FreeBSD Continues Work On Ridding Its Base Of GPL-Licensed Software

[bug77]

Seems to me to be the most useless thing you can do. GPL played a vital role in giving us free access to software. Free as in everyone had to work together, not free as in free to steal someone else's work.
I remember when FreeBSD was better, but few companies wanted to invest in it so that other people can steal your work and call it your own. Hence they stagnated and Linux improved.

Why useless? They want their code base under a more permissive license. They are free to do it.

[OneTimeShot]

Is this the old BSD process of deleting GPL copyright headers and committing with a comment "Code is now BSD"?

[jabl]

That's a very thorough response.

Thanks. For some reason I've been thinking and reading a lot lately on free vs open, and the future of FOSS. Not claiming I have any unique insights, but..

Agreed that the changes that GPLv3 made pushed people too far as it not only tried to clarify the spirit of the "GPLv2 or later", but also broke it. It should have not tried to extend the reach of basic GPL.

Instead, I think if RMS actually opened a discussion instead of used force it would be a different situation.

AGPL is troublesome as it tries to be full on public domain to the point that it excludes commercial work on it. I think it was always supposed to be a niche license.

I don't know, in a way AGPL is IMHO closer in spirit to the four freedoms given the rise of SaaS which has blown a huge hole in the GPLv2. IIRC some of the earlier GPLv3 drafts were pretty AGPL-like, but several of the companies involved in the GPLv3 process, like Google, objected strenuously and those parts were dropped from the final. Ironically(?), despite getting their way Google then still went and shifted their development efforts from the GNU toolchain to the LLVM ecosystem.

I guess it would have been nice if GPLv3 would have been AGPL-like, and the result would have been a lot more free software in the world. But, for better or worse, that's not reality. In reality, GPLv3 and AGPL particularly have largely been failures. Most usage of AGPL has been for "poison pill" licensing, trying to push users to buy a commercial license instead. And even in that case, it seems AGPL is not strong enough, as can be seen by SSPL, Commons Clause etc. pushed by MongoDB, Elastic, etc.

[Shiba]

Why useless? They want their code base under a more permissive license. They are free to do it.

And people are free to judge their efforts as useless.

[f0rmat]

fuck this shit californian bsd hippy nerdy hilly billies, I guess this idiots must be on some shit face pay book

Tell us how you really feel.

[zoomblab]

I have come to this conclusion. Any serious piece of software should be GPL. For auxiliary tools and libraries BSD, MIT, Apache, LGPL are ok.

No misunderstanding. I do consider there is a utility to all licences. But an OS? And a policy of restricting OS components to a specific licence family? It seems that their interests are not my interests. Thanks but no thanks.

[ermo]

The BSD codebases tended to be jealously guarded by a small cabal, which slowed down contributions, and disagreements tended to be resolved by forking the entire thing, which is how we got all those *BSD's, and further split the development effort.

At least for FreeBSD, the "jealously guarded by a small cabal" quip seems particularly relevant as it pertains to e.g. hardware sensor drivers; the result being that FreeBSD 12.x *still* doesn't have a nice, universal hardware sensor interface because a certain prominent member of said cabal flat out flamed the proposed implementation into oblivion literally *years* back.

Say what you will about the current quality and shortcomings of FreeBSD (compared to most modern Linux distributions, the installation and ootb experience is flat out laughable IME), but the approach where you have an integrated kernel and user-land does have its benefits IMHO.

[f0rmat]

Say what you will about the current quality and shortcomings of FreeBSD (compared to most modern Linux distributions, the installation and ootb experience is flat out laughable IME), but the approach where you have an integrated kernel and user-land does have its benefits IMHO.

I can certainly concur with you there - especially if it is implemented in such away that people could change the defaults if they wanted to. But an integrated kernel and user-land might help reduce many of those noobie scary messages that linux errors often produce.

[kpedersen]

I don't know, in a way AGPL is IMHO closer in spirit to the four freedoms given the rise of SaaS which has blown a huge hole in the GPLv2. IIRC some of the earlier GPLv3 drafts were pretty AGPL-like, but several of the companies involved in the GPLv3 process, like Google, objected strenuously and those parts were dropped from the final. Ironically(?), despite getting their way Google then still went and shifted their development efforts from the GNU toolchain to the LLVM ecosystem.

I am of the same opinion here. I am also wondering if the tonnes of GPL licensed code is actually working against us a little bit in that it is just making companies write web services rather than proper software. Web services whether intentional or unintentional have DRM as an underlying essence which I can't stand. At least with commercial desktop programs there is a *chance* they might not break it with DRM.

So I would generally recommend two choices depending on the type of project:

• Completely free license (i.e MIT, BSD) allowing anyone, even companies to do what they want with the code. Including making a proprietary desktop binary around.
• Affero GPL license to ultimately ensure free-software always stays competitive and relevant by forcing proprietary to play catchup rather than leverage existing code.

In some ways licensing some code under GPL and then some commercial company takes it and makes yet another web service (tying users to their servers) is the absolute worst case scenario. And unfortunately it is absolutely prevalent. unless the GPL fixes this issue and takes in core parts of Affero, I actually see it as a little bit of a failure. I would even rather a proprietary binary blob than having to connect to some-ones ratty internet server.

The problem I can see is, it is very hard to enforce AGPL. By nature of these companies who would break the license, they will not share any code to let us check.

[mdedetrich]

I am of the same opinion here. I am also wondering if the tonnes of GPL licensed code is actually working against us a little bit in that it is just making companies write web services rather than proper software. Web services whether intentional or unintentional have DRM as an underlying essence which I can't stand. At least with commercial desktop programs there is a *chance* they might not break it with DRM.

So I would generally recommend two choices depending on the type of project:

• Completely free license (i.e MIT, BSD) allowing anyone, even companies to do what they want with the code. Including making a proprietary desktop binary around.
• Affero GPL license to ultimately ensure free-software always stays competitive and relevant by forcing proprietary to play catchup rather than leverage existing code.

In some ways licensing some code under GPL and then some commercial company takes it and makes yet another web service (tying users to their servers) is the absolute worst case scenario. And unfortunately it is absolutely prevalent. unless the GPL fixes this issue and takes in core parts of Affero, I actually see it as a little bit of a failure. I would even rather a proprietary binary blob than having to connect to some-ones ratty internet server.

The problem I can see is, it is very hard to enforce AGPL. By nature of these companies who would break the license, they will not share any code to let us check.

I think web services is just a natural evolution that came about as the average Bob has more devices now than they used to. In the old days, you typically had one desktop PC (which was even a family PC so it wasn't even typically one device per person). Now people have multiple devices, i.e. laptops + tablets + smartphones + desktops and even smart watches so its kind of natural that the cloud is exploding because its for obvious reasons a logistical nightmare to have manually sync between all said devices.