Matthew Garrett: How-To Drive Developers From OS X To Linux

[Del_]

The Question isn't whether those vendors forked, the question is rather whether those vendors contributed back upstream.

No, please stop this black or white attitude, you are smarter than this. Probably a number of them contributed upstream, just as surely as probably none of them contributed everything upstream. Same with AOSP, Google (the rich uncle) threw the code over the fence, sure there are contributions. However, noting how large the project is and the vast number of corporations involved,then the contributions should by your logic be monumental. Fact of the matter is that the only viable free android (Cyanogenmod) joined the crew and now effectively has a proprietary fork of Android (i.e., it is not free anymore). The amount of contribution and community involvement back to Android is shockingly low. The leader of AOSP withdrew in protest, remember?

Now Luke, if you are happy with open core, I suggest you come clean and say so. If not, then please take in some of the data out there.

[Luke_Wolf]

Yes really. Just as webkit is part of safari and cups has had proprietary extensions on OSX for quite some time. Moreover, I believe the only reason Apple keeps LLVM/Clang development sort of open (they did keep the ARM64 stuff rather closed for quite some time, didn't you notice?), is because of their stated goal of out-competing gcc. I only hope they fail, and that both compiler stacks prosper in the time to come. It is going to be very interesting to see how other companies involvement in LLVM/Clang works out long term. It certainly didn't take google long to figure out that webkit collaboration was rather tedious. But yes, the model can succeed. Let's discuss it again in ten years.

Suffice it to say that I am in 100% disagreement with you over the idea that the derivative works of Safari and XCode somehow automatically should be opensource just because the core library they're built ontop of is.

As far as it taking a long time for Apple to release the code, yeah that sucks but what matters is that they did of their own will and volition release it, they didn't need a gun put to their head to force them to release it under a permissive license which is the idea that you and chrisb are pushing.

Nothing prevents anybody from using GPL code. Everybody uses linux today. What you are trying to say is that you are losing those developers that would like to include the code in their employers software,

Since when exactly were we talking about people using GPLed code as opposed to developing products with GPLed code? The fact that businesses are willing to adopt LAMP servers to serve their web pages is completely irrelevant to the discussion of developers adopting code into their own projects. Further most users (as opposed to developers) are license agnostic, and what matters to them is the technical benefits of a project more than anything else.

and you believe this to be a very important group of developers. In some cases this may be true, typically if you have one major company throwing the code over the fence for free for all. If you on the other hand conclude that their is no such rich uncle, then the empirical evidence telling you that you are wrong is right in front of your nose. In the case of openstack, that rich uncle was Rackspace, and they have had a tremendous success with their bet so far. I am very interested in seeing how this plays out though. I am afraid proprietary extensions and management software will be abundant some years down the road. That is, unless Red Hat decides to be the second rich uncle for the project. If they do, I do hope they choose GPL for licensing regardless.

This has nothing to do with "Rich Uncles" this has everything to do with one of the most important groups of users: Developers as users of your library or software. These individuals are adding value to your project on top of what you provide. So for instance as it's the topic at hand, the Kwin and Clutter developers as well as the individuals playing with Weston are all significantly more important to the Wayland project in terms of code and bugs they can submit than Joe Schmuck user, the difference that permissive licensing brings is that it allows these high value developers to also be proprietary developers thus expanding the base of high value developers.

As developers yes, as users no. You really need to raise your precision level. They can still report bugs, and even provide patches, as users. And they do in large numbers. For me this is very pragmatic. When it comes to support contracts, it is not given that you will get more of them on a permissively licensed code base.

Users are completely irrelevant to our discussion here. Developers are what matters.

and stop with the gun already. It is even worse than all the car analogies that plague the internet.

It's a common english saying, and an apt one. Regardless of the morals of what Samsung did in creating the exFAT driver, what if they didn't release it under GPL? well.. they wouldn't be able to distribute android, they'd probably have to shift large portions of their server infrastructure off linux and whatever else they might use it in. In effect a bullet to the head for a company that decides to build itself ontop of copy-left software, and then makes a stupid mistake of not adhering to the license.

