Comment by ants_everywhere

Comment by ants_everywhere 4 days ago

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I say this all the time, but the point of the permissive licenses is you're making a donation to private industry.

There are reasons to do this, for example if you believe that private industry adopting some technology is good and you want to make that happen.

But people keep seeming surprised by the fact that these donations aren't reciprocated (or at least people don't seem to plan for them to never be reciprocated). It sounds to me like the AGPL license was more consistent with their goals.

bigstrat2003 4 days ago

Not quite. The point of permissive licenses is that you're making a donation to everyone. If private industry uses your donation fine, if not that's fine too. But it's certainly true that if you have a problem with private industry using something you freely gave them, permissive licenses aren't for you.

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  • ants_everywhere 4 days ago

    If you wanted to make a donation to everyone, you'd use a copyleft license.

    The point of permissive licenses is to grant the ability to exclude people from the enjoying the benefit of improvements.

    I.e. they're not for creating public goods. They're grants for making it easier to create excludable goods.

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    • ranger_danger 4 days ago

      > The point of permissive licenses is to grant the ability to exclude people from the enjoying the benefit of improvements.

      I find this comment to be incredibly disingenuous, and just plain false.

      Excluding people would only be done if someone took a permissive license and then re-licensed it to something more closed... you've entirely made up a malicious assumption about what people do with the software. And you're even assuming people ARE doing something like this with the software.

      A permissive license simply lets you do just about anything you want with it. Some will agree this is more "free". But, freedom TO vs freedom FROM is a common argument.

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      • ants_everywhere 4 days ago

        You don't need to re-license permissively licensed software to include it in your code.

        Apple, as far as I know, doesn't release the FreeBSD fork they use in Mac OS.

        Companies generally use a ton of permissively licensed software and don't release forks of it under any license because the entire point of the license is that you can take the code, make modifications, and you have no obligations to give anything back when doing so.

        There was an attempt to rebrand "free software" -- meaning software focused on user freedom -- as "open source" -- referring to software permissively licensed for use by corporations. This was the point of the OSI. [0]

        > The “open source” label was created at a strategy session held on February 3rd, 1998 in Palo Alto, California, shortly after the announcement of the release of the Netscape source code....The conferees believed the pragmatic, business-case grounds that had motivated Netscape to release their code illustrated a valuable way to engage with potential software users and developers, and convince them to create and improve source code by participating in an engaged community. The conferees also believed that it would be useful to have a single label that identified this approach and distinguished it from the philosophically- and politically-focused label “free software.” Brainstorming for this new label eventually converged on the term “open source”, originally suggested by Christine Peterson.

        So literally a decision by a committee of industry folks to play down the idea of freedoms or giving back and focus instead on the business case.

        So they killed the ethical argument that favored copyleft licenses in favor of the business argument that favored permissive ones.

        Now people are saying "hey it's unfair that you're not giving back." Fair enough, but that's an ethical argument. That's what the OSI was trying to get rid of.

        The OSI approach has its place. We wouldn't have Mac OS or Google or Meta without it. But its place is allowing industry to standardize and to reduce costs. Those benefit consumers indirectly since we have fewer competing standards and reduced development costs can imply reduced end user costs. But that only works because each company can make improvements and exclude others from using those improvements; i.e. they can make proprietary improvements.

        [0] https://opensource.org/history

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        • ranger_danger 4 days ago

          > You don't need to re-license permissively licensed software to include it in your code.

          If the project you include it in does not use the same license, then I think you are technically re-licensing it.

          But either way, I don't see how the rest of your comment applies to what I said.

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      • mkesper 3 days ago

        Wake up. That's what's happening to your gifts you released under permissive licenses. Enterprises like AWS, Apple etc. build their business on them and don't want to give anything back.

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        • ranger_danger 3 days ago

          I know that's what is happening, and they are fully within their rights to do so when I use a permissive license. If people are using a permissive license and then getting upset that others are 'stealing without giving back', well, then they chose the wrong license in the first place.

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      • tempfile 3 days ago

        > I find this comment to be incredibly disingenuous, and just plain false.

        I wonder if there will be any justification for this remark :-)

        > Excluding people would only be done if someone took a permissive license and then re-licensed it to something more closed

        Yes, that is the only way they can be distinguished. If nobody ever distributes proprietary software including the permissively-licensed code, then it might as well be copylefted.

        > you've entirely made up a malicious assumption about what people do with the software. And you're even assuming people ARE doing something like this with the software.

        I think this is your point of departure with reality. This happens constantly! Anyone who ever includes permissively licensed code in a proprietary codebase is denying the users of that codebase from the freedoms the upstream developers gave them. The freedom to do this is the freedom to withhold rights from other people. You can choose not to care about that, if you want. But that's what is happening.

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  • tw04 4 days ago

    I think we need to distinguish using and abusing. IMO a private corporation taking the source to make a commercial project and refusing to give anything back (whether patches, money, or otherwise) is abusing.

    When corporations utilize the code and make a good faith effort to contribute back something, no matter how trivial, they are using the source.

    Just because it’s legal doesn’t make it right and I feel confident given the current state of the world saying that we should start expecting more from corporations. The idea “they only exist to make money” is how you break the social contract.

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    • ants_everywhere 4 days ago

      > a private corporation taking the source to make a commercial project and refusing to give anything back (whether patches, money, or otherwise) is abusing.

      What I'm saying is that's the point of the license. That's why universities use the licenses (e.g. MIT, Berkeley) and why Apache uses it. They're designed to stimulate the private sector by moving IP from research into industry (universities) or by industries pooling resources to make software purchases cheaper (Apache).

      I don't think it makes sense to describe using them in this way as abusive or bad faith.

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    • kelnos 3 days ago

      > IMO a private corporation taking the source to make a commercial project and refusing to give anything back (whether patches, money, or otherwise) is abusing.

      I don't agree. Releasing under a permissive license is explicitly saying "dDo what you want with this, including using it commercially without giving back". And if you're saying that, you can't cry "abuse" when someone does exactly what you told them they could do. Because that's what you've done: the license terms explicitly say that.

      "Legal" has nothing to do with it; if you want other people to have to contribute their changes publicly, you use a copyleft license. If you don't care, you use a permissive license, and then there's no such thing as "abuse", as long as people follow the letter of the license.

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