[arca_vorago]

Exactly. It's like when evaluating things people just completely forget about the implications of the license they use, in both specific and broad contexts. I use and support GPL products as much as possible, even when a BSDesque product may actually have a few advantages. I'm not 100% on that either, but I try hard to slowly adapt and use truly foss software and get used to the ecosystem mentality changes they require.

I wish people, particularly devs, thought more about licenses and their long term impact on freedom of the user & dev. I get tired of hearing about how "but copyleft is less free because it restricts me", but to me that's like saying "individual liberty under the rule of law is less free because it prevents me from punching that dude in the face". It's some strange form of anarchism argumentation that fails to respect the rights of others.

With all the security issues cropping up lately, I think it should be obvious to big picture thinkers that, while not the solution in itself, any real forward thinking solutions for cyber-security must focus on keeping black boxes out of the picture. BSD style licenses are dangerous to me because they allow hard working peoples code to be abused and used for abuse of others.

To be fair to this particular argument though, LLVM does fall under the LSCA license which is gpl compatible, it simple isn't copyleft, so my above rant is more a general comment than on the topic of clang.

[cat199]

Copyleft software presumes software exists in a vaccum where money and funding aren't an issue in other areas of society..

If everything in computer software is copylefted, the status quo in the rest of the non-software economy persists.

Further, examples of AGPL 'free software' for the web backed by the dominant cloud service provider essentially give them an unlimited monopoly on that particular service, since, as copyright holder, they will be the only party able to create a proprietary fork which is better than the competition..

More philosophically:

The spirit of the law is always greater than the law itself..

[cyphar]

> If everything in computer software is copylefted, the status quo in the rest of the non-software economy persists.

If every free software project was copylefted, it would be effectively impossible for any company that is smaller than Apple to maintain everything they need to make software proprietary. Want font rendering? Reimplement libharfbuzz. Want to write any C program? Reimplement glibc. And so on.

> Further, examples of AGPL 'free software' for the web backed by the dominant cloud service provider essentially give them an unlimited monopoly on that particular service, since, as copyright holder, they will be the only party able to create a proprietary fork which is better than the competition..

Only if they have a CLA or don't accept any contributions. I can't think of any examples of such AGPL projects, but even with the GPL such projects are quite rare (and CLAs like the FSF actually don't allow them to create proprietary forks). You're just spreading FUD, please stop.

[arca_vorago]

>it would be effectively impossible for any company that is smaller than Apple to maintain everything they need to make software proprietary.

Why does it need to be proprietary in the first place though. I feel like the arguments I am hearing are making assumptions about the desired outcome to support their reasoning.

[cyphar]

Sorry, I don't think my tone was clear. It's a good thing that it would make proprietary software effectively impossible to maintain (I'm a huge proponent of both copyleft and free software). I completely agree with your GP comment. ;)

[greenhouse_gas]

While I personally like the GPL philosophy, I think that its days in protecting free software is numbered.

The purpose of the GPL was to encourage companies to publish their software under the GPL (want to use readline, got to use GPL). The long term goal was to create an environment where GPL software was so much better than the alternative that closed-source software would just whither.

This made sense in the 1980s. Remember that gnu was started when RMS found that he couldn't modify a program he needed - at the dawn of proprietary software.

This was a time when software writing was a small-scale operation (emacs was written by one? individual, Unix by two or three, etc.) and college students/professors could easily outnumber commercial software houses.

It actually worked for a while - gnu actually won a objective-C compiler purely due to the GPL.

Now, on the other hand, nowadays software companies are huge and have huge teams. Even without llvm's academic base, Apple would have enough cash to build it on their own.

[pjmlp]

Now that printer driver will be written with code taken from a Github project MIT/BSD license and the company won't make it available to anyone, using firmware encrypted with TPM, thus getting full circle to those days while having higher profits for the printer company, thanks to lower development costs.

[cyphar]

> Now, on the other hand, nowadays software companies are huge and have huge teams. Even without llvm's academic base, Apple would have enough cash to build it on their own.

Why make it easier for them? Very few companies can be like Apple (and even Apple didn't write everything from scratch). Compromising allows more companies to wrong their users, it's not helpful to treat companies like people -- without a profit motive most companies won't liberate their software.

