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

[yogi_berra]

Why is it important to give people the option to restrict the end users freedoms?

You need to check your privilege, pal. You have exactly 0 rights to anybody else's work.

[Luke_Wolf]

No, either you are unaware or you choose to ignore realities. Public domain code failed utterly (yes it was quite popular). I could argue on the merits of permissive licensing too, but the conclusions are less clear cut.

Pure Public domain failed yes because code was all of the sudden subject to copyright and patents, however the public domain continues to effectively live on in permissive licenses. For instance all the BSD license says is essentially: Don't sue us, and don't try to claim that the code was written by you. Which is effectively the same thing as putting it out in the public domain (there are minor legal differences of course but the end effect is the same).

Yes, but this also goes for the cost of copying and distributing software. What this means is that there are very strong forces favouring the market leader, resulting in dominating player within each software category. This is why permissive licensing fails in terms of collaborative company effort. There will only be one winner when it comes to open stack, unless it goes copy-left. Just as any company putting resources into llvm/clang is pouring resources into Apple, strengthening a competitor who may put them out of business (yes, I am looking at you Intel with your compiler suite).

The problem with this idea is that you're assuming the existence of a dominant player/market leader. This only really happens when a company releases it's source code itself or a company buys out a project (Such as Apple did with CUPS and LLVM). However this occurs with Copyleft projects too, for example despite the LGPL license Digia has majority control of Qt, CUPS is under the GPL however if we look at Mesa, X11, and the BSDs we see that corporate control by a single entity doesn't have to be the case, and further even if a software project originates from a company or group the effect of the "Market leader" becomes diluted to the point of impotence, for example while Red Hat is the leader in Linux, due to the sheer popularity of Linux as an OS their influence on the kernel itself is around 10%, on the other hand while I don't have direct statistics for it, the Apache webserver has a lot of commercial interest and Red Hat, IBM, and Novell have people who are among the top contributors looking at the list of developers on Ohloh however the list of top contributors seems to be dominated by independent contributors.

Feel free to argue all you want, but you are wrong. It is not the same signal simply because it really isn't the same signal. That is why Theo De Radt needs to be very vocal about what he wants to achieve. If you slam gpl on your code, we all get the message. You cannot argue your way out of reality.

As a copy-left supporter you've got your opinion on what the signal means, and as a permissive supporter I have my opinion on what the signal means, and clearly we're not going to agree on that. So there's no point arguing this.

[Luke_Wolf]

*snip*

This isn't a discussion about personal like or dislike of permissive vs copy-left, it's a discussion about it's effects on communities, and how software develops, and as an aside of that whether open source being used everywhere by everyone is better or worse than enforcing a barrier, and as a further aside whether the OSS development model is superior for all cases. Personal feelings on "Oh teh GPL is teh evil" or "Oh teh BSD is teh evil" are not appreciated.

If you have something constructive to add such as evidence of one license type vs the other having larger communities or having superior code, feel free to discuss that point. But leave your feelings at the door kthx.

[Luke_Wolf]

further even if a software project originates from a company or group if it becomes extremely popular the effect of the "Market leader" becomes diluted to the point

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[Del_]

So just to mess up this discussion and get all the warring parties onto the same side (against me) I'm going to propose that the ideal open source license would allow proprietary use for a certain period of time by a company/individual who contributed a certain amount to the project, with reasonable safeguards against abuse.

Didn't Monty propose something like this for MariaDB? Could work I guess. Personally I am not sure there is any one perfect answer. Different licenses have different purposes, and many of them serves a needed purpose. As such, I have nothing against proprietary, permissive nor copy-left in general. However, I do find it troubling that a number of software houses are able to drain resources from idealistic open source developers on false premises. To me is seems pretty clear that the likes of Apple wants all the benefits of open development, but they want it to be a one way street, that is why they choose permissive.

Actually using gaming as an example against OSS is rather disingenous for one big reason. Nobody has ever tried to develop a serious game more complex than Wesnoth or Xonotic under an open source license.

Fair point, although I have to admit I have concluded that open development is far from being able to compete on AAA games. I believe the main obstacle is the need for massive investment over a short amount of time with lots going to graphical designers.

The problem with this idea is that you're assuming the existence of a dominant player/market leader. This only really happens when a company releases it's source code itself or a company buys out a project (Such as Apple did with CUPS and LLVM). However this occurs with Copyleft projects too, for example despite the LGPL license Digia has majority control of Qt, CUPS is under the GPL however if we look at Mesa, X11, and the BSDs we see that corporate control by a single entity doesn't have to be the case

Qt uses copyright transfer, so it is plagued by many of the same issues as with permissive licensing. I just hope it won't turn on us again, looked a bit spooky when Microsoft got Nokia by the balls. Yes, CUPS is a good example of Apple coming in and destroying it in terms of community (they still employ its only developer I believe), again copyright was all in one hand enabling proprietary extensions, ref. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CUPS#History Truth be told, I have not done any attempt to figure out what Apple added for their own use. So yes, I am specifically thinking of copy-left with distributed copyright in my earlier posts in this thread. Like linux, samba, debian, pulseaudio, git, gnome, kde, xfce, openwrt, red hat and systemd uses. They all can live well along side their proprietary competition. They also provide an atmosphere where multiple open projects can co-exist without destroying each other.

On the other hand nginx is today a proprietary project, and it seems to be taking a dominant position over the apache web-server. It will be interesting to see that one unfold.

[zanny]

You need to check your privilege, pal. You have exactly 0 rights to anybody else's work.

How in the hell does that statement mean I'm trying to claim others work? The statement asks why it is important to enable the utilizers of your work to exploit the end user of your work.

