Copyleft licenses are not βrestrictiveβ
https://drewdevault.com/2024/04/19/2024-04-19-Copyleft-is-not-restrictive.html
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@drewdevault I cant tell you how many times people released their innovated idea under a copy-left license only to be angered when they realized the consequences, the vital nature, and the lock-in that resulted. Many abandoned the project and had to start over...
To each their own, but I will never use a copyleft license again.
@freemo oh no, it prevented you from making proprietary software, what a tragedy...
@drewdevault No, I didnt say anything about proprietary software. And it allows for that just fine.
I assume you mean "virality".. and no, it prevents quite a bit else.. for example it prevents switching or in some cases even using other copy-left licenses. It is also well known for not working well along side other open-source licenses in general.
There have been countless open-source projects that had to be abandoned and restarted from scratch due to the virality of a copyleft license that prevented progress regarding open-source interests due to licensing conflicts.
X.org server I think was the one that had to be abandoned, or was it XFree86.. one of the major X11 implementations had to be completely abandoned and rewritten as whatever replaced it.
@freemo that didn't have anything to do with copyleft.
It literally did, though as pointed out by another commenter it didnt require a complete rewrite only partial, but did require a complet reorg and rename.
@freemo it literally didn't lol
I mean I prefer the MIT license personally but I've never felt the need to just invent shit to defend it, much less shit that is quick and easy to look up and identify as bullshit. What's the goal here, I wonder?
@khm hell if I know brother
Here is a quote from wikipedia basically agreeing with what I said word for word.
The newer terms are referred to as the XFree86 License 1.1. Many projects relying on XFree86 found the new license unacceptable, and the Free Software Foundation considers it incompatible with the version 2 of the GNU General Public License, though compatible with version 3.
Here's the text of the added clause that was the last straw (the last of many other issues):
> Except as contained in this notice, the name of The XFree86 Project, Inc shall not be used in advertising or otherwise to promote the sale, use or other dealings in this Software without prior written authorization from The XFree86 Project, Inc.
How does that relate to copyleft? The GPL doesn't restrict anyone's ability to market the inclusion of GPL software.
Because that term violated the GPL which could not be changed because the license was viral.
The text from Wikipedia was clear on that I think.
@freemo @khm @drewdevault Right. Sorry, morning brain. It made itself incompatible with the GPL. It was a reason, but it was hardly the only reason. And it's hard to believe Red Hat and other distros - even if they weren't shipping GPL code - would want to wait on express permission anytime they wanted to advertise inclusion of an X window server.
From the X Window System entry:
> However, considerable dissent developed within XFree86. The XFree86 project suffered from a perception of a far too cathedral-like development model; developers could not get CVS commit access and vendors had to maintain extensive patch sets. In March 2003, the XFree86 organization expelled Keith Packard, who had joined XFree86 after the end of the original MIT X Consortium, with considerable ill feeling.
@khm Then maybe you shouldnt do it on my thread where I get notified if you dont want me pointing out youre a moron.
The part you left out of the quote:
> Versions of XFree86 up to and including some release candidates for 4.4.0 were under the MIT License, a permissive, non-copyleft free software license. In February 2004, XFree86 4.4 was released with a change to the XFree86 license, by adding a credit clause,[23] similar to that in the original BSD license,[24] but broader in scope.
The old license wasn't copyleft. Copyleft didn't cause the fork.
@khm @drewdevault
That is correct, it is the other copyleft licenses in the eco system whose viral nature and incompatibility with the clause that caused the issue.
In response to the poor license change, some developers forked a version before the change and made it into X.Org Server (only small changes were made after that version, so "completely abandoned and rewritten" to refer to rewriting small changes is completely wrong).
GPL/AGPL are for people who don't want their software to ever become part of an AWS/Azure offering or packaged commercially without code changes being released. But if you're writing a library in GPL (and it's not LGPL) don't expect anyone to use it. My current company has strict license checks as part of VC funding and we've removed and replaced parts of the code if it's discovered a dependent license is GPL (there's a CI check to prevent this now).
Proprietary software developers being unable to use it is the whole point.
They either can join the free world and respect the users freedom, or they can't use the best libraries in the world is one of the tactics that GNU uses to defend freedom.
At least one piece of software that was proprietary is now free due to the choice of GNU Readline using the ordinary GPL (GPLv2+ I believe, although its GPLv3+ now) - the developer could have torn out line editing support, but determined it was easier to stop trampling the users freedom (too bad someone has now written a readline implementation that doesn't defend freedom, but thankfully that rarely happens); https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html
GPLv3+ libraries are used heavily in free software - exactly where they're intended to be used, despite how hard those with proprietary agendas seethe.
Btw, there's a good chance that proprietary software company is infringing the LGPLv2 and LGPLv3 by a blanket freedom-denying clause that also demands that reverse engineering to find the malware is not allowed, while those 2 licenses require that reverse engineering for the purpose of debugging modifications is allowed.
I have no real issue with anyone using GPL.. you are giving your time for free, put whatever rules on your contribution you want, im just happy your contributing.
But **I** will never contribute to a copyleft project, and I certainly never want to be limited with how I can use my own projects either. So I will certainly never support anything copyleft if ic an help it.
