[Deejahll]

> Would it outrage you for someone else to take your code ... and make millions while you make nothing? ... You shouldn't use the GPL if your response would be, "Bully for them, I had fun and they made the world better."

This is wrong. Copyleft licenses are concerned with freedom, not price.

I don't care if somebody gets rich off my software while I don't.

I don't want somebody to take the work I have done and turn it into proprietary software that other users may no longer have the freedom to inspect, modify, and share. THAT is why all my work is GPL or AGPL. It has nothing to do with whether you make money or those users spend money or I get a cut of some money.

Now that we have so many SaaS startups, "turn it into proprietary software" includes "use it to build a service and never distribute the sources."

GPL and AGPL protects my code from this happening, while licenses like MIT and BSD ("permissive" licenses) do not.

Permissive licensing, in the context of SaaS, is functionally equivalent to proprietary licensing. Somebody benefits (not necessarily monetarily) from the use of my software without paying its price: improvements must be shared.

[TazeTSchnitzel]

> This is wrong. Copyleft licenses are concerned with freedom, not price.

Precisely. The thought that someone might take the code I wrote and make it into a proprietary product, removing the freedoms I had, is horrible. But if someone made an free software product based on it and made millions, all the better for them!

[morganvachon]

BSD doesn't remove any freedoms from the original software author, and in fact it unshackles them from having to publish all future development, allowing them to go proprietary in the future if they wish to.

To put it another way, once you license something under GPL, it is forever GPL. That's a strength of that license in the sense that it has allowed so much excellent and important software to grow and flourish. On the other hand, when you license something under BSD, at any point you have the power to take it to another license or make it proprietary. That's the "permissive" part that many people (including GPL advocates) don't get. The source code itself is still open as long as the original author wishes it to be. Under the GPL, the source code is open for all eternity, even if the original author changes her mind later.

Another aspect of this (and it was mentioned elsewhere in this discussion) is that, even if a company comes along and turns your BSD licensed code into their own proprietary product, you still get to keep your code and continue to improve it. All they've really done is forked it; if they are a good citizen they will even contribute improvements back to you. I think the classic example of this is Mac OS X, which is based in part on FreeBSD. When Apple forked FreeBSD into the base of their new commercial OS, the FreeBSD project didn't magically disappear. Here we are 15 years later and both the commercial OS X and the open source FreeBSD are flourishing. Development of FreeBSD didn't die the day OS X was born.

[lwf]

> BSD doesn't remove any freedoms from the original software author

Neither does the GPL. The GPL does not place restrictions on the author. In fact, as the author of a project, you can declare your project GPL and totally fail to comply with the GPL yourself, because the license is a copyright license, not a contract.

> To put it another way, once you license something under GPL, it is forever GPL. That's a strength of that license in the sense that it has allowed so much excellent and important software to grow and flourish.

Both the GNU GPL and BSD licenses are non-revocable (except, in the case of the GPL, if a reuser violates the license)

> On the other hand, when you license something under BSD, at any point you have the power to take it to another license or make it proprietary.

Assuming "you" refers to the author of a project, they can change the license they use for the project in the future regardless of whether they initially chose BSD or the GPL.

(I'm on the Debian ftpmaster team, which checks all new binary packages submitted to Debian; I review licenses for fun)

[bzbarsky]

> To put it another way, once you license something under > GPL, it is forever GPL.

It's forever GPL for people who use it under the GPL license. If you're the copyright holder, not a licensee, you can change the license if you want to. Of course that doesn't stop people from using existing GPL copies, and you do have to be the actual copyright holder (e.g. if you accepted patches from other parties, you have to get permission from their authors to make such a change). But given such permission, a change can totally be made.

An example is the Mozilla code, which used to be licensed under a tri-license that included the GPL and was relicensed to a different license (MPL2). This process required finding everyone who had copyright on the codebase (several companies and a number of individuals) and getting their permission for the license change.

