This comment kinda rubs me the wrong way, especially since the author notes that I also want to preserve full ownership of the code so that I can do commercial licensing of code derived from it. If there are many companies that want a curve like this (which means it presumably took non-trivial time and skills to develop), maybe they should come to a commercial agreement with the author?

What is it with pushing people to unpaid labour to make megacorps happy with some fuzzy notion of potential "wide adoption" as the only reward?

Thank you. As you note, the story here is very clear. It's under GPL so there is no friction for it being used in open source creative apps like Inkscape, and for uses outside GPL I want people to buy an exception[0]. I've had success with this licensing model in the past and am hopeful it can continue.

[0] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling-exceptions.en.html

Good for you. That's exactly as intended.

The intent of making something open source is usually for others to use it. The parent is remarking that by choosing GPL the code would probably never be used. Which, in theory, would defeat the reason for making it open source in the first place.

I'm assuming the idea behind making such a comment is the realization that many people, especially in academia, do not realize how unusable GPL is.

> The parent is remarking that by choosing GPL the code would probably never be used.

Nonsense. Raph Levien's spiro spline code already is used in Inkscape and Fontforge, as you could easily have found out yourself. How exactly is releasing code under GPL going to to prevent its adoption in widely used GPL'ed software?

And if the approach is any good, why would a commercial software vendor not be convinced by the GPL'ed prototype to reach out to Raph to find a licensing deal or commission work from him rather than doing it themselves?

> people [...] do not realize how unusable GPL is.

The GPL is so unusable that almost every computer or device you touch is full of GPL'ed software.

I think the "unusability" of the GPL is exactly what many people want when they release GPLed code.

GPLed code can be used by other researchers (good for popularity), but you can't use it for proprietery software.So if Adobe wants to use this curve, they have to license it.

If it actually works out, I don't know, but that's been the intention of some researchers that I asked why they used GPL.

> The intent of making something open source is usually for others to use it.

The intent of releasing something under a MIT or BSD license, maybe.

You can release the source code without any license. Adding a license means you want other people to "license" it from you - I.E. using your code.

The GP actually quoted the article "and solves most of the problems that held that back from wider popularity."

Which imply the author wanted people to adopt it. I'm assuming it wasn't about other academics adoptions but of hobbyists and commercial ventures.

> Many companies […] would avoid GPL just avoid any possible litigation

There are so many examples of GPL software being blacklisted by commercial companies and dying out as a result. Linux, Bash, gcc, Blender, Ansible, MySQL, git… It really is quite a graveyard.

In all seriousness, the licensing choice seems very reasonable for someone wishing to partner with commercial companies rather than have their work lifted without royalties.

There's a difference between using GPL software, and shipping GPL software as part of your product.

I use lots of GPL software for building my product (like git), but I can't ship any as a part of it.

I presume that code for a curve is meant to be included in a product, rather than being used on its own.

libgit2 is used by GitHub (a Microsoft product); bash is packaged in macOS (an Apple product); MySQL is served in RDS (an Amazon product).

Companies find various ways to ship GPL software, depending on the situation. Sometimes it requires discussing it with the authors. Overall, it does ensure greater protection on the authors and on the propagation of the software.

libgit2 has a "linking excemption", which is probably the only reason why Github can use it, so that's a bad example, because it isn't really GPL (it's more like LGPL).

Shipping bash as a part of macOS is not what I had in mind. (and it's funny, because macOS ships an ancient version of bash, because they don't want to touch GPL3...)

As for Amazon RDS, I thought that was SaaS? So they don't "ship" it either...

I mean the whole purpose of GPL is to make using it with closed source difficult / impossible.

And in practice, apart from the big Open Source projects, GPL is used a lot by people who don't want to give away their code for free, they just want to get people to pay for a commercial license. Which is odd, because it feels like it is totally against the spirit of the free software movement.

> Which is odd, because it feels like it is totally against the spirit of the free software movement.

And yet, it is completely within the original intended spirit. It is not about "giving source code away for free", it is about the user (who may very well have paid for the right to use the software) being "free" to do whatever they want with it...up to and including modifying the source code for their own benefit. With traditional proprietary (aka "non-free") software, even if you had access to the source code, you are not legally allowed to modify it. And then GPL goes a step further and allows you to redistribute your modifications! That's freedom.

The idea that "open source" means "give everything away" is imho one of the primary mistakes of the "free software" movement. and why RMS now encourages the term "libre software" instead.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html

He considers commercial licensing.

GPL is perfect, we get to play around with it and the author may make money from it. And if it doesn't work, the author can still switch to a more permissive license (MIT, BSD,...), the other way around won't work.

Also worth noting that it is presumably not patented, so nothing prevent companies from rewriting the algorithm.

The author is still able to give out commercial licences to companies, so where is the problem?

Anyone interested is free to obtain a better license aligned with their needs.

Surely the curve function is worth something. Take that something and invest in a non GPL license.

GPL = Share and share alike

A company using the curve function for profit is not sharing. And that is OK, but they should also be paying for that, due to the fact that they are unwilling to pay by contributing more open code.

The open code comes from people who have to eat. It makes perfect sense for closed projects to pay for a suitable license. The author makes mention of all this, indicating commercial license plans.

That's exactly as it should be.

Agree, GPL effectively means non-commercial.

Most companies won't touch GPL code with a barge-pole.

Would you want to use code the author explicitly describes as not yet complete research-code and not for production commercially?

If it doesn't belong in a commercial product, does it belong in Inkscape or OpenOffice?

That was previous millennium. We're in 2018 now.