Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by pie_flavor 1320 days ago
It is impossible to tell, from this post, whether you mean to say that the teeth can be removed from the GPL by simply licensing a dependent work as LGPL, or whether you mean to say that the GPL does not steal ownership from you and you can adapt it later to be non-GPL.

If the former, this is laughably wrong and displays a complete misunderstanding of open source licensure. The GPL infects the entire project, that's its defining factor, and you cannot set the entire work's license as LGPL any more than you can set it as MIT.

If the latter, this is a fake distinction, and displays dishonesty about the risks. Regardless of what license I can distribute my code under later if I change it, in order to use a GPL-covered library I must license the version of my code that depends on it under the GPL. That version of the code will be GPL-licensed to anyone that has it, for eternity; I cannot retract it, regardless of what changes I make to my own copy.

Either way this is not a reassuring post. I am glad to know Slint is GPL so I can stay far away from it and recommend others do the same.
1 comments
ogoffart 1320 days ago
If I was laughably wrong, why are WebKit and Safari not GPL, despite it is based on KHTML which was using Qt 3.x which was GPL. From your argument, Qt's GPL should have "infected" KHTML's code and so WebKit, and by extension Safari. But Safari is not open source, is it?
link
pie_flavor 1320 days ago
This post would indicate that you are talking about the latter case, in which case you were not laughably wrong, but rather dishonest about the risks. You are talking as though people have the ability to be Apple, but everyone you're talking about is not in Apple's position, but in KDE's.
link
ogoffart 1319 days ago
Yes, exactly. My point is that the open source project who wants to be a more liberal license can do it, just like KDE did.

Then if someone wants to take that for proprietary software, they can do it too, like Apple. They don't even need to go as far as Apple and make a fork, they can use Slint's paid, or free as in beer (ambassador) license.

link