Now it's true that using the BSD license means you don't have to hunt down those other contributors and get their permission to relicense, so the bar for the author taking the code proprietary is lower (and in fact identical to the bar for anyone else doing so).

[the_why_of_y]

I don't understand why Mozilla would need extra permissions to upgrade from the old tri-license to MPLv2?

The MPLv1 already had an auto-upgrade clause that allowed any downstream to use and distribute the code under a later version published by the license steward; the MPLv2 also is implicitly a triple-license with LGPL/GPL.

MPL v1.1 "6.2. Effect of New Versions" does mention the new version of the license has to be published by Netscape instead of the Mozilla Foundation; was that the issue perhaps?

This page seems to agree with my reasoning in "Does Mozilla need permission from anyone to change the MPL?"

https://wiki.mozilla.org/MPL_Upgrade

"No permission is needed from any contributor to upgrade the codebase from MPL 1.1 to MPL 2 because the MPL 1.1 contains within itself a provision which allows software under 1.1 to be redistributed under a later version of the licence."

[bzbarsky]

Huh. I was pretty sure Gerv spent a while hunting down contributors, but maybe I'm misremembering something. Clearly I must be!

[jarfil]

> when you license something under BSD, at any point you have the power to take it to another license or make it proprietary

And that's why I would NEVER contribute code to any of your projects. You want people to work for you for free, then when you're ready just close the code and run with it? Yeah, right, try again.

The GPL is a "you can't screw me, I can't screw you" license. The BSD is a "whatever" license, much like the MIT or a CC0/Public Domain. If I don't care about the code, if it took me no effort to create, I may consider the BSD... or just the CC0, whatever. Otherwise, you're either looking at a real contract or the GPL, and you better don't try to screw me either way.

Oh, and you can re-license YOUR code under any license you wish. If you published it once under the GPL, it only affects whoever may get it from that publication; you can still re-publish it in the future under any other license you wish, since it's YOUR code, to do as you please.

[antihero]

If it's GPL'd, what prevents the author/project owner simply changing the license though?

[bzbarsky]

Nothing, if they have copyright on all the code.

If they accepted changes from someone else, that someone else has copyright on those changes and the license can't be changed without them agreeing to it (or possibly their changes being removed from the codebase; I am not an IP lawyer and you should consult one if you want to be sure on this score).

[digi_owl]

> BSD doesn't remove any freedoms from the original software author, and in fact it unshackles them from having to publish all future development, allowing them to go proprietary in the future if they wish to.

IANAL but as best i can tell, neither apply for GPL.

The changes do not have to go back to the original developer. All that is required is that the code changes are published if ever binaries based on those changes are made public.

And going proprietary is possible if everyone involved agrees. Note the number of multi-license projects out there, including some fairly substantial ones like Qt.

[gbog]

Ok but I would like to know if Mac os taking FreeBSD code did benefit to Free BSD. Edit: tried to add more but some js breaks everything on my phone

[toast0]

OS X uses the FreeBSD userland, but it was more or less a one time pull, the kernel is radically different, so it would be hard to keep things synced; as a result, I doubt there has been a lot of contributions of patches backwards. However, Apple and FreeBSD both had license problems with gcc, and Apple sponsored LLVM, which benefits FreeBSD as well. Maybe there's a cultural benefit for FreeBSD as a result of OS X exposing people to the FreeBSD userland, although running into limitations that have been fixed upstream more than ten years ago may give people the wrong ideas.

[reitanqild]

> The thought that someone might take the code I wrote and make it into a proprietary product, removing the freedoms I had, is horrible.

I feel this argument is weak: even if I license my works under BSD, no one can make my BSD licensed code that has already been distributed into to a proprietary product, even not myself.

To make that software that I licensed under BSD a proprietary product they would need to somehow convince all users of my software to get rid of all copies as well as convincing me to stop distributing it under a free licence.

