Why I don't use the GPL

http://www.kaybee.org/~kirk/GPL.html

by georgecmu • 13 years ago

26 22 13 years ago

fein• 13 years ago

The reasons cited in the article are exactly why I release software under wtfpl using a moniker.

Any of my code that I deem worthy of ridicule by the software community should be as easy to use and modify as possible. The only way that I've found for the purist in me to be satisfied is to allow complete freedom in the usage of code that I produce.

mehrzad• 13 years ago

I learned not much new from this. People have made this claim for years. The author isn't some visionary for figuring this out, and I assume he doesn't think he is. The point about financial benefit was interesting, however.

jkldotio• 13 years ago

> People have made this claim for years.

Indeed, and this was published in the Linux Journal in 2002. It is an old boring argument, it even includes the words "I'm not just trying to start a holy war here", echoing the famous cut and paste Slashdot troll. Georgecmu, who has over 6500 karma and who's been here quite a few years, knows exactly what he's doing: trolling (and I have flagged this submission as it's so obvious).

The Free Software Foundation is not half as dogmatic as people think either. They have released software under MIT, and have a huge list of licences they consider to be free. Pick the one that works for you.

icebraining2• 13 years ago

Stallman himself has advocated for non-copyleft free licenses when he considered they would increase the total user freedom (particularly, by helping Ogg take on MP3).

https://lwn.net/2001/0301/a/rms-ov-license.php3

_b8r03• 13 years ago

While I respect the author's choice, I have to disagree over the point about people contributing to the codebase.

I've spent the past two years reverse engineering products built on Linux with no source code or build chain available. Last week I spent two days breaking into an embedded Linux device that runs alongside entire families of motherboards using an almost completely open stack with no attribution, no contribution and no source code release. The authors (both the OEM and the motherboard manufacturer) as far as I can tell do not contribute to any of the projects I've identified on the board from their official email addresses or in a professional capacity.

When you start looking at MiFi hotspots it's even worse. I did a talk last year at BlackHat EU on one example[1] where I finally managed to get the developers to fess up the source.

[1] http://media.blackhat.com/bh-eu-12/Lord/bh-eu-12-Lord-Hotspo...

jcr3• 13 years ago

For those interested in seeing the BlackHat video presentation by Steve Lord (hn:iuguy):

https://www.blackhat.com/html/bh-eu-12/bh-eu-12-archives.htm...

At the time the idea of "required sharing" was put forward by RMS (1985 or so), it was a serious improvement over the status quo of proprietary software protected by confusing licensing terms.

Trying to redefine the terms "free," "freedom," and "liberty" to mean "restricted," "required," and "threat of legal harm" is dishonest rhetoric. The GNU/FSF should be more honest and direct by clearly describing their license as "sharing required."

The existence of a commonly used "sharing required" licenses like the GPL, and LGPL, and LLGPL, and ... has been beneficial in a lot of different ways. The primary way it has been beneficial over the years has been in how it very successfully nudges reluctant industry players towards releasing source code. The _requirement_ of sharing has shown industry the advantages of sharing code when they were previously fixated on the competitive advantages of not releasing code.

In the early days, the older BSD/MIT/ISC/PublicDomain licenses (well, public domain is not formally a license but you get the point), were insufficient to convince industry players to give up the competitive advantages of proprietary licenses and closed source software for the competitive advantages of collaboration through open source.

Times have changed, but not much. Licenses on open source code are still violated constantly by closed source vendors. It's not just a GPL problem; there's tons of proprietary closed source programs out there that fail to live up to either the "attribution" clause or the old "advertising" clause of the BSD-ish licenses. It really doesn't matter if your license of choice has an inherited "sharing required" clause, since it will still get lifted and incorporated into closed source, proprietary programs. Unless you have tons of time and money to waste in chasing the violators, your preferred license terms really don't matter.

The most interesting thing about violations of open source licenses is the reverse engineering perspective. When you're able to identify the misused open source code within an executable binary, you can then use fingerprinting of the open source to better understand the closed source binaries. If you're curious about this kind of identification and program understanding in reverse engineering, you should look into the FLIRT and FLARE features of the IDA Pro disassembler.

_b8r03• 13 years ago

> The most interesting thing about violations of open source licenses is the reverse engineering perspective. When you're able to identify the misused open source code within an executable binary, you can then use fingerprinting of the open source to better understand the closed source binaries. If you're curious about this kind of identification and program understanding in reverse engineering, you should look into the FLIRT and FLARE features of the IDA Pro disassembler.

For Linux-based devices more often than not they use a uImage loader with one of 3 filesystems (JFFS2, Squashfs, CramFS), so once you've got around whatever encryption or encapsulation's in the image (I typically generate a picture graphing bytes to spot entropy, a technique I shamelessly stole from Don A. Bailey) you can normally run something like binwalk[1] to identify the filesystems and dd them out using a small shell script. I typically mount each resulting image and extract the contents then unmount. You can usually spot the open source bits by looking at binary names, strings and the way they're linked.

Most Linux-based devices use common distros based on SBCs with uClibc and are either ARM or MIPS based. I'm slightly biased towards ARM because of the hotspot work but there's a lot of broadcom SBCs out there running *wrt variants.

If anyone's interested, I'll be at #44Café[2] this tuesday talking about breaking into onboard BMCs used for IPMI-based management. Again, GPL violations ahoy.

[1] https://code.google.com/p/binwalk/ [2] - http://44con.com/44cafe

gillianseed• 13 years ago

3. Offer proprietary licences to companies who wants to use it in a proprietary product. The x264 devs makes money on their GPL licenced code this way for example.

