GCC To No Longer Require Copyright Assignment To The Free Software Foundation

[wizard69]

that quoted bit is one big reason many reject GPL. GPL is the opposite of developer freedom, basically they steal your code.

Are you sure ? My understanding was that the company is granted back a right to use their contribution outside of free software.
Am I looking at the right document ?

[wizard69]

seriously why does that even bother you? As long as you have the copyright you can keep it free.

Also consider software that might get modified by many players. If you are the maintainer of the original code do you really want to deal with thousands of slightly modified code bases? Sometimes keeping customized software private is far better for everybody involved. Frankly I’ve never understood this fear.

That has nothing to do with whether you want to make a profit from your code or not. I can release my code under GPLv3 without ever intending to make any profit from it. But I also want to protect other users from somebody rogue taking my code, making a small modification and keeping it proprietary (it's not even about selling, since GPL allows selling).

[jaypatelani]

uid313 you can pull request on github as well https://github.com/NetBSD they have mercurial repo as well

[MadeUpName]

that quoted bit is one big reason many reject GPL. GPL is the opposite of developer freedom, basically they steal your code.

Seriously we are in 2021 and people still don't understand the GPL? When you submit code under any version of the GPL you have to certify that you own all the rights to the code you are submitting. Further you have to grant any one that legally uses the code following the GPL a non-revokable right to use the code. You don't actually have to give ether your copyright or patents away. If some one then takes your code and uses it in a project that isn't GPL then you can go after them. What FSF was doing wasn't GPL they were off reservation freelancing some whacky shit.

The classic example is the company behind the original SSH. They GPL'd it, got the community to submit a bunch of patches to fix their buggy ass code, then turned around and close sourced it again. The problem was yes they could close source any new contributions but any of the code they already released under the GPL was FREE. So the community just forked at the last point before they closed it again. Shortly after a nasty exploit happened that effected proprietary SSH but not free SSH and you had to pay serious money to get the fix or you could just upgrade to the free as in beer, free as in speech version. Bye, bye proprietary SSH.

[uxmkt]

Seriously we are in 2021 and people still don't understand the GPL?

People already fail at much more trivial tasks (such as rules pertaining to virus mitigation, both digital and analog), so.. nothing is surprising anymore.

[yurikoles]

Apple doesn't want to contribute code back to the wider world, their LLVM is not mainline LLVM :^)

The main driver of current development for Apple platforms, Swift is Open Source, which is based on Apple's downstream fork of LLVM, which is in turn also Open Source.

They are not mainlining all of their work, but they are not hiding/closing it, anyone may build Swift/LLVM on some Linux, e.g. for server-side/backend development.

They even opensourced core aspects of Swift: Grand Central Dispatch (GCD) and Foundation, so anyone may develop apps using Swift for other platforms, sharing most of the code. Higher-level frameworks is still proprietary, but they are mostly depended on Apple OSes and hardware, just simply commercial, killer-feature of Apple Ecosystem, e.g. UIKit, SwiftUI, Combine.

You can even write native code in Swift may be compiled and run on Android, so it may replace likes of C/C++, e.g. for gamedev and other cross-platform, performance-critical use-cases.

[randomsalad]

I hate copyright assignments and signing with real names and such.

Often I want to contribute to some open source project, usually just something minor, and then it says I have to sign some legal document, and then I just abandon it.
If it is not that, then my pull request often have multiple commits and the maintainers want me to squash them, or change the commit message for something that I already committed, and it just gets confusing and tricky. The bar to contributing to open source is too high, it is too complex.

Keeping commits and merge requests sensible makes the life of maintaining the software much easier, though. Writing sensible commit messages, keeping related changes grouped together, and avoiding double-changes within the context of a single MR all go a long way to making the act of maintaining software that much easier.

Tools like git squash, git rebase and git reset are super-useful, I strongly recommend you learn them even if you're not expecting to contribute to these projects that much, if at all.

[9Strike]

You people should understand that free software =/= open software and that the GPL3 is like that for a reason.

In principle yes, but the FSF fucked up the GPLv3. Really, Tivoization should have never been a part of it (just like in the GPLv2). That's the reason why GPLv2 and v3 are incompatible with each other, despite the funny "or later" term. Linus decided to explicitly not allow the GPLv3 in the Linux kernel because of that.

They created the AGPL, why not also the TGPL that restrict tivoization? This would have been way more helpful.

Tbh I think the EUPL these days is a much more relieable. No more "or later" stuff, and legally binding in 27 countries. Essentially it's ALGPL with allowed relicensing to GPLv2 and v3 for maximum compatibility.

[flakmirror]

I think this is a good move, but while I understand RMS when he wants to keep GCC extension unfriendly to keep the freedom, the CLA and the license has driven off several developers off the project: for instance the IR in GCC is kept under the wraps and not exposed because someone could create non-free extensions: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/e.../msg00171.html

I don't think this will change things much, for better or worse.

[Nocifer]

GPL is the opposite of developer freedom, basically they steal your code.

The GPL is not so much about developer freedom as it is about code freedom; or even better, it's not about personal freedom but about communal freedom. It is about making sure that we as developers respect the freedom of other developers by preventing us from being selfish a$$holes and taking their free, open source code for our own and doing whatever with it without giving anything back to them and the rest of the community, and it also prevents others from doing the same to us. Basically, it's a way of ensuring that developers (including yourself) can release their code to the public in good conscience, without being afraid that their good conscience will be abused.

So if you are a developer who values freedom and open source, then the GPL is of course not the opposite but rather the pinnacle of developer freedom.

If, on the other hand, you want to be the aforementioned a$$hole then yes, GPL is "the opposite of developer freedom" and it "steals your code" (which in this case means "it steals you of the right to steal MY free code") and you can cry me a river.

I'm all for arguments against the GPL when it comes to the successful commercialization of software (i.e. I can understand that in our less than perfect world, always enforcing the GPL is at least impractical) but when it comes to the morality of it, arguing against it on the premise of it "stealing your freedom" sounds to me as if you were advocating for the right of e.g. a bully to have the "freedom" to punch little kids in the face. Your freedom should respect MY freedom, and that's what the GPL ensures. Anything less than that and we're not talking about freedom but about anarchy (in the bad antisocial sense; not in the well-intentioned sociopolitical sense, of which the GPL is an example of).