if somebody cry about it not being compatible with GPL, it being hurting the FOSS and so on: you can make money for my work, but any software, AI model or whatever you build on top of it, must be shared in the same way.
@Shamar wrote
This is a very American vision about the matter.
So the fact that I'm not American might influence why I don't share that vision? 🙂
I'm happy for people to make money from my public-domain code, if they can figure out how. Writing code is easy; creating successful
products (closed- or open-source) is hard, expensive, and risky. Adding extra friction with dozens of complicated and incompatible FOSS licenses only makes things worse.
cc @paul_ipv6 @tinker