PaulHoule• 13 years ago

People have different viewpoints of what freedom means.

I am not against the GPL but I haven't used it on anything for 11 years and would be less inclined to use a product if it is GPL and I'm thinking about modifying it.

icebraining2• 13 years ago

I have, however, come to the conclusion that software licensed under the GPL is far from "free software".

Not to take on OP himself, but this kind of semantic argument gets tiring.

Free Software is a name for a concept that essentially means, "all software that gives the user the four freedoms state in its definition." The whole discussion around what it means for software to really be Free is a pointless red herring.

kostya-kow2• 13 years ago

In a sense, GPL is not free. It is free as in "freedom for society," but it is not free in a selfish, individualistic way. It does not give you freedom to not respect other people's freedom.

By using GPL, you sacrifice some of your personal freedom for the good of society.

But this is sometimes necessary for progress.

>A majority of companies have already decided that their product will be closed-source before they even started designing it.

Such a close-minded company does not deserve to benefit from FLOSS Software. If more organizations release their code under GPL, it will give this group of organizations an advantage over the once who prefer closed source license.

You can also just dual-license it, and give the companies that want to use your software in closed-source programs a chance to pay you money.

>If a closed-source company decides it could use some open-source code in its product, it will do one of two things (if the code is licensed under the GPL):

>1. Use the open-source code and not tell anybody

>2. Write their own code from scratch

If an essential library/framework this company wants to use is licensed under GPL, they may reconsider their decision to release software under closed-source license. And if they are so stubborn as to not even consider using FLOSS Software, then they do not deserve to exist. Newer, more innovative companies will take their place, leveraging the benefits of FLOSS.

I also think Linux's popularity over BSD kernels is a great example of why GPL is far better than all the permissive OSS licenses.

jiggy2011• 13 years ago

They might reconsider the licensing, OTOH it would be just as likely that this would create a market for companies to sell proprietary friendly libraries for the sorts of things that are typically available under MIT/BSD etc today.

The risk would be that such a market would tempt talent away from the open source ecosystem.

jeffdavis• 13 years ago

I have thought for a while that the FSF made a miscalculation with the GPL. The focus of the GPL is very much on the source code itself, as though having it was everything. I think that was a reasonable assumption to make at the time, but I don't think it reflects the current reality.

In reality, the code itself is somewhat of a liability -- a source of bugs and a time sink when you try to make modifications. What you really want is the end product and the flexibility to modify and improve it. To have the end product you don't need the source at all, and to modify and improve it the source is (nearly) necessary but not sufficient.

That has a few implications. One is that companies don't want to be burdened with source code. They would prefer to share the burden with other users, as long as they aren't giving away any competitive advantage they have. Win-win: they keep the ability to improve and modify it as they need, but unload much of the maintenance cost.

The GPL avoids a problem where people take an open source project and try to drive it away with a closed-source product that is a little better. But that doesn't really happen as far as I can see -- usually, releasing a closed-source product based on an open source project is good for both.

t_hozumi• 13 years ago

What I don't like about GPL is that nobody can define "link" without implementation detail.

I think there is no difference between linked modules and modules which are connected by TCP/IP.

dalke• 13 years ago

While you may think so, GPL is based on copyright, and it's what the copyright law and courts say which count. Linked modules contain code covered under copyright and hence is regulated by the GPL. A connection via TCP/IP does not.

It would be odd indeed to connect to Facebook's web site via TCP/IP, and claim that the Facebook system and my TCP client code are all part of one system, so Facebook has violated my copyright.

jcr3• 13 years ago

If you're curious about the legal side of linking in non-C languages, the following legal analysis of the LLGPL (Lisp Lesser GNU Public License) is an interesting read:

http://www.ifosslr.org/ifosslr/article/view/75/146

mhogomchungu• 13 years ago

As a copyright owner of source code,its important to know there are two kind of users of your code,"end users" and "distributors".

Any person who get the restrictions of the GPL is,by definition,"a distributor" and GPL does not exist to protect and serve their interests and that is why "distributors" complain about it.

If you are primary customer is "end users",then GPL is the right license for you,if your primary customer is "distributors",then BSD type of a license is a proper license.There is a reason why both licenses exist,they serve different purposes.

You changing from GPL to BSD type license could be an indication of you changing who your primary audience is.

ysapir• 13 years ago

"The company is much more likely to work with the open-source developers"

This is an understatement. When you work with an open-source third-party library/module in a commercial company, it is much easier for the company to submit bugfix patches to the open source developers. The company probably has access to a wider range of data (including proprietary client data that can't be released) but which will highlight hard to find bugs. The code is open source so it can debug the problem itself. But even if it is MIT/BSD/Apache/etc, it makes more sense for the company to send back the patches to be integrated. Otherwise, it has to maintain an unreleased patch-list and re-apply it with every version update. If it does not apply cleanly, it has to spend resources to update the patch to the changes in the new version. It's developer time the company can use for better things.

Knowing this is one more reason I am also more likely to choose code released under a permissive license than under GPL. I figure all things being equal, it is probably better tested, better code.

kostya-kow2• 13 years ago

>The code is open source so it can debug the problem itself. But even if it is MIT/BSD/Apache/etc, it makes more sense for the company to send back the patches to be integrated. Otherwise, it has to maintain an unreleased patch-list and re-apply it with every version update. If it does not apply cleanly, it has to spend resources to update the patch to the changes in the new version. It's developer time the company can use for better things.

It would be much easier for those companies to contribute upstream, instead of abusing loopholes in GPL.

profquail• 13 years ago

There was an good discussion on this topic earlier today, but somehow it disappeared from the front page of HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5580972

Why I don't use the GPL

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