It's not just disrespectful, it's stupid and dangerous. GPL is one of those exceptional things that shaped the world as it is today. These projects are nothing more than an attack to our freedom.
But in the long run freedom could be impacted. Imagine this becoming popular. Then some proprietary fork happens, by some tech giant, which adds some feature that is great. Then lots of people, who did not care for GPL in the first place switch to that proprietary version, because ir is oh so much more convenient. Suddenly distros get pressure to use the new thing. Or people switch to whatever has the proprietary replacement. At some point the majority of the people could be using that, instead of libre software. Perhaps your next employer obligates you to use the proprietary thing, because it is popular and they don't want to deal with people using less common OS.
Whatever the masses do can always have impact on what you can do, or are forced to do. For example quitting your job, because you want to use the libre tool, when your employer tries to force you to use the proprietary tool. "Why can't you be a good employee like eeeeveryone else?"
Most distros won't allow proprietary software. When mongodb switched license, most distros stopped providing it. Now that redis also became non-free, distros are pushing the free forks.
> Your freedom is not the least impacted by the MIT or BSD licences. The software distributed is and remains free and open source.
Only the original as delivered by the original dev-team. The derivatives can be, and often are, closed off. That's the opposite of "free and open source".
Xbox, Nintendo's various consoles, and Sony's are all DRM'd to hell and back. If BSD wasn't available under terms Sony liked, they'd be using QNX or something more obscure and just as inaccessible to their users. For better or worse, all the big console manufacturers see their ability to lock down their platform as vital to their development and business strategies. Vital to their ability to charge $60 for a few gigabytes of 1s and 0s.
The Playdate console seems a lot friendlier to developers and end users alike, but that's precisely because they're a smaller player in the market and need that advantage. Same dynamic played out with drivers for SCSI controllers, and GPUs under Linux, where the biggest players were the last to provide quality open source support. Seems to have a lot more to do with market position than with licenses, to me.
> If BSD wasn't available under terms Sony liked, they'd be using QNX or something more obscure and just as inaccessible to their users.
That's the point: if they don't want to contribute their changes back, they should spend their own money writing their own software.
Right now, they'd take thousands of hours of effort from the community, add a few hundred of their own and then close off the product from the very community that they so willingly took this charity from. Yay BSD license!
If they had to use QNX or similar, they'd pay to do it. If they had to use GPL, they'd pay to close off their changes, which would be great for funding more free software.
> For better or worse, all the big console manufacturers see their ability to lock down their platform as vital to their development and business strategies. Vital to their ability to charge $60 for a few gigabytes of 1s and 0s.
Well that's why I divided the licenses into "pro-user" and "pro-corporate". The BSDs are pro-corporate.
> If they had to use QNX or similar, they'd pay to do it. If they had to use GPL, they'd pay to close off their changes, which would be great for funding more free software.
It sounds like you're advocating for wiping them all from history and outlawing everything but GPL licensed code, which just isn't possible, nor desirable. Sorry?
> It sounds like you're advocating for wiping them all from history and outlawing everything but GPL licensed code, which just isn't possible, nor desirable.
That's a strawman: Nothing I said implied any sort of genocide.
I'm pointing out that the pro-user license has more benefits than the pro-corporate licenses.
i mean that is ok but i do not want them using open source commons without any contribution. it is not a logic thing. i just hate oss being basically abused in that way
I think it's a mistake to see it as abuse. They are using the software under the terms it was licensed to them by the developers. So no abuse has happened. Doubtless they have made contributions to that software in the process as well.
Would I prefer every computer be open to general purpose computing, and infinitely hackable by it's owner? Sure. But I also respect that they have reasons not to take that route. And as consoles and PCs converge, there are fewer and fewer reasons for me to be upset about one manufacturer's choices. I voted with my dollars and bought a Steam Deck. I think the preservation of culture is a much stronger argument for breaking console DRM and emulation.
I agree with GPL being a way to protect the investment in the commons so it remains "freer" than with MIT/BSD licensed code. But in the cloud platform world this is has show to be not so helpful (hence we need the AGPL). Both GPL and AGPL are (AGPL more so) shunned by big biz: this is a blessing (fuck 'm) and a curse (they have much money to invest).
All open source releases are extending the commons (freely available to everyone), so if MIT/BSD code is released I still cheer for that (even if it clones GPL code).
I don't know why so many people think compelling code to be shared is practical, desirable, or better than leaving it up to choice, but GPL is definitely not more free than BSD license.
Anyone who doesn't want to comply with the conditions of the GPL is simply a freeloader. Complaining that your freedoms are restricted because to take other's work you also need to share your own changes to it (and even that condition depends on you distributing the modified software) does not elicit sympathy with me.
BSD is freer license (you can do more with the code, including releasing binaries based on the original source w/o releasing the source of the improvements), GPL is a license for freer code (you are not allowed to release binary derivatives w/o releasing the source of the improvements).