As weird as it may seem, you should not forget that free software licenses are built upon the fabric of copyright. Without copyright, free software could not exist in its current form. For GPL-like "copyleft" licenses, there would be no way to enforce that binary distributions of derived works are accompanied by their source code. Similarly, in the context of permissive BSD/MIT-style licenses, there would be no way to enforce attribution.

So, given that FOSS---which a large portion of the HN crowd depends on---cannot work without copyright (at least not in its current form), the recent discussions may be less of a surprise.

Maybe... although I personally think that the GPL and other 'copy left' licenses aren't the reason open source has prospered, nor do I think enforcing attribution really helps the FOSS world that much.

People write and share code because it is useful to do that, not because licenses require them to.

I think FOSS would do fine with no copyright, and in fact more software might end up open source if we had ZERO copyright... why not make your code open source and get back contributions when your code would end up being shared anyway?

You may think that, but history argues otherwise. See the Unix Wars (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_wars).

I am not sure I follow. Are you saying licenses are what stopped the UNIX wars?

IMO Linux won because its license forced everyone who used and extended it to open their changes - this changes the calculus for firms building products on Linux to make it more worthwhile to upstream their changes to reduce their local maintenance burden.

Compare this to something like the playstation 4, which used freeBSD as the base of their OS, and contributed nothing back to the project at all.

Linux "won" because SGI very loudly shit the bed and betting on Itanium, taking IRIX with it, DEC was in the process of making the future of Tru64 very confusing with the Alpha, a computer that didn't support their flagship OS, and HP was EOLing HP/UX because they bet everything on IBM's OS/2 Warp.

The only big UNIX vendor left was Sun Microsystems, and Solaris indeed dominated the 90s dotcom era. Everybody was running SPARC and SunOS servers.

It wouldn't be until the mid 2000s when Linux started picking up the pieces left behind after Red Hat started their server product and certification program.

For a long time, Linux was strictly a hobbyist OS. It later dominated by simply being the last one standing after everyone else fell.

The true competitive threat to the Unix vendors wasn't each other, it was Microsoft.

And "for a long time" was actually a fairly short time. Linux began to approach feature-comparability fast, and ran on PCs, not $10,000 workstations (that were getting beat power-wise by PCs).

This seems a bit of a chicken and egg problem... why would the early adopters have chosen Linux, before others had been forced to contribute back their changes? The first company to adopt it wouldn't have received any benefits, only an obligation. Why pick it over BSD?

I think there were likely other factors that made it win out.

Oh, for sure. There are always other factors in the real world.

But I think that's the main one that allowed Linux to snowball ahead of the other Unix(-likes).

They would also get the "promise" that the system they were betting on would also get contributions from other companies, making a safer long term bet.

And because the GPL makes it difficult to fork and make the branch a proprietary product.

No. AT&T created Unix but was unable to market it due to a previous antitrust action. So they gave it away. (They required a license signature (I've signed that! :-)), but did not charge and were very lenient.)

The UCBerkeley Computer Science Research Group (if I've got my acronyms right) was one of the recipients and went on to add on many, many features and releasing the result under the BSD license.

Many people built companies like Sun around selling BSD Unix, including many alumni of UCB.

Then AT&T got out from under the consent agreement and began selling its own Unix, System V. By this time, Unix was a major player in the workstation market (a market that has largely disappeared as PCs got more powerful).

By, say, the mid 1980s, there were many, many companies selling many, many varieties of Unix, all descended from the original Unix via BSD or via BSD+System V. Most of them had some unique, valuable features (Irix's graphics, AIX's LVM and journaling file system, etc.) and all of them had modifications to lock customers into their version. This is where the POSIX standards come from (second only to ecmascript market manipulation goofiness), and why things like Autoconf/automake and the much-loved imake (not really) exist. There was much in-fighting; Sun vs everybody else, everybody else vs. IBM, etc.

Then two things happened: PCs got more powerful and began eating into the bottom of the workstation market (PCs ran DOS+Windows, which was and arguably still is, technically inferior to multi-user-by-design systems like Unix[1].) And PCs got more powerful and began to be able to run more advanced OSs (think "memory management").

At this point, the Unix world began to conflict with the Windows world. Unix was technically superior, Windows had more public and developer mind-share. But the Unix world was still more interested in fighting each other and stapled all of their arms and legs to that particular tree.

The end result was that Windows became and remains the most-used operating system[2]. All (almost) of the commercial Unixs died (almost; there's still some animated corpses around)[3]. The two counter-examples are MacOS, which is completely locked to Apple hardware, and Linux.

Linux is the interesting case. Windows and commercial Unix all had a 15- to 20-year head start. But Linux achieved (mostly) feature parity quickly and did not break down into multiple, competing streams. Both of those are due to the GPL; you can fork GPL software all you want, but you cannot add a feature to a fork and expect it not to be back-ported into the original if it's useful. You also have a very hard time locking users into your fork.

The bottom line is that Microsoft won the Unix wars, because the Unix licenses allowed companies to take Unix proprietary.

[1] Modern Windows is kinda-sorta based on VMS, another workstation OS, but not really and then they walked that back, and so on....

[2] I don't really consider Android or iOS to be general-purpose OSs. And they're both rather their own little islands, no matter how much the underlying tech shares with the rest of the universe.