Building a proprietary product that includes my code does NOT remove anyones freedom to use my code, no?

[Deejahll]

This presumes that any modifications to "your" code that someone else makes should be none of your business. Seems fine on the surface.

But what if your code writes files or communicates over the network? And what if, say, Microsoft takes your permissively-licensed code that is just beginning to gain popularity, changes one piece of it to make it incompatible with yours, and doesn't release their change? They use their massive marketing department or pre-bundling to get lots of Windows users to use it. Everyone is still free to use "your" version of the code, but nobody wants to, since it is incompatible with the more popular Microsoft version, now on its way to becoming "the standard."

If you are okay with that, no rabid copyleft zealot like me has any place to criticize you. Release your code with a permissive license. That's fine. (Permissive licenses are considered "Free Software" by FSF and rms as well, after all.)

But to me, that seems grossly unfair for code I spent my valuable time designing and developing, so I don't release my code under a permissive license. If Microsoft wants to build a product with the work I have done, it needs to convey the same freedoms to its users that I did. That's the cost.

[millstone]

This is hypocritical, because the GPL does exactly what you describe through its "or any later version" clause. Remember when gcc switched to GPLv3? Did you contribute to gcc? If so, your contribution got re-licensed under whatever the FSF decided, and thereby acquired a bunch of new restrictions that you never agreed to.

And sure, everyone is free to use the v2 version of the code (i.e. gcc 4.2), but nobody wants to, since all new development is happening with the v3 version, which is now the standard.

Linux is a famous exception: it omits the "or any later version" clause, and so avoids getting steamrolled in the way you describe.

[click170]

> Remember when gcc switched to GPLv3? Did you contribute to gcc? If so, your contribution got re-licensed under whatever the FSF decided, and thereby acquired a bunch of new restrictions that you never agreed to.

How can they relicense the code unless every contributor signed a Contributor License Agreement granting them that right?

A quick search seems to indicate that GCC has no such CLA.

[elsjaako]

The standard GPL includes a clause that let's you published a modified version of the software under a later version of the GPL.

So if you write something under the GPLv2, and I change it and publish it, then the GPL says I need to release the source under the GPLv2 or later. This means that I can publish it under the GPLv3, and you can't take back my changes unless you upgrade your software to the GPLv3.

Linux removed the "or later" text from their version of the GPLv2, meaning that I can't change the Linux kernel and publish the result under the GPLv3.

[fsloth]

Can you provide examples of software that were released by their original author using BSD/Mit style licence and got steamrolled by a third party who took their code and mangled it?

At least to my knowledge the opposite seems to be more common. Experts release a library under a very permissive licence, and everybody wins. One such example is libPNG.

http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/src/libpng-LICENSE.txt

[alecco]

I got an example, you are likely using it right now.

KHTML (LGPL, not GPL) taken by Apple to make WebKit (LGPL), later "rewritten" and licensed BSD for 2.0.

Apple did also the dirty trick of giving a single huge patch against the previous release of KHTML making it almost impossible to integrate back to the main codebase. Even LGPL can be abused. Lesson learned the hard way by the community.

And you now have everyone parroting how great WebKit is, nobody remembers the original team at KDE. It was brutal.

[anonbanker]

Microsoft did exactly this in Windows 2000 with the BSD-licenced Kerberos. Embraced and Extended.

[throwawaykf05]

Microsoft used their own implementation of Kerberos. From the Kerberos Wikipedia entry:

> While Microsoft uses the Kerberos protocol, it does not use the MIT software.

The license of the original implementation is thus irrelevant. Pretty much the only thing that would have prevented MS would have been if there were patents on Kerberos.

[dummyfellow]

Did MS use kerberos implementation or the protocol, wiki page isn't very clear on it. If it is 2nd then it would be an entirely different issue, which even GPL/copyleft wouldn't have helped (though oracle java lawsuit may do so).