[Hamish Wilson]

Actually using gaming as an example against OSS is rather disingenous for one big reason. Nobody has ever tried to develop a serious game more complex than Wesnoth or Xonotic under an open source license. As a result there is no data on the matter as to whether OSS can succeed or not as a development model for games, and thus we can't actually draw any conclusions.

How complex a game is does not matter to the argument, as my conclusions on this matter come more from comparing current "open source" offerings to independent titles, which tend to be on a similar level of complexity. The latter seem to be much more successful largely due to its closed centralized development which offers far more polished gameplay experiences. In general, a game needs one or two designers and not a hundred, just as a novel can never work if it has a hundred authors.

What we need now in order to make free software gaming a reality is to convince Indie developers that just because you have your source code available it does not mean that the game will stop selling. My previous reference to John Carmack's engine licensing, which you only vaguely touched on, goes a long way in showing how copy-left can actually potentially help with this, depending on the priorities of the developer in question.

In Essence while the culture of gaming and modding is counter to open source licenses at this point in time the effects of more open systems and available systems on the associated communities is a strong indicator that open source development and licensing would be beneficial to the gaming ecosystem.

In the context of fan made expansion content and even some multiplayer experiences I might agree with you, but when it comes to actually creating a properly balanced, coherent, and designed game experience opening up the development largely leads to a lack of consistent quality and a unified whole.

[zanny]

just because you have your source code available it does not mean that the game will stop selling.

And your art and sound assets. If you make all the models and textures available under a CC license, plus the music, you won't see a 5% drop in sales on Steam because most people will prefer supporting the dev and having the Steam convenience than getting a maybe-works repackage of the whole thing made by someone else. Assuming you don't try to price gouge the steam version and sell, say, a 2d sidescroller for $5 rather than $30. And of course you seek financing from those who want your products to continue producing games outside charitable convenience store sales.

[TeamBlackFox]

Well Luke here are my thoughts without my personal perspective on them on the copyleft vs copyfree/copycenter.

Most devs I know agree that copyleft is designed to protect the copyright of the developer by making a program such as a game commercially unviable unless you pay for a commercial license, like Prey 2's developer is doing for the GPL'd source code of id tech 4. For them, they honestly don't want their work to be shared with the community and I respect their right to do so. I'll probably play Prey 2 when it comes out. id tech engine games have a reputation for normally being good. So the GPL is counterintuitive to indie game development because it makes it very difficult for a game to be kept closed unless you pay out of the nose for a commercial license.

On the other hand the copyfree licenses are great for indie game development as you can add onto an existing game, and release the code if you feel like it. It gives secondary and tertiary developers more freedom. Of course I don't code for a living at all, I am a datacenter tech so I don't see code on the job, it's nothing more than a hobby for me. But when I do make something such as a game I'll release the engine for free under a permissive software license and sell the actual game and bundle it with the engine, some official binaries and the source itself so say someone on an unsupported platform can compile it. Hell, if they make a package for it I'll endorse it as a recommended build for whatever OS

[Luke_Wolf]

How complex a game is does not matter to the argument, as my conclusions on this matter come more from comparing current "open source" offerings to independent titles, which tend to be on a similar level of complexity. The latter seem to be much more successful largely due to its closed centralized development which offers far more polished gameplay experiences. In general, a game needs one or two designers and not a hundred, just as a novel can never work if it has a hundred authors.

Just which games are you comparing here? The only complex completely OSS games I can come up that compare to indies are VegaStrike, Wesnoth, and Xonotic, however I'm not aware of what Indie games fit into the categories against them.

Also the writing thing is why I think that if there were to be a complex OSS game (as in having real stories and such) it would need to be designed like Neverwinter Nights or Wesnoth such that you have your core assets, engine, editor, and some basic scripts as the "base" game, and then you have modules of stories (and you could allow people to sell proprietary story modules if you so liked if you wanted to keep the incentive of profit)

What we need now in order to make free software gaming a reality is to convince Indie developers that just because you have your source code available it does not mean that the game will stop selling. My previous reference to John Carmack's engine licensing, which you only vaguely touched on, goes a long way in showing how copy-left can actually potentially help with this, depending on the priorities of the developer in question.

Well here's my question with that, would a game be considered a derivative work of an engine or more specifically does it taint the license (if the engine was GPL)? It's not as clear cut to me as say using an IDE or a compiler as you're actually linking to and using the game engine itself for your scripts. If it does then while the developers of the original game/engine are protected from it's effects subsequent commercial developers can't use it without opensourcing everything. Which means we're back to square one because they're not going to use that because they want to sell their content, unless all you're after is a balkanized field of game engines and letting their individual games run everywhere.

LGPL or looser doesn't have that derivative works problem and so commercial developers can build off of the engines without the same issues (going under the assumption that games are considered a derivative work of the engine). So from the game developer perspective looser is better. If games are not derivative works of their engines then game developers are license agnostic as regards the engine, and it's a question of technical benefit.

But alright, so what about the people who create engines? Well their interest is in getting people to license the engine (Unless you want to try to make the argument for support contracts as opposed to sales). So instead of copyleft or permissive what they really want is a non-commercial license in order to increase interest while preventing people from making a dime off their products without their say so, and regardless will require a CLA to contribute upstream. However if someone big were to permissively license their engine they'd basically kill off their competitors overnight (unless they too decide to opensource and shift business model) because video game engines are expensive to license and the industry would transfer over to a support as opposed to sale basis. You can decide for yourself if that's a good thing or a bad thing.

In the context of fan made expansion content and even some multiplayer experiences I might agree with you, but when it comes to actually creating a properly balanced, coherent, and designed game experience opening up the development largely leads to a lack of consistent quality and a unified whole.

I heartily advise you to take a look at the freespace community, all of the major mods are very high quality and full games unto themselves.