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Michał Górny

I'm considering relicensing my projects to #GPL, going forward. Or — at least these projects that involve more lines of code than the GPL copyright notice takes. Why? Perhaps it's just a matter of growing up to realize how bad corporations are. But the more important question is: why did I use permissive licenses in the first place?

Perhaps it was a matter of good nature, a belief in a "permissive" definition of freedom. I wanted my code to help people. It didn't matter to me if somebody else would make money from it, or use it as a part of proprietary software, as long as the original remained free.

Perhaps it was a matter of simplicity — having a short license that I could understand.

Perhaps it was lack of belief in GPL and its enforcement. Things like nVidia repeatedly working around Linux license, grsecurity going proprietary, Oracle's AGPL-based extortion threats or government after government violating OpenSC license. After all, even if some corporation wanted to infringe on my copyright, what could I do?

But I think it's time to change that. Seeing more and more #OpenSource projects go to shit, I think it's time to make a strong statement. To say "I believe in #FreeSoftware, and to hell with corporate exploitation!"

7 January at 15:05 | Open on social.treehouse.systems
23 comments
Diego Elio Pettenò

@mgorny use REUSE.software and SPDX headers and everything becomes larger than the GPL notice.

Though, I went the other direction over time and I'm more likely to use MIT/0BSD than GPL simply because nothing I write make a difference to be copyleft-licensed, but it can make a difference to be permissive-licensed.

7 January at 15:16 | Open on mastodon.social
Alfred M. Szmidt

@flameeyes @mgorny And when it makes a difference ... you might regret it.

7 January at 15:50 | Open on mastodon.social
Diego Elio Pettenò

@amszmidt @mgorny no, really no.

There's nothing of anything I've released myself for which I would be annoyed if someone included in a proprietary software.

This doesn't apply to everyone or to any projects, but mine are in that camp for sure. Trying to call up to emotions by saying "regret" makes you sound disrespectful.

7 January at 15:58 | Open on mastodon.social
Alfred M. Szmidt

@flameeyes @mgorny Maybe you will, I don't have a crystal ball .. but you make a similar argument I've heard over many decades where people regret that they picked a permissive license.

7 January at 15:59 | Open on mastodon.social
Alfred M. Szmidt

@flameeyes @mgorny (and before you call someone disrespectful, maybe consider your own words first)

7 January at 16:00 | Open on mastodon.social
Diego Elio Pettenò

@amszmidt @mgorny and you sound like a zealot that doesn't even stop to ask people who *have literal decades of experience* what makes them think that.

I'm tired, you're boring.

7 January at 16:00 | Open on mastodon.social
Alfred M. Szmidt

@flameeyes @mgorny So much for respect I suppose ... I have plenty of more experience than you have on the topic, so have a *plonk*

7 January at 16:02 | Open on mastodon.social
Martin Owens :inkscape:

@flameeyes @mgorny

Most of my code is GPL or AGPL and always has been. Though sometimes I will put out public domain works.

One interesting counter example is templates. When I found out that one of the templates in inkscape was licensed GPL I had that sinking feeling that we'd just invited a few million people to copyright infringement because they sure as hell weren't going to know about the GPL.

Had to get the original authors to PD their work since it was never their intent to lock users

7 January at 16:50 | Open on floss.social
waldi

@doctormo @flameeyes @mgorny Please use CC0 then. Public domain is a concept that does not work in larger parts of the world.

7 January at 20:03 | Open on chaos.social
Diego Elio Pettenò

@waldi I don't use Public Domain because I just can't (not in the USA! We don't have a working public domain here!) but for various reasons I don't have CC-0 either.

I settled for 0BSD because to the best of my research is the least frowned upon of the options.

flameeyes.blog/2020/04/16/maki

7 January at 20:06 | Open on mastodon.social
Genders: ♾️, 🟪⬛🟩; Soni L.

@mgorny we wish the GPL composed with similar licenses. the permissive ones do, why haven't we figured out how to make the copyleft ones do the same?

