[mechEpleb]

Getting it out there. If your goal is just to ensure that a well supported open source solution exists and people can use it instead of having nothing at all or only paid proprietary garbage, a permissive license makes far more sense.

If your goal is sticking it to the man and demolishing capitalism or whatever then it's different of course.

[logbiscuitswave]

I’ve worked several jobs in the past where using reciprocal OSS (such as GPL) was expressly forbidden. This would leave us in the position of reinventing the wheel, buying something, or using something (possibly inferior) that’s more permissive.

(I guess in many ways this is a data point to support the “OSS work becomes just a source of free labor for large tech companies” thesis up thread.)

[parafactual]

It might be the only pragmatic choice, so I'm not condemning developers or anything, but that would make me a bit uncomfortable with the company itself.

[sigjuice]

So I take it Linux was not used at all in any shape or form?

[Stratoscope]

I suspect that when GP said "using", they meant "incorporating it into your own code".

No one at any company I've heard of or been involved with cares if you simply use, i.e. run, Linux or other GPL software. That doesn't affect the licensing of your own software.

What they do care about is if you take the GPL software and incorporate it into your own product.

[sigjuice]

I guess you are right. The OP said "buying" and I suppose in the trajectory my career has taken me the concept of buying code is foreign to me.

[ex_amazon_sde]

You are ignoring the protections against "tivoization", patent trolling and passing software freedom down to the end users.

Often we are the end users. Because of permissive licensing phones, routers, iot devices have a lot of closed or otherwise locked own components that I cannot trust nor modify.

The same apply to SaaS.

[SQueeeeeL]

Open source software is bizarrely sticking it to capitalism. RMS and his ilk developed these licenses pretty much because they wanted free shit out there with no stipulations. It's insane that anyone with skills would care enough to work on GNU instead of making 6 figures to write the same code for IBM. OSS kinda proves that humans are deep down pretty alright

[throw0101a]

> RMS and his ilk developed these licenses pretty much because they wanted free shit out there with no stipulations.

Copyleft, having to release code diffs, is a stipulation / restriction.

MIT/BSD is the one without any stipulations / restrictions:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_License

Depending on one's goals one may be better than the other.

[kekumu]

For anyone not very familiar with copyleft, the actual goal is:

> My work on free software is motivated by an idealistic goal: spreading freedom and cooperation. I want to encourage free software to spread, replacing proprietary software that forbids cooperation, and thus make our society better. [1]

Free as in freedom for the users of the software to control, audit, and modify what runs on their hardware.

The stipulations are there to prevent people who aren't aligned with those goals from benefiting from (and working against) the work done by the community that believes in those goals.

[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/pragmatic.html

[throw0101a]

Being forced to release source code is a restriction. Some people are okay with that, and others want totally unrestricted code available.

[morelisp]

> others want totally unrestricted code available.

It's easy to give the lie to this, because the restriction they are unhappy with is the restriction against restricting others. Anyone complaining about that is just masking a demand of "free for me, but not for thee" - definitely _not_ "totally unrestricted."

[zxzax]

Just a small correction -- The GPL does not require you to release code diffs. The requirement is that people who receive binaries from you are entitled to receive the source to that binary upon request.

[scythe]

You're kind of underselling Stallman's vision. He realized early on (80s) that the users' control over the software running on their machines was intimately related to their personal freedom. Most of society has only started to notice this when rumors about apps and websites secretly accessing your microphone and camera started to spread in the late 2010s.

For Stallman, and the rest of us inspired by the copyleft movement, writing GPL software wasn't merely a way to impact the profits of capitalists. He would have been scarcely more satisfied with closed-source software written by a democratically organized cooperative and released for free. The goal was and is to ensure that users have the freedom to know what the code running on their machines is doing, and to alter its behavior if they wish.

That dream seems so distant today that people worry it may never be satisfied, but I have a more optimistic view. Someday, hardware generations will not be so rapid or represent such major improvements. That will create an opportunity for the GPL ecosystem to close the gap in functionality and provide alternatives that run on the hardware most people own. Mostly, the GNU project is always running behind on the hardware treadmill; keeping up with software functionality is easy by comparison.

[parafactual]

What do you mean by "free shit with no stipulations"? As I see it, that would describe permissive licenses, which even allow you to build on software and sell it without giving back via source code. The GPL requires you to abide by some rules and "play fair".

[lupire]

IBM pays some people to write GPL code.