RMS Feels There's "A Systematic Effort To Attack GNU Packages"

[MoonMoon]

If all programmers had as say, a union decision, released code only under the GPL3, all that locked crap could not have been legally sold. The resulting market vacuum would have forced the sale of unlocked equipment. This would have castrated CALEA and other police-friendly legislation requiring backdoors by making replacement of backdoored software and firmware much easier.

I don't think so. Having a GPL V3 licensed OS forces nothing, except the manufacturers to come up with their own proprietary solution, exactly what happened before Android. Nothing would have changed.

[efikkan]

Lot's of GNU packages are in need of overhaul or replacement and LLVM is a bigger load of crap than GCC, but for now we still need both for lots of uses. But we need to get past bickering about collaberation between different projects, sometimes a competing project might offer an improvement (like X might pick up something from Wayland and vice versa).

C library should be removed in order to system would be relatively secure and wouldn't be full of security bugs like buffer overflows.

So what are you going to do instead, implement everything in Java? There is nothing wrong with writing proper C code, in fact lots of software would be less bloated and stable if written properly in C.

[Luke]

Actually this WOULD have worked.

I don't think so. Having a GPL V3 licensed OS forces nothing, except the manufacturers to come up with their own proprietary solution, exactly what happened before Android. Nothing would have changed.

A strike by "ALL programmers" to force use of the GPL v3 would in fact have forced the hardware makers to sell unlocked devices, by cutting off the supply of coders to write proprietary locked crap.

[MoonMoon]

A strike by "ALL programmers" to force use of the GPL v3 would in fact have forced the hardware makers to sell unlocked devices, by cutting off the supply of coders to write proprietary locked crap.

You just would have ended with a lot of unemployed developers, replaced by those that don't have these moral limitations. And yes, those will ever exist, because for some people having food and shelter weighs more as some moral high ground.

[KernelPanic]

One danger is that a piece of non-GNU code will negotiate closed source blobs. Another is that code under restrictive usage licenses (you can see the code and maybe even contribute to the project but you can't use it for yourself or maintain a fork) will patched through one of those plugin APIs.

That's not necessary a fault of the permissive license. That's more of a fault of whoever allowed the code into the project. For instance, the OpenBSD project is under a two-clause BSD license, but they make sure there are no NDAs or other restrictive licenses that are in the base. It's considered part of their auditing process. Linux is under the GPL, but it contains firmware blobs that aren't exactly free.

http://changelogs.ubuntu.com/changel....141/copyright

I'd venture to say most Linux users haven't read that.

And this isn't a theoretical concern: Apple and Sony keep a lot of LLVM work closed source or under non permissive licenses by using plugin interfaces. Intel is rumored to have a whole stack of compiler optimization they won't release.

Which is fine in my opinion. I'll agree that it would be nice if companies shared their contributions with the world. However, if the company doesn't want to use something under the GPL and doesn't have another open-source alternative, then they're just going to create their own proprietary system and not share it. The more permissive licenses allow a "bridge" between what can be open-sourced and what can't be.

At the end of the day though, both GCC and clang are good, free, and open-source compilers. Ultimately, the future of both lies in the developers who use them.

[blackiwid]

Which is fine in my opinion. I'll agree that it would be nice if companies shared their contributions with the world. However, if the company doesn't want to use something under the GPL and doesn't have another open-source alternative, then they're just going to create their own proprietary system and not share it. The more permissive licenses allow a "bridge" between what can be open-sourced and what can't be.

I dont agree to that, the question is why do you want to develop/use free/open source software. If its only because its costfree or because its in some cases technical better, of course you dont care. If you as developer dont agree that proprietary software should be legal or at least you dont want to contribute to it, or maybe you just want that the people that gain from your contribution give something free back, you dont want that. you maybe also want not advertise proprietary software/plugins with your software.

And there is another point, when there is maybe a free as in free beer plugin that is proprietary, its less likely that somebody makes the effort to write a free version of the plugin. So I dont see any advantages except for people that dont care about freedom at all, I mean if you see the lisense only as a small implementation detail of a software, you will not care, but most (developer) people dont, and that is not foss-developer exclusive, proprietary software developers also using that lisenses pretty exclusivly, except it really hurts them, and a software that they cant money with maybe has no change to get used because its a to small thing taht nobody would eat taht bad lisenses for such a small advantage. But in general they are also pretty convinced that this is how software should be lisensed and see no moral problems with it, or even see free software as cancer or something, because they only think on the money side and see their advantage over everything else no matter what.

