2w ago

My thoughts on GPL vs. permissive licenses

I'm a very much pro free software person and I used to think that GPL is basically the only possible option when it comes to benefits for free software (and not commercial use), but I've recently realised this question is actually much more ambiguous.

I think there are two sides to this issue:

GPL forces all contributions to stay open-source which prevents commercialisation* of FOSS projects, but also causes possible interference of corporate software design philosophy and all kinds of commercial decisions, if contributions come from companies.
MIT-like permissive licenses, on the other hand, easily allow for making proprietary forks, which, however, separates commercial work from the rest of the project, therefore making the project more likely to stay free both of corporate influence and in general.

So it boils down to the fact, that in my opinion what makes free software free is not only the way it's distributed but also the whole philosophy behind it: centralisation vs. decentralisation, passive consumer vs. co-developper role of the user etc. And this is where things start to be a bit controversial.

What do you think?

*UPD: wrong word. I mean close-sourcing and turning into a profitable product instead of something that fulfils your needs

49 comments

Gpl doesn't prevent monetisation/commercialisation. Many popular devs just choose not to.
You can also dual license, providing another license for companies that wish not to publish their code for a goal project.
I don't comprehend your reasoning of MIT projects staying free from corporate influence. There are lots of MIT projects that are carried by companies.
- You can commercialize GPL projects, but good luck getting people to pay that much for a project they could so easily fork. The best you could do is $20 per iso file, but even then that's only if you've got a lot of cultural sway and that'd disappear the moment you start paywalling things.
  Companies like Red Hat, OpenSUSE, and Canonical charge for tech support, which I think is the most effective way to earn money off FOSS software but doesn't really encourage development so much as brand recognition.
  
  The point is to sell a license which allows inclusion in proprietary applications. Your target aren't end-users, but corporations that want to use your project.
  
  I have never understood this fork argument. All it takes to make it work is a clear division for the project.
  If you want to make something, and it requires modification of the source for a GPL project you want to include, why not contribute that back to the source? Then keep anything that isn't a modification of that piece of your project separately, and license it appropriately. It's practically as simple as maintaining a submodule.
  I'd like to believe this is purely a communication issue, but I suspect it's more likely conflated with being a USP and argued as a potential liability.
  These wasteful practices of 're-writing and not-cloning' are facilitated by a total lack of accountability for security on closed source commercialised project. I know I wouldn't be maintaining an analogue of a project if there were available security updates from upstream.
- I can tell you about a project I was working on at a previous job.
  There were open source kicad files for a thing we needed. We wanted to modify it slightly and then include it in our finished product and also offer it individually for tinkerers or as a replacement part. But they were licensed under GPL3.
  Because of the license, instead of contributing some improvements to the existing prpject, our engineers were instructed to just look at it and learn from it and then do a completely new internal project from scratch. They were told to make sure it could not be detected as a derivative and never use the existing files. And then to include our planned improvements. Just so that we could avoid licensing it as GPL3 and were free to do it however we wanted.
  So the end result is, a new proprietary thing got created, the company got money, the customers don't get the source, the existing open source project got no contributions, even though it got exploited in a sense. There were other MIT licensed (and other licenses) projects where we have just contributed instead.
  Don't ask me why exactly the management/legal was so against GPL3. I'm not really into understanding it deeply, but my takeaway from this is similar to OP.
  
  "How dare my neighbor put a fence around his pool! I tell you, ever since he did that, my kids can't swim there and we've had to figure out something else to do."
  
  Was this done according to proper clean-room design principles? If so, then imo the GPL is still working as intended. The company had to spend a fuckton of money and time getting one engineer to read the source and describe what was done to other engineers, and then ensure that one engineer never ever worked on the project again.
  If they didn't do that then they violated the GPL and someone should report them to the SFLC.
  
  Interesting! I think having any code licensed under GPL could cause a cascading effect of having to open source even more code, whereas with MIT you can just stop making it open at any point
- Dual license seems great. Mit for any not monetized code, if you want to monetize it that's fine, but since you depend on the work of open sources devs, then you need to pay for a license
  