On this we agree, but I am afraid humans are not that idealistic in general. I do believe we need GPL to keep the suits in check. As I am sure you know, a lot of people only care about the own short term profit.

Oh absolutely I can tell you that even in small teams I've had to deal with people playing political games for short term benefits while harming everyone in the long run. Short Sightedness of this kind is one of the largest problems with humanity in general.

That said I disagree that the GPL, and copy-left in general actually has the claimed net-positive effect, as I don't believe that forcing people to do things is productive and have seen nothing more than patch glob messes actually come of GPL enforcement.

Yes, you can get extra contributors from proprietary software houses, those may or may not outweigh potentially lost developers or sponsors. No, GCC is not hampered by politics, basically all issues have been addressed (transition to C++, plugin interface, modular code base, facilitating JIT). Actually you are very hard pressed to find a project more willing to adapt to those who wish better design than GCC. We all know where RMS comes from, but I get very provoked by your unfounded bashing of the GCC developers here.

Nowadays GCC is reforming and fixing itself yes, however RMS stifled the development of GCC for years due to his personal politics, such as not wanting to allow modules because he was afraid of proprietary developers expanding off of the codebase.

Desire for wider adoption? I beg to differ. My involvement in GPL projects is certainly fuelled my belief that those projects will get wider adoption than permissively licensed alternatives. I cannot speak for other of course, but neither should you.

Eh.. The point I was getting at is it's a difference of a matter of mindset of the license. Permissive licensing lets everyone use it no strings attached as a feature, whereas copy-left enforces that code must remain open (and if hard copy-left that anything built ontop of it must be open) as a feature. And the reasoning for going one way or the other is going to be strongly influenced by the nature of the license.

For instance I don't believe in Intellectual Property as a concept, and view it as a harmful toxic entity. Derivative Works especially do not sit well with me and as a result I will avoid contributing to a project that has a license harder than LGPL if I can, and while I would release code under the public domain that doesn't solve the patent issue and in some places public domain isn't a valid license. As a result I have strong preference for the Apache 2.0 license with my own projects.

[Luke_Wolf]

No, please stop this black or white attitude, you are smarter than this. Probably a number of them contributed upstream, just as surely as probably none of them contributed everything upstream. Same with AOSP, Google (the rich uncle) threw the code over the fence, sure there are contributions. However, noting how large the project is and the vast number of corporations involved,then the contributions should by your logic be monumental. Fact of the matter is that the only viable free android (Cyanogenmod) joined the crew and now effectively has a proprietary fork of Android (i.e., it is not free anymore). The amount of contribution and community involvement back to Android is shockingly low. The leader of AOSP withdrew in protest, remember?

If ~300,000 commits, by ~2000 contributors, which amounts to 13.5 Million lines of code (as per Ohloh) isn't monumental I don't know what is. It's not the Linux kernel sure but even The Document Foundation only represents 2 or 3 hundred people last time I looked up the statistics.

Now Luke, if you are happy with open core, I suggest you come clean and say so. If not, then please take in some of the data out there.

I don't have a problem with open core, no. Open Source code is simply the pragmatic choice, and if both open source and proprietary vendors are standardizing on an open core (such as webkit or LLVM) then it's better for everyone involved because more open source is being used.

[zanny]

I don't have a problem with open core, no. Open Source code is simply the pragmatic choice, and if both open source and proprietary vendors are standardizing on an open core (such as webkit or LLVM) then it's better for everyone involved because more open source is being used.

Is it, really? There is the tangential debate between morals, ethics, and market share - for many of us developers our code being used is not the goal if it enables the restriction of a users software freedoms. There is a reason Google rewrote the entirety of the GNU userland for Android. It is not just this black and white "get open source everywhere no matter the sacrifice" good. Some of us would rather see our code used less to prevent the violation of users when possible.

[Del_]

If ~300,000 commits, by ~2000 contributors, which amounts to 13.5 Million lines of code (as per Ohloh) isn't monumental I don't know what is. It's not the Linux kernel sure but even The Document Foundation only represents 2 or 3 hundred people last time I looked up the statistics.