The vasy majority of my contributions are in no way proprietary and have no real use for me in a proprietary setting. Some other stuff does.
And yea, it is doing its job by cutting off developers from wanting to contribute to it, which is why copyleft has been dying out significantly in recent years and largely replaced with MIT and apache licenses.
The trend of GPL to isolate itself and push developers away by punishing the very people who release under it is exactly why its dying.
Even the Mastodon server you run is AGPLv3.
i want to see the actual email archives, shit sounding funny as hell
>child rape victim was probably entirely willing
https://itsfoss.com/richard-stallman-controversy/
The announcement of the Friday event does an injustice to Marvin Minsky:
βdeceased AI βpioneerβ Marvin Minsky (who is accused of assaulting
one of Epsteinβs victims [2])β
The injustice is in the word βassaultingβ. The term βsepsual assaultβ is so vague and slippery that it facilitates accusation inflation: taking claims that someone did X and leading people to think of it as Y, which is much worse than X.
The accusation quoted is a clear example of inflation. The reference reports the claim that Minsky had seps with one of Epsteinβs harem. (See https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/9/20798900/marvin-minsky-jeffrey-epstein-seps-trafficking-island-court-records-unsealed.)
Letβs presume that was true (I see no reason to disbelieve it).
The word βassaultingβ presumes that he applied force or violence, in some unspecified way, but the article itself says no such thing.
Only that they had seps.
We can imagine many scenarios, but the most plausible scenario is that she presented herself to him as entirely willing. Assuming she was being coerced by Epstein, he would have had every reason to tell her to conceal that from most of his associates.
Iβve concluded from various examples of accusation inflation that it is absolutely wrong to use the term βsepsual assaultβ in an accusation.
Whatever conduct you want to criticize, you should describe it with a specific term that avoids moral vagueness about the nature of the criticism.
rms called Jeffrey Epstein a serial rapist and never defended the island.
He rather defended his late friend Minsky (who cannot defend himself as he's dead) from what turned out to be untrue allegations (he's one the few people who appeared to have a non-criminal reason to be on the island, as Epstein was a big MIT donator and it seems he requested that Minsky give a presentation about a nice technical topic with fancy words in return for the donations (Epstein instructed one of the victims to have sex with Minsky, but that didn't happen, presumably because Minsky said no)) and of course the proprietary software companies twisted that to say he supported Epstein, while covering up how Bill Gates was directly associated with Epstein and then idiots like you recite their propaganda without thinking.
rms writes the GNU articles, updating them to cover recent freedom issues, rather than merely reciting them.
there were always huge FUD pushes and smear campaigns and pushes to exile GPL code, until big tech discovered the network loophole. then suddenly GPL was fine because it didn't affect their ability to colonize the commons anymore. then AGPL comes along and fixes that, and suddenly GPL is bad again.
Except for VC frauds who were never open source, and were always just using that as a gimmick to submarine their way in before the license twist came.
(FWIW i think OSLv3 is a much cleaner license than AGPL; it's mostly the same thing, but significantly easier to read, even though one or two bullet points are left out on purpose because they didn't want to try to explain linking to judges.)
Rich Gold's _The Plenitude_ is a good book on that one. There's a chapter where he talks about "colonizing the commons" and the constant trend companies have to take what belongs to everyone, proprietarize it, and then seek to make people dependent on it. And they pretty much do it automatically, impulsively, thus why it is necessary to explicitly oxidize the behavior.
FSF claims so: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#OSL
Has anything changed?
@mischievoustomato @djsumdog @freemo @icedquinn
@djsumdog @freemo @icedquinn @mischievoustomato
I have little interest in contributing to a project that won't defend the freedom of my work, so I have contributed to copylefted projects, but never to pushover-licensed ones.
>I certainly never want to be limited with how I can use my own projects either.
I suggest never using other developers libraries and writing everything yourself, if you feel like you're limited by not holding all of the copyright.
>which is why copyleft has been dying out significantly in recent years and largely replaced with MIT and apache licenses.
The fact is it hasn't - there exists more copylefted software now then in the past and freedom is being defended better than ever before.
Yes, microsoft and others have tricked many new developers into doing gratis work for them and their buddies, by making it seem that MIT expat and Apache 2.0 has "largely replaced" freedom-defending licenses, so more and more people make the mistake of using those licenses.
If they could, microsoft would make it that you couldn't even select say the GPLv3 as the license on github, but instead they've settled for making it ambiguous if a project is GPLv3-only or GPLv3-or-later (proven to be intentional as they refused to accept commits correcting this issue).
>The trend of GPL to isolate itself and push developers away by punishing the very people who release under it is exactly why its dying.
In reality, the floating island of freedom is bolstering itself slowly but surely with only high-quality developers, rather than welcoming low-quality ones, who will turn around and make the software proprietary.
You do you.. most developers prefer apache license these days, im one.. you dont, and are in a minority, thats your right.
Source?
I see that Apache 2.0 may be the most preferred license on github and other proprietary code hosts, but those aren't the only places to host software.
>are in a minority
Yes, freedom enjoyers have always been a minority, but just look how much has been done.
@freemo that's literally the only thing that vitality prevents