[3] The Free/Net/Open/DragonFly BSDs are, I'm sorry to say, noise. And did you notice that I had to mention four of them?

people do, but companies don't.

projects like openwrt would not exist if it weren't for copyright enforcement.

There were other open source licenses at the party before the GPL dropped its controversial "viral" turd in the punchbowl - and many of them still exist nearly unmodified. (e.g. BSD with attribution removed, etc.)

I know, but I am just questioning whether any license is needed for open source to prosper.

I am positing that if licenses didn't exist, and anyone could do anything they want with any bit of code they see, open source would still prosper.

That just isn't how things work. I believe you are making the wrong assumption that the same amount of open source work would exist. If that were the case, then yes, it wouldn't matter that much. But, a lot of contributions to open source wouldn't have existed if it wasn't for the licenses. That's the examples you've been given.

There might be some contributions that wouldn't have happened, but there also might have been others that did happen. My hypothetical was in a world with no copyright or license at all.... so all proprietary code would be copyable, too

Proprietary code would by definition not be copyable, because it would be... proprietary. It's the opposite to open source. The thing that incentivises open sourcing proprietary source code is exactly things like licenses... Your imagined scenario is just "no license for open source, and free reign for closed source". It makes no sense to me.

If no code was copyrightable nor licensable, people could reverse engineer any code they get access to. It would be hard to keep code completely proprietary. You would not be able to distribute your code at all.

I am not saying this is the way we want to go, I am just curious about the thought experiment.

Ok, if it's for a thought experiment then I'll play along. Reverse engineering source code is not as easy as you make it out to be. Not only that, but reverse engineering in the sense of black box is not a violation of most existing licenses. And, if we're talking about decompiling code into something useful, that too is a tall order.

> When did the HN crowd become so defensive of copyright?

Copyright is good in limited quantities. The current multi-decade time horizon is probably what a lot of people are against, and not the concept in general.

And limited time period seems to be consistent through history. From the paper "Copyrights and Creativity: Evidence from Italian Opera in the Napoleonic Age":

> Comparing changes in the creation of new operas across Italian states with and without copyrights, we show that the adoption of basic copyrights encouraged the creation of new work. Moreover, we find that copyrights changed the quality of creative output by encouraging composers to produce more popular and durable works. These results generalize to a broader set of musical compositions and to librettos, as the literary component to the score of operas. Based on these findings, we conclude that the adoption of basic levels of copyright protection – not exceeding the lifetime of the composer – can help to raise both the quantity and the quality of new creative works.

> Importantly, we find that extensions in the length of copyright beyond the composer’s life did not encourage creativity. Performance data reveal that few operas were played after the first 20 years, which suggests that only the most durable creative goods stand to gain from copyright extensions. […]

* https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2505776

Both the permissive and copyleft licenses are only enforcable through copyright law.

I don't mind that copyright exists, I just wish it was better.

Also there's a power difference between individuals violating the rights of a big company, and a big company violating the rights of many individuals.

If Copilot isn't reined in, it feels like yet another case of "The laws only apply to poor people".

What does it mean to "enforce" a "permissive" license?

Attribution, mostly.

Because its my (and many of ours) code they have "learnt" from, stripped the license and are intending to sell on. When we listed code under MIT or GPL we meant those licenses, they weren't random and Microsoft just seems to be completely ignoring the reality of reproducing those works which are covered by those licenses, they are making code private and paid for that is open source. Not OK.

"The heathen are sunk down in the pit that they made: in the net which they hid is their own foot taken"

Copyright is a horrible system. Microsoft has been one of the biggest proponents of that system. But now they've clearly violated it. They should either join in abolishing it, or face its consequences.

Consider people's reaction to people selling boot leg DVDs vs torrenting a movie. Although people may consider both morally incorrect the corrupting profit motive results in the former being seen far more negatively. In the current situation there is also the matter that the Microsoft is still perceived rightly I think very negatively and open source authors very positively. Also in a David v Golliath situation nobody wants to be seen rooting for the giant.

Personally I would be concerned about insert corp here accidentally stealing code from an open source project then years later going after the open source project for copyright infringement regarding the code they in fact stole from the open source project.

I guarantee this is not Microsoft's announcement that they are forfeiting their copyrights. This is just them abusing the spirit of ours.

Probably because when poor people give something for free to other people to lift them out of poverty it is called empowerment, but when billionaires take free work of poor people for their own personal selfish gain it is called - exploit.

Say your AGPL code is Copiloted into someone's new program and they decide to release that under a non-free license; that's the issue. We're defensive of copyleft.

This submission aside, it seems that most people are just concerned about getting sued on copyright grounds for using copilot.

It's hypocrisy. People will defend entire books and research papers being shared on libgen/scihub, which is unarguably actual copyright infringement on a massive scale, but training an AI on open source code is somehow the worst thing ever even if there's no case law to say that this constitutes infringement at all.

It's not really that hypocritical when you understand peoples perspective on it. In general people (here on HN/OS-community) care about sharing experiences and knowledge. Copyright on opensource content does not inhibit peoples ability to learn from it. Theres also the whole "big corp vs little guy" mentality at play here. If copilot was opensource then I don't think that anyone would have an issue with it, I actually think people would respond well to it if that were the case.

It's not hypocrisy to say that different types of work should have different copyright lengths, and that for some types the answer is zero.

Especially if you remember the phrase "to promote the progress of science and useful arts".

It's self-serving hypocrisy when programmers argue for