[Sanddancer]

I'd argue the opposite, that GPL style licenses make it easier to hide things in black boxes these days. LLVM and Clang are under BSD style licenses, and even Sony has said that being an active contributor keeps things moving along [1] even when they don't have to contribute back. Plus, most BSD-style code doesn't require things like copyright assignment, which can be a big brake against people from contributing back.

Additionally, a lot of GPL software, like MySQL and BerkeleyDB, create a more closed community because that company has a lot more ability to create their own black box projects through dual licensing as closed source works. Postgres, in comparison, is BSD licensed, making it much harder for a company like Oracle to buy out pieces of the community and run away with the source and make deals others can't. The GPL has a lot less community power to counter those sorts of situations.

[1] http://llvm.org/devmtg/2013-11/slides/Robinson-PS4Toolchain....

[cyphar]

GPL doesn't require copyright assignment (the two issues are completely separate). And if the original author isn't the only copyright holder, they can't make GPL'd code proprietary either. Which is why going GPL is a benefit for everyone -- nobody can effectively make the software proprietary unless there is only a single copyright holder.

With BSD-style licenses, everyone is also on an equal footing, except that now users have no guarantees that the software they use will be maintained as free software. At any point, a treacherous developer or company could scoop up the talent from the community and make a maintained fork of the project proprietary. The original project dies because of lack of talent and now free software has helped expand the reach of proprietary software.

Note that even with copyright assignments, there are some good ones. The FSFs (optional for projects) copyright assignment has specific wording that guarantees they will always keep the code free (and even go further to state that it will always be copyleft and in keeping with their well-documented philosophy). If I had a single foundation I had to pick to assign my copyright to, it would be the FSF.

[Sanddancer]

That same treacherous developer can scoop up talent from a GPLed project too, such as the examples I gave. Sourceforge used to have a GPLed, but was brought closed, and the free version mouldered from disuse. Free software helped expand the reach of proprietary software. The GPL is no guarantee that a free version will always remain the most used branch either.

Going GPL also has drawbacks. Look at how Apache 2 and GPL 2 weren't compatible because of the Apache license's patent clause. That lock-in effect of the GPL means that your software package can't be used by the larger free software community. Which if you're satisfied with it, fine, but some people don't want to encumber their software as such. There's no such thing as a universal benefit.

[cyphar]

> That same treacherous developer can scoop up talent from a GPLed project too, such as the examples I gave.

I don't understand what this sentence means? Do you mean they take the developers and stop them from working on the original GPL version? In this context I'm referring to the most common case which is a GPL project that has more than one copyright holder.

In _that_ context is is not possible for a developer to take the existing work of the developers, make a proprietary fork, and convince the developers (in a moment of weakness) to switch and start working on the proprietary code. They can create a new project, but that's always true and not possible to restrict (nor would anyone want to).

> That lock-in effect of the GPL means that your software package can't be used by the larger free software community.

And this is the whole point of the "or any later version" clause. Every complaint you're bringing up has already been resolved by how the GPL is used and has worked for >20 years. Of course the GPL does have its downsides (the whole MPLv1/CDDL thing is a real shame) but "lock-in" is not one of them (unless you explicitly decide to lock yourself in, which is your own fault).

[Sanddancer]

It's absolutely possible in such a for the developer to make a fork. People can agree to change licenses, portions can and have been rewritten. Nothing keeps a license in stone.

I'm referring to the GPL's "no other restrictions" clauses that keeps things from interoperating with the Eclipse public license for IBM wanting to maintain choice of venue, the MPL, CDDL, 4-clause BSD, etc. Each of which the FSF says, "well, if they just used our license." The GPL is absolutely a barrier to cooperation.

[bonzini]

Both MySQL and BDB require either copyright assignment or a CLA.

In contrast, Linux does not and GCC's FSF copyright assignment includes a promise that the software will remain free.

[nullc]

> I'd argue the opposite, that GPL style licenses make it easier to hide things in black boxes these days. LLVM and Clang are under BSD style licenses,

Where can I download the source code for the specific version of clang used in OSX?

(AFAIK, it is unavailable, which has been a bummer in chasing bugs which show up only in it)

[ckok]

Usually they show up here: https://opensource.apple.com

https://opensource.apple.com/release/developer-tools-81.html for example.

Sometimes takes a while to show the latest version though.