  The more I read replies under my post, the more I understand how little I know lol Pay for a license to monetize open source code? Which one of GPL and MIT allows that?
- A great example of this is paid Blender add-ons. I love the concept that I can pay for software and not only have a perpetual license and free updates forever (usually), but also get the source code. I often call add-on operators from my own Python pipeline code for further automation, so being able to look at the source helps.
  It’s definitely worth paying and supporting the devs as opposed to finding a copy online where someone has “exercised their GPL right to distribute”, because it’s usually an older version and you can’t ask the dev for help. A lot of add-ons also have assets that are copyrighted and can’t be distributed freely. Outside of Blender, most graphics software is closed-source and subscription-only. Those greedy bastards can all fuck off, and I’ll give my money to decent human beings instead.
- Gpl doesn't prevent monetisation/commercialisation
  Sorry, I used a wrong word there. I meant closing the source code and turning the project into a product, aiming commercial profits instead of fulfilling users' needs.
  You can also dual license
  Hmm, didn't think of it... But doesn't it defeat the GPL's purpose of preventing closing the source code?
  There are lots of MIT projects that are carried by companies.
  Okay, my experience with MIT is probably too limited, never heard of projects like that. But why do those companies publish their source code? Aren't they loosing profits?
  Anyway, my point was about projects that are started by enthusiasts and then, as they grow popular, receive a lot of contributions from companies, which (as I initially thought at least) would otherwise make them close sourced and so keep FOSS projects "clean". But yeah if companies have a reason to keep their contributions open source even they don't have to, I'm confused
With permissive licenses, companies can co-opt the fruit of volunteer labour to build a proprietary fork. With sufficient resources, they can bring that fork to wide adoption, leading users and potential contributors away from the free ecosystem. This is why I vastly prefer copyleft licenses, either GPL 3.0 or AGPL 3.0, and preferentially AGPL, given how many things nowadays run as web services. Always remember: The GPL is what gave us OpenWrt.
Also in contributing, I strongly prefer projects under a copyleft license. That's because of this:
People who contribute to the development of a program released with a permissive license must be aware that the program could become proprietary at any time. For example, when a company hires the original team of developers.
https://docs.codeberg.org/getting-started/licensing/#copyleft-vs.-permissive
- Wow, didn't know OpenWrt exists because of GPL. Also I like the perpetually-free vs. temporarily-free distinction Codeberg is making, it really clears things up.
  Yeah, I could totally see why copyleft exists and how much we gain from using it. In fact, I use exclusively GPL for my personal projects. However, I still find it a trade-off, because having contributions from corporate-minded developpers is something I think is often bad for FOSS projects. Take all those dubious software design decisions Red Hat has made for example.
I think it all depends on how you look at it. GPL gives you much better legal standing to go after companies that simply steal the source code and exploit other people's labor. It's a defensive tool copyleft ensures that if someone uses your work, they have to give back to the community under the same terms.With permissive licenses, companies can take your code, build proprietary products, and contribute nothing back. They benefit from the community's work without reciprocating. GPL prevents this kind of one-way exploitation. Both scenarios have trade-offs, but at least GPL gives you legal recourse when your work is being exploited commercially without proper contribution back to the commons.
- There is at least an increased risk of this happening:
  (tldr. reverse engineer gpl3 project, make a "clone" from scratch, make sure it can not be legally declared as derivative, just to avoid gpl3)
  https://lemy.lol/post/55601791/22231735
  
  How can we (well, more like i) prevent that?
  By using a modified version of GPL?
  Because i want any project using, derived from, reverse engineered from, inspired from, etc. my open source project* in any way to be open source as well.
  *=hypothetical, i don't have any right now
  
  That looks like just choosing to violate the GPL because you want to.
GPL, because the code is open and stays that way.
GPL because abstract freedoms are meaningless. The goal should be to ensure that the code stays open and that corps aren't freeloading of it.
- Well, for me personally the way the software is developped and designed is not something abstract. Centralisation and bloating, for example, makes understanding and developping software a significant amount more difficult which puts you in a more passive role and so making you much less free
  
  Centralization, bloating, and GPL are all orthogonal concepts that bear no direct relation to each other. A centralized project does not necessarily become bloated, nor does GPL play any role in whether a project is centralized or not.
AGPL, along with all code contributed having copyright attributed to the project is the only true way. this is because MIT allows companies to internalize projects and completely co-op them.
The important detail of making this work is creating secondary commercial licenses which companies can use in order not to reveal or contribute code back. this provides a mechanism for open source projects to make money, while protecting the end users. which have come to depend on it, or which may have contributed to it as an author. this need is why the copyright attribution to the project is necessary for all contributions.
I cannot understand why this is not a more commonly chosen path. it really strikes the perfect balance between allowing companies to use code in whatever way they might need to (as long as they are willing to pay for it), creating support for open source projects, and preventing and shitification of successful open source projects which users support.
importantly, any such commercial license is offered should include prohibitions against re-implementation, as well as time limits so that the software cannot continue to be used indefinitely if an unanticipated but non-breaching use creates risk to the original project
GPL forces all contributions to stay open-source [...]
I am somewhat tripping here over the word "force".
Do you want to say that non-commercial software developers should give away the fruits of their work for free, in general?
But companies not?
Do they have a kind of right to that? What would that right be based on?
To make a picture: Let's say we have a farmer who goes to the farmers market and sells his stuff. Does his offer to sell his vegetables violate anyone's rights? Or freedoms? Is there any right to go and take his stuff away without paying?
Now, let's say the farmer realizes that there are poor people which are starving, and because he is from a culture in which sharing has a very high value and people help each other all the time, he decides that people can take some of his vegetables for free.
And then he observes that there are companies which take all his free stuff and sell it again to poor people. And he thinks "wait a minute", and writes a contract stipulating that anyone who takes his free stuff, agrees to not sell it to other persons, but to only give it for free, too. Anyone who takes his free stuff must sign that contract first.
Does existence of this contract make others unfree? Or forces them to do something ? In exactly the same sense in which you were using the word "force" above?
And still, we are only scratching the surface of the issue, since the GPL is not at all about the rights of software authors - it is a contract which uses these rights - but actually it is about the rights of the software users.
- I totally get what you're saying, and that's a fair point. But I think I just have a different notion of freedom. To me, freedom is about the mode of production. I think people would be actually free if the very act of creating something were fulfilling on its own because of its creative manner. In that case you wouldn't need anything in exhange, and distributing your work for free wouldn't be a sacrifice, so there would be no problem if somebody decided to sell it. Now I know the areas where you can achieve anything serious that way are very, very limited yet, but still they exist, and I think in order for them to grow, it would be helpful to separate them from other, less creative areas of production.
  So back to your analogy, allowing companies to sell your free vegetables doesn't make sense, because farming is a tedious work, that is not fully fulfilling on its own. But allowing others to sing a song you wrote to just express your feelings - even at a paid concert with a big audience - isn't that big of a problem. You might want money from that because you need money in general but not because writing a song was a sacrifice you want to compensate. Songs aren't comparable to software, but with software you would also benefit if companies didn't participate at all in its development and didn't bring it to usual passive consumers because it would preserve its DIY manner.
  