I tried to dig a bit further in that data for you, and did the tedious task of checking out the twenty developers with most commits. Eighteen are Google employees, one is the AOSP leader that left in protest, the last is a Bluez developer (yes that is the GPL bluetooth stack for linux). Google is a large software company, maybe you would like to check out the next twenty? Moreover, while linux steadily increases developers and commits, Android seems to be slowing down.

I don't have a problem with open core, no.

From your previous posting I really find that hard to believe. I took you for one that enjoyed not needing closed source on your desktop to have it functional. In any case, if you don't see any issues with open core development model, then I guess we can agree to disagree.

[Marc Driftmeyer]

Yes really. Just as webkit is part of safari and cups has had proprietary extensions on OSX for quite some time. Moreover, I believe the only reason Apple keeps LLVM/Clang development sort of open (they did keep the ARM64 stuff rather closed for quite some time, didn't you notice?), is because of their stated goal of out-competing gcc. I only hope they fail, and that both compiler stacks prosper in the time to come. It is going to be very interesting to see how other companies involvement in LLVM/Clang works out long term. It certainly didn't take google long to figure out that webkit collaboration was rather tedious. But yes, the model can succeed. Let's discuss it again in ten years.
Nothing prevents anybody from using GPL code. Everybody uses linux today. What you are trying to say is that you are losing those developers that would like to include the code in their employers software, and you believe this to be a very important group of developers. In some cases this may be true, typically if you have one major company throwing the code over the fence for free for all. If you on the other hand conclude that their is no such rich uncle, then the empirical evidence telling you that you are wrong is right in front of your nose. In the case of openstack, that rich uncle was Rackspace, and they have had a tremendous success with their bet so far. I am very interested in seeing how this plays out though. I am afraid proprietary extensions and management software will be abundant some years down the road. That is, unless Red Hat decides to be the second rich uncle for the project. If they do, I do hope they choose GPL for licensing regardless.
As developers yes, as users no. You really need to raise your precision level. They can still report bugs, and even provide patches, as users. And they do in large numbers. For me this is very pragmatic. When it comes to support contracts, it is not given that you will get more of them on a permissively licensed code base.

I should note that copyright transfer agreements like Ubuntu's CLA are very problematic. For this discussion I am thinking of copy-left projects with distributed copyright.

and stop with the gun already. It is even worse than all the car analogies that plague the internet.
On this we agree, but I am afraid humans are not that idealistic in general. I do believe we need GPL to keep the suits in check. As I am sure you know, a lot of people only care about the own short term profit.
Yes, you can get extra contributors from proprietary software houses, those may or may not outweigh potentially lost developers or sponsors. No, GCC is not hampered by politics, basically all issues have been addressed (transition to C++, plugin interface, modular code base, facilitating JIT). Actually you are very hard pressed to find a project more willing to adapt to those who wish better design than GCC. We all know where RMS comes from, but I get very provoked by your unfounded bashing of the GCC developers here. Desire for wider adoption? I beg to differ. My involvement in GPL projects is certainly fuelled my belief that those projects will get wider adoption than permissively licensed alternatives. I cannot speak for other of course, but neither should you.

You know jack about LLVM/Clang if you think Apple has the authority carte blanche to close or keep it open as they see fit. It is a collaborative project from dozens of large corporations and much more. You are a complete clown if you think LLVM/Clang will ever touch GPL.

[Marc Driftmeyer]

Suffice it to say that I am in 100% disagreement with you over the idea that the derivative works of Safari and XCode somehow automatically should be opensource just because the core library they're built ontop of is.

As far as it taking a long time for Apple to release the code, yeah that sucks but what matters is that they did of their own will and volition release it, they didn't need a gun put to their head to force them to release it under a permissive license which is the idea that you and chrisb are pushing.



Since when exactly were we talking about people using GPLed code as opposed to developing products with GPLed code? The fact that businesses are willing to adopt LAMP servers to serve their web pages is completely irrelevant to the discussion of developers adopting code into their own projects. Further most users (as opposed to developers) are license agnostic, and what matters to them is the technical benefits of a project more than anything else.