7 January at 15:16 | Open on chaos.social
zabbeer 🌱

@mgorny Every time I see a discussion about permissive licenses it reminds me of this meme I made a while ago:
7 January at 15:50 | Open on floss.social
Max

@zabbeer @mgorny freedom to link software with other software without doing dumb slow workarounds because GPLv2 is not GPLv3 compatible.

eighty-twenty.org/2021/09/09/p

in our era of software that never actually gets “distributed”, GPL is worse than useless for most projects: it doesn’t stop corporations from using software internally (and they only ever use it internally anyway, since everything is web-based) and it hurts good actors by being incompatible with other open-source licenses, including itself.

“just always use GPLv2+”: this + is a statement that I’m willing to distribute under any terms that FSF brands as GPLv4, which requres a lot of trust in FSF, which I don’t have. it also doesn’t solve the problem of linking GPLv2-only libraries with GPLv3-only libraries.

“just always use AGPL”: it’s less useless than GPL, but is still easily circumvented by keeping AGPL code in its own microservice, never seeing the outside world, so never “distributed”.

@zabbeer @mgorny freedom to link software with other software without doing dumb slow workarounds because GPLv2 is not GPLv3 compatible.

eighty-twenty.org/2021/09/09/p

in our era of software that never actually gets “distributed”, GPL is worse than useless for most projects: it doesn’t stop corporations from using software internally (and they only ever use it internally anyway, since everything is web-based) and it hurts good actors by being incompatible with...

7 January at 16:11 | Open on im-in.space
Max

@zabbeer @mgorny if you want to stop corporations from using your software, just use a non-commercial license, it’s that easy.

7 January at 16:18 | Open on im-in.space
Howard Chu @ Symas

@goldstein @zabbeer @mgorny the point of the GPL/copyleft isn't to prevent commercial use of Free Software. It's to prevent taking what was released openly from being closed. The so-called "permissive" licenses are just a cynical free pass for corporations to steal from the public, nothing more.

7 January at 17:34 | Open on mastodon.social
Mark Hughes

@mgorny I made this choice a while back for similar reasons, but now am also considering the anti-capitalist software license.

What do you think about that?

anticapitalist.software/

7 January at 15:53 | Open on mastodon.social
Alfred M. Szmidt

@markhughes @mgorny It is as bad non-free licenses. I hope you won't use it.

Freedom 0 (the right to use a program for any purpose) is one of the most important freedoms we have. Everyone has the right to software freedom, not just those we think deserve it -- that is unjust and immoral.

7 January at 15:58 | Open on mastodon.social
jollyrogue

@amszmidt Counterpoint… 🙂 Corporations aren’t people, and we should quit treating them as such. They are unjust and immoral, and don’t deserve to exploit people’s work.

@markhughes @mgorny

7 January at 18:01 | Open on bsd.network
mirabilos

@mgorny @markhughes software licences are not the tool/level to fight these things. You’ll only hurt legit users. Bad players will just ignore it. Your stuff will just end up obsolete and unused.

7 January at 16:09 | Open on toot.mirbsd.org
mirabilos
Maciej "XGQT" Barć

@mgorny

Opinion on GPL-* variants vs each other and vs MPL-2.0?

7 January at 16:44 | Open on emacs.ch
Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell:
@mgorny Yeah enforcement against mega-corporations can't really work at individual level, you'd need a project big enough that some organisations could do the enforcement, but against smaller players, which are far more numerous I've rarely seen cases of violation, more like doing weird shit like a zip file on a random website for AGPL software…

Meanwhile here GPL is a license family I tend to avoid due to it's pretty bad license compatibility, which even today ends up forcing duplicate work.
That said for recent projects I'm picking the MPL-2.0 rather than BSD-3-Clause which I used to pick, this way it's balanced between copyleft and reusability, I really wish it could forbid usage in outright proprietary software though.
@mgorny Yeah enforcement against mega-corporations can't really work at individual level, you'd need a project big enough that some organisations could do the enforcement, but against smaller players, which are far more numerous I've rarely seen cases of violation, more like doing weird shit like a zip file on a random website for AGPL software…
7 January at 16:44 | Open on queer.hacktivis.me
vv221

> Perhaps it was a matter of simplicity — having a short license that I could understand.

This is the main reason behind the choice of the 2-Clause BSD License for most of my work.
7 January at 16:49 | Open on fediverse.dotslashplay.it
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