[pjmlp]

If Apple hadn't made Swift open source now at WWDC, that would be a fine example.

Or the zillion of extensions being made by companies on top of LLVM.

[geon]

A very contrived example.

[Deejahll]

Oh yeah I just pulled that from a fever dream I had, that sort of thing never happens in real life.

> "Embrace, extend, and extinguish", is a phrase that was used internally by Microsoft to describe its strategy for entering product categories involving widely used standards, extending those standards with proprietary capabilities, and then using those differences to disadvantage its competitors.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish

[jahewson]

And what permissively licensed software did Microsoft apply this policy to, exactly? Or is it just an unfounded fear?

[danbmil99]

> This is wrong. Copyleft licenses are concerned with freedom, not price.

I have long been annoyed by this canard. Yes, someone can create a piece of code, slap a GPL license on it, and charge $10,000 a copy. In the real world, that developer will make exactly $10,000, because their first user is free to share the code with the rest of the world at zero cost.

"Free as in free speech and beer, not just free beer." FTFY

[runamok]

Is that true? You could not have a clause that allows people to see source but pay to run it?

I know Chef now has a new revenue model where version 12 is free but if you want various modules enabled like a webui you need to pay.

[cbr]

redhat?

[throwawaykf05]

Red Hat makes most of their money providing services around their distro, rather than from selling the distro itself. (Source: Friends at RH).

[anonbanker]

Ardour?

[dgreensp]

In that case, the parent could have asked, "Would it outrage you if someone slapped a GUI on your code and released it as freeware?" I think they didn't because even fewer readers would see the harm in that.

[ChristianGeek]

> I don't care if somebody gets rich off my software while I don't.

This is either incredibly naive or incredibly stupid. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume the former. To spend your time like most of us do, getting paid to make someone else wealthy, is one thing. Getting paid nothing to make someone else wealthy is little more than voluntary slavery. Don't want/need the money? Fine, then give it to a worthwhile charity and make the world a better place. But at least make your time and effort count for something.

Edit: Grammar

[Deejahll]

> This is either incredibly naive or incredibly stupid.

In order to interpret that one sentence the way you did, you had to:

- divorce it from the context where the software was released as copyleft

- ignore that person getting wealthy must share their source code

- willfully misinterpret "don't get rich" as "get paid nothing"

- presume that money given to some charity is more of a societal good than software

- presume that that the creation of free software "counts for nothing"

But please do continue to abuse me as "incredibly" naive and/or stupid, and make comparisons to "slavery!" It might not feel like a genuine Hacker News discussion if you didn't.

[jdreaver]

This is the naive comment. It takes a lot of effort to start a company and make money off of something, even if you didn't make the original version. If people are willing to pay millions of dollars for software, and someone comes along and builds something that fits that demand, then why shouldn't they?

Some people make software for fun, or to help others. If my software helps someone make millions, then cool, good for them. Personally, I would certainly monetize free software I made if I saw the opportunity. However, some people might already be wealthy and want to play with their kids or something instead of chasing a new startup opportunity, so they shouldn't care if someone else makes millions off of their software. You are acting very arrogant when you assume everyone's values line up with yours.

[serf]

The scope of motivation that drives you to code is extremely narrow.

Some people code to enjoy themselves.

Let's not forget that this profession is also a hobby for many.

[fsloth]

Here, have an upvote.

While the style of your comment was acidic, it still remains a psychological fact that people do not value things that are free.

One can be afraid of a perception that since "everybody can code" and "opensource is free as in ... beer? Speech? I don't care, it's free so it's basically worthless" that the intrinsic value of people who code is not that high. This is not a risk in large corps and dedicated software houses but it can create crappy management-employee dynamics in smaller orgs where code is just the enabler for the main product.

That said, it is up to the authors to decide how they feel about the fruits of their labour being used. There is nothing wrong with being generous and embracing all positive externalities - or blocking them or attempting to extract value from them for that matter.