[jwr]

> The proliferation of "give everything away for free" MIT/BSD/Apache licenses seems to me to have been an intentional campaign by corporate interests to undermine free software ideals

As a counterpoint, when I make something open source, I really mean "freedom", which includes the freedom to build a commercial service using the software. I use the MIT license not because of "corporate interests to undermine free software ideals", but because I really want the software to be free as in freedom.

GPL, GPLv3, AGPL and similar license actually restrict the freedom to do anything you want with the software. I'm not saying there is anything wrong with it, just that "free software ideals" could mean different things to different people, and there might not be any "corporate interests".

[FuriouslyAdrift]

The GPL is meant to be viral... it infects other projects so as to open up software ecosystems. The open source movement came out of a time when nearly everything was proprietary and locked up.

Tivo-ization really woke up a lot of people to the dangers of proprietary lock in and abuse. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tivoization

[Jensson]

> The GPL is meant to be viral

But that also makes people not wanna bother with it. People in the middle who doesn't care either way will be very apprehensive of putting in a license virus in their project.

[FuriouslyAdrift]

You should always know what patents and licenses are part of your project/product.

[me-vs-cat]

This is both true and absurd.

True because that's how the system actually works today.

Absurd because monopolies on ideas -- specifically patents and software licenses as mentioned here -- have absurd durations.

[kmacdough]

But the point others make is, this type of libertarian free is wide open to the Embrace, Extend, Extinguish strategy. A very successful, repeatable business strategy to own supposedly "open" domains. There's a reason people have debated freedom to and freedom from for centuries. This is the core conundrum/challenge of freedom.

GPL style licenses provide some guarantee you're investing in an ecosystem that is resistant to EEE. Freedom from takeover in exchange for freedom to make any arbitrary business venture. It's a choice, but to conflate libertarian freedom as the only form of freedom is narrow and ignores this centuries old unsettled debate.

[rcxdude]

There are two freedoms of different people (or rather different roles) that are in conflict here: the freedom of developers to do whatever they would like to do with code that they have access to, and the freedom of users to be able to change and control the software they use. MIT/BSD/etc prioritise the former, while GPL prioritises the latter: free software advocates generally believe that proprietary software is immoral, and that _all_ software should be open to users to modify, even if that limits developers freedom to keep it secret. The GPL is an attempt to enforce this as much as can be achieved under current law, not a natural reflection of their wishes (which would compel all software to have source code available for modification).

(There's also a secondary motiviation for using the GPL which seems to be driving this kind of discussion, that of 'paying your part', but this is neither open source nor free software in origin IMO: the desired deal is 'I make the source code available, but I want a cut if you're making money from it'. You can often do this with a version of the GPL that is viewed as sufficiently anti-commercial, and then offering a paid proprietary license, but this is antithetical to the goals of those who wrote the GPL)

[spookie]

Corporate interests != GPL is not on the cards