I would understand if Canonical want a new cow to milk, but why are developers even agreeing to this? Are they out of their minds?? Do they actually want companies to steal their code? Or is this some reverse-uno move I don’t see yet? I cannot fathom any FOSS project not using the AGPL anymore. It’s like they’re painting their faces with “here, take my stuff and don’t contribute anything back, that’s totally fine”
The unfortunate reality is that a significant proportion of software engineers (and other IT folks) are either laissez-faire “libertarians” who are ideologically opposed to the restrictions in the GPL, or “apolitical” tech-bros who are mostly just interested in their six figure paychecks and fancy toys.
To these folks, the MIT/BSD licenses have fewer restrictions, and are therefore more free, and are therefore more better.
Add to this, the constant badmouthing of GNU and FSF from the crony bootlickers and sadly this is what we get
The tech crowd is also more of a consumer kind these days than the hacky kind, so it’s much easier to push corporate shite with a little bit of polish on top
it’s interesting how the move away from the gpl is never explicitly justified as a license issue: instead, people always have some plausible technical motivation. with clang/llvm it was the lower compile times and better error messages; with these coreutils it’s “rust therefore safer”. the license change was never even addressed
i believe they have to do this exactly bc permissive licenses appeal to libertarian/apolitical types who see themselves as purely rational and changing a piece of software bc of the license would sound too… ideological…
so the people in charge of these changes always have a plausible technical explanation at hand to mask away the political aspect of the change
The rust coreutils project choosing the MIT license is just another gambit to allow something like android or chromeos happen to gnu+linux, where all of the userland gets replaced by proprietary junk.
And yet that’s a popularly welcomed approach, for some reason. Just look at the number of thumbs down this has. https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/issues/1781
I"m with you on copyleft, but if I had any connection to the project and felt the need to add a reaction emoji, it’d probably be a “thumbs-down” as well.
It’s not because I’m against the GPL, but because of the way the GitHub comment is written.
It doesn’t even say “you should use the GPL”, it says “you MUST say GNU doesn’t agree with you”. I’m perplexed.
Now, I respect the idea of GNU, but the way GNUers in general go about behaving themselves is perfect to alienate people, and this GitHub issue is a prime example. I don’t get it.
If people don’t know about GNU, tell them. Nicely.
If people have misconceptions about GNU, there’s nothing wrong with fixing them. Again, nicely.
The problem is, whenever I encounter GNU and however much I agree with them on key issues (which is at about 90%, my main gripe with them being Freedom 0), they just have a knack to get me, someone who is with them on most issues, annoyed at them. I can clearly see how someone who isn’t as alligned with them as I am gets equally annoyed and avoids GPL and GNU like the plague just to fuck with 'em (while fucking over everyone, including themselves). Not to mention ones into the libertarian stream, since you yourself covered that pretty well.
What the GitHub issue you linked that I keep coming back to shows is this GNU herd mentality of fucking over others unintentionally and in turn fucking over everyone. While they’re clearly better than the “libtards”, they still end up doing the same mistake.
That sounds a lot more confrontational and less diplomatic.
The ticket was actually indirectly asking it, by explaining the potential problems with non-copyleft. They just added “If you plan to carry on…” to introduce a compromise, which actually allowed for at least some minor change to be made, and made it clear that the different license is intentional and not just for lack of awareness (which would imply the devs have no intention on switching).
Somehow you added the “MUST” to this sentence, but not to the first one… even though the github issue did not say they MUST, instead it even used the word “please” and appealed to having some deference to the GNU coreutils.
At least this issue managed to get a change through for clarity… I don’t think you would have gotten anything at all with the other approach.
There is another issue on their tracker that was opened many years ago about relicensing to GPL, but it kind of became one of those things where a bunch of people came in and discussed it back and forth to death with no resolution.
I remember the lead developer of the Rust version of Coreutils gave a talk about the project once and he addressed the licensing question by essentially saying (paraphrasing), “I don’t care about this. So I just picked one.” You’d think someone so involved with open source as that guy (seriously, he has a hugely impressive pedigree) would care, or would at least give a justification.
yeah, unfortunately most people in the foss community are the apolitical/free thinker types who hate the fsf bc it is “too political/evangelist” and don’t want to understand how user freedom is affected by permissive licenses
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I use LLVM because it’s good, but I would like it even more if it was GPL and I agree with OP’s comment as well.