This has nothing to do with "Rich Uncles" this has everything to do with one of the most important groups of users: Developers as users of your library or software. These individuals are adding value to your project on top of what you provide. So for instance as it's the topic at hand, the Kwin and Clutter developers as well as the individuals playing with Weston are all significantly more important to the Wayland project in terms of code and bugs they can submit than Joe Schmuck user, the difference that permissive licensing brings is that it allows these high value developers to also be proprietary developers thus expanding the base of high value developers.


Users are completely irrelevant to our discussion here. Developers are what matters.



It's a common english saying, and an apt one. Regardless of the morals of what Samsung did in creating the exFAT driver, what if they didn't release it under GPL? well.. they wouldn't be able to distribute android, they'd probably have to shift large portions of their server infrastructure off linux and whatever else they might use it in. In effect a bullet to the head for a company that decides to build itself ontop of copy-left software, and then makes a stupid mistake of not adhering to the license.



Oh absolutely I can tell you that even in small teams I've had to deal with people playing political games for short term benefits while harming everyone in the long run. Short Sightedness of this kind is one of the largest problems with humanity in general.

That said I disagree that the GPL, and copy-left in general actually has the claimed net-positive effect, as I don't believe that forcing people to do things is productive and have seen nothing more than patch glob messes actually come of GPL enforcement.



Nowadays GCC is reforming and fixing itself yes, however RMS stifled the development of GCC for years due to his personal politics, such as not wanting to allow modules because he was afraid of proprietary developers expanding off of the codebase.


Eh.. The point I was getting at is it's a difference of a matter of mindset of the license. Permissive licensing lets everyone use it no strings attached as a feature, whereas copy-left enforces that code must remain open (and if hard copy-left that anything built ontop of it must be open) as a feature. And the reasoning for going one way or the other is going to be strongly influenced by the nature of the license.

For instance I don't believe in Intellectual Property as a concept, and view it as a harmful toxic entity. Derivative Works especially do not sit well with me and as a result I will avoid contributing to a project that has a license harder than LGPL if I can, and while I would release code under the public domain that doesn't solve the patent issue and in some places public domain isn't a valid license. As a result I have strong preference for the Apache 2.0 license with my own projects.

GCC has lost the battle.

[BeardedGNUFreak]

The failure of GCC and the rise and domination of LLVM/Clang is an amazing example of what happens when developers are liberated from poisonous viral licences used to promote nutty ideologies like the GPL.

Development, code sharing, and technological advances in the compiler world have exploded thanks to LLVM/Clang having a truly free and open license.

[Del_]

There is the tangential debate between morals, ethics, and market share - for many of us developers our code being used is not the goal if it enables the restriction of a users software freedoms. There is a reason Google rewrote the entirety of the GNU userland for Android. It is not just this black and white "get open source everywhere no matter the sacrifice" good. Some of us would rather see our code used less to prevent the violation of users when possible.

I appreciate that, and I believe you are not alone. To the extent I understand my own motivation it is actually very pragmatic. While some people in this thread seems to observe a very different world than the one I live in, a world where permissive licensing spurs more development than copy-left, it seems very clear to me that copy-left is the most efficient route long term. It actually seems to me that Luke's stand is just as idealistic as yours, only he seem to adhere to an extreme liberalist stance (I always fail to make sense of that line of thought).

[bridgman]

I appreciate that, and I believe you are not alone. To the extent I understand my own motivation it is actually very pragmatic. While some people in this thread seems to observe a very different world than the one I live in, a world where permissive licensing spurs more development than copy-left, it seems very clear to me that copy-left is the most efficient route long term. It actually seems to me that Luke's stand is just as idealistic as yours, only he seem to adhere to an extreme liberalist stance (I always fail to make sense of that line of thought).

It depends on who is doing the developing. If the world you live in gets most of its open source efforts from company funded developers, you're probably better off with a permissive license. If most of the development comes from individual volunteers, you're better off with a copyleft license.

In my world we can't afford to lose either group and neither license is ideal.