[KernelPanic]

I dont agree to that, the question is why do you want to develop/use free/open source software. If its only because its costfree or because its in some cases technical better, of course you dont care. If you as developer dont agree that proprietary software should be legal or at least you dont want to contribute to it, or maybe you just want that the people that gain from your contribution give something free back, you dont want that. you maybe also want not advertise proprietary software/plugins with your software.

And there is another point, when there is maybe a free as in free beer plugin that is proprietary, its less likely that somebody makes the effort to write a free version of the plugin. So I dont see any advantages except for people that dont care about freedom at all, I mean if you see the lisense only as a small implementation detail of a software, you will not care, but most (developer) people dont, and that is not foss-developer exclusive, proprietary software developers also using that lisenses pretty exclusivly, except it really hurts them, and a software that they cant money with maybe has no change to get used because its a to small thing taht nobody would eat taht bad lisenses for such a small advantage. But in general they are also pretty convinced that this is how software should be lisensed and see no moral problems with it, or even see free software as cancer or something, because they only think on the money side and see their advantage over everything else no matter what.

I don't see it as a black-and-white solution. If your livelihood relies on you earning an income from writing code, then it's going to be quite difficult to justify open-sourcing it. Some people may also be forbidden from open-sourcing code or using the GPL in certain corporate environments.

One thing to note with the GPL is that it doesn't prevent "leeching" either. If you take source code licensed under the GPL and don't distribute the modified versions, then you don't have to give anything back.

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq....alDistribution

If this is applying to a large firm and they feel their software gives them a competitive advantage, then they won't give away anything anyway.

Personally, I don't think the GPL is evil or anything like that. But I try to approach it from a more pragmatic viewpoint. I feel more permissive licenses give a greater incentive to get people to share code vs trying to use a license dictating how it should be shared.

[MoonMoon]

One thing to note with the GPL is that it doesn't prevent "leeching" either.

I would say that much harsher, the GPL encourages leeching: If you import BSD licensed code into a GPL licensed project (which is totally valid and allowed) changes to that code, which are licensed under the GPL, can not be ported back to the original project due to license reasons. So in this case, ironically, the GPL prevents exactly what they wanted to achieve in the first place. In effect, seen from the standpoint of the developers of the original code, the GPL is not better at all than a closed source derivative of the same code, both make changes to the code unavailable to the original project. So, if you call one of them leechers you have to call the other one leechers, too.

[bridgman]

I would say that much harsher, the GPL encourages leeching: If you import BSD licensed code into a GPL licensed project (which is totally valid and allowed) changes to that code, which are licensed under the GPL, can not be ported back to the original project due to license reasons. So in this case, ironically, the GPL prevents exactly what they wanted to achieve in the first place. In effect, seen from the standpoint of the developers of the original code, the GPL is not better at all than a closed source derivative of the same code, both make changes to the code unavailable to the original project. So, if you call one of them leechers you have to call the other one leechers, too.

This doesn't sound right. Most of the BSD license variants (maybe "many" not "most", I haven't counted them ) are compatible with GPL so the BSD-licensed code can be returned to the GPL project assuming there isn't a project-specific rule prohibiting it. As an example, most of the graphics driver code in the Linux kernel is X11 licensed.

[MoonMoon]

This doesn't sound right. Most of the BSD license variants (maybe "many" not "most", I haven't counted them ) are compatible with GPL so the BSD-licensed code can be returned to the GPL project assuming there isn't a project-specific rule prohibiting it. As an example, most of the graphics driver code in the Linux kernel is X11 licensed.

I think you have misunderstood me. You can, as you state, use BSD licensed code in a GPL licensed project, however, the changes that are made in the GPL licensed project to the BSD licensed code are also GPL licensed and there is no way to use GPL licensed code in anything but GPL licensed projects. You can't use GPL licensed code in a BSD licensed project without switching the whole project to the GPL.
This has to the BSD licensed code the same effect as not releasing the changes at all.