However, you’re literally the guy that replies “oh, so you hate oranges” to people that say “I like apples” or however that meme goes. How about you don’t completely twist people’s justifications into something they never said.
edit: It comes down to that I have no say in whether other people want to allow their code to be exploited by corporations nor does it make a practical difference to me in what I can do with it, all I can do is say “you’re an idiot” to them.
chill, man. i’ve never said this is consciously (or at all) his reasoning for not choosing the gpl. what i mean is that, collectively, this is what’s pushing the development, sponsoring, and adoption of more and more tooling with permissive licenses
Yeah, that’s all there’s to it, along with pure ignorance. In a past not so ideologically developed life, I’ve written code under Apache 2 because it was “more free.” Understanding licenses, their implications, the ideologies behind them and their socioeconomic effects isn’t trivial. People certainly aren’t born educated in those, and often they reach for the code editor before that.
Freedom for the rich and powerful to fuck over society and everyone else!
This, I understand.
This, I do not. Apologies for my tone in the next paragraph but I’m really pissed off (not directed at you):
WHAT RESTRICTIONS??? IF YOU LOT HAD EVEN A SHRED OF SYMPATHY FOR THE COMMUNITY YOU WOULD HAVE BOYCOTTED THE MIT AND APACHE LICENSE BY NOW. THIS IS EQUIVALENT TO HANDING CORPORATIONS YOUR WORK AND BEGGING THEM TO SCREW OVER YOUR WORK AND THE FOSS COMMUNITY.
I feel a bit better but not by much. This makes me vomit.
I write code for a living. I cannot, by any means, utilize a GPL library to support the needs of our customers and will either have to write my own replacement or dig to find something with less restrictions like MIT.
On many occasions, we will find bugs or usage gaps or slowdowns that can get pushed back to the MIT licensed open source cause we were able to use it in the first place. If your goal is to make sure your library gets used and gets external contributors, I don’t see how GPL helps the situation as it limits what developers can even choose your library in the first place. If your goal is spreading the ideology that all software should be free, go keep banging your drum for GPL.
Thank you for your work. If people like you were all around us, then I wouldn’t mind as much projects using MIT since we would still see contributions. But I doubt there’s that many people out there like you. Thank you for contributing to FOSS.
Like 80% of the top 10 most contributed libraries on github are either MIT, Apache, or BSD. I think you underestimate how many corpo folks do contribute or wholly support open source libraries.
Since you seem so reasonable…
The restriction that some people object to is that the GPL restricts the freedom of the software developers (the people actually writing and contributing the code).
Most people would agree at first glance that developers should be able to license code that they write under whatever license they like. MIT is one option. Some prefer the GPL. Most see the right to choose a proprietary license for your own work as ok but some people describe this as unethical. I personally see all three as valid. I certainly think the GPL should be one of the options.
That said, if we are talking about code that already exists, the GPL restricts freedom without adding any that MIT does not also provide.
MIT licensed software is “free software” by definition. Once something has been MIT licensed, it is Open Source and cannot be taken away.
The MIT license provides all of the Free Software Foundations “4 freedoms”. It also provides freedoms that the GPL does not.
What the MIT license does not provide is guaranteed access to “future” code that has not yet been written. That is, in an MIT licensed code base, you can add new code that is not free. In a GPL code base, this is not possible.
So, the GPL removes rights from the developers in that it removes the right to license future code contributions as you want. Under the GPL, the right of users to get future code for free is greater than the right of the developer to license their future contributions. Some people do not see that as a freedom. Some even see it as quite the opposite (forced servitude). This “freedom” is not one of the “4 freedoms” touted by the FSF but it is the main feature of the GPL.
What if they choose a license that limits the freedom from all other developers to improve that copy of the software? is allowing a developer to restrict further development actually good for the freedom of the developers? Because I would say no.
The spirit of the GPL is to give freedom to the developers and hackers (in the good sense of hacker). The chorus of the Free Software Song by Stallman is “you’ll be free hackers, you’ll be free”.
“Your freedom ends when the freedom of others begins”
The only “freedom” the GPL restricts is the freedom to limit the freedom of other developers/hackers that want to edit the software you distribute. This is in the same spirit as having laws against slavery that restrict the “freedom” of people to take slaves.
Would a society that allows oppression (that has no laws against it) be more “free” than a society that does not allow oppression (with laws to guarantee the freedom of others is respected)?
What freedom in the sense of writing code does the GPL inhibit? GPL simply says that changes to the source must be published. MIT is just a scapegoat for companies to get stuff for free without helping the developer that’s giving their time and soul for it