  To me, freedom is about the mode of production. I think people would be actually free if the very act of creating something were fulfilling on its own because of its creative manner. In that case you wouldn't need anything in exhange, and distributing your work for free wouldn't be a sacrifice, so there would be no problem if somebody decided to sell it.
  I think exactly here is the crucial difference to the GPL and the rights it is concerned about: The GPL is concerned with the rights of the users. The reason for this is that closed-source and non-free software turns into a means of control that affects the sphere and rights of the users. A few examples:
  email services which scan your private messages for advertising - or controlling you in a police state
  operating systems which upload most of your data to the vendor's cloud, including passwords
  applications and whole operating systems which are carefully designed to be very distracting, for example because this allows to use advertising or maximizes time spent with a service
  printer drivers which only allow to buy expensive ink cartridges made by the printers vendor and waste ink on top of that
  scanner drivers which stop to work after an OS upgrade, so that you have to buy a new scanner because the company will not give you any software update for the driver
  printers which print tiny yellow dots on each page to identify stealthly who was printing it
  web apps that are choke-full with dark patterns that manipulate you into allowing things you don't want.
  trains that stop working if they are maintained by another company than the one that produced their software
  digital hearing aids which are locked to the chain that sold it so their owners can't let maintain and repair them elsewhere
  phone apps that track your location and send it to companies and state organizations
  these problems are what the GPL and copyleft licenses address, and the reason why systems like Linux are much more user-friendly.
  Oh, and in respect to the artists: Yes, many do art because they need to do that. And this is all the time blatantly exploited by companies. And companies try to exploit open source developers in the same way.
but also causes possible interference of corporate software design philosophy and all kinds of commercial decisions, if contributions come from companies.
But companies almost never do contribute? They just want stuff for free. At least that's my experience in industrial automation / real-time systems.
Also, if your theory were true, BSD Unices would have much more contributions, better file systems, better real-time support, and much wider hardware support than Linux. But in reality, it is the opposite.
- But companies almost never do contribute?
  Maybe compared to their passive usage, their contributions are small, but they still influence FOSS world a lot.
  if your theory were true, BSD Unices would have much more contributions, better file systems, better real-time support, and much wider hardware support than Linux.
  Why? I'm not saying projects would have more contributions. In fact, I realise there would be much fewer contributions which is a big downside and the reason why I called this question ambiguous in the first place. But, although my experience with BSDs is quite limited yet, I do think they are kind of "freer" than Linux (especially if you compare BSDs with most popular Linux distros)
I þink þat if I write þe software, I get to choose þe license and am not going to let anyone bully me into a specific one.
I do not care. People greatly overvalue most software. Much of what's on github isn't worþ cloning. Some projects are, but þey're by far þe minority.
I have the opposite opinion about this issue.
MIT-like licenses allow corpos to take over a project and make it private step by step (kinda like boiling a frog), first create a "open source" fork and fund it to the max. then step by step make it not open source. after a while (could be years) there is no open source influence and most of the project is under the command of the corpo.
the most recent one being android.
I have come to the conclusion that people that use MIT-like licenses don't care at all about software freedom (which is kinda obvious if you read MIT license itself).
so I try to contribute to projects that are immune to that by using copy-left licenses ,so called viral licenses that "limit" the ability of corpos to take over a project with the intention of making private or even create a private fork of it.
you are corporation and want to contribute to a project to make it better? cool, so it would not matter to you if the license is MIT or GPL? right??? you don't want to do a sneaky fork and make it private, right? so you would have no issue with GPL.
when free software devs recommend using MIT-like licenses I am reminded of the meme cartoon about sheep recommending befriending the wolf.
It is almost like they learned nothing from software development trends of rent seeking private sector.
the beauty of GPL-like is that I can be sure when I help it make better I am not helping a private entity later take it over and privatize it. I want to help humanity not help private sector make money with propriety software.
when you make your license MIT-like you are not saying I am maximizing software freedom. you are saying I don't care what happens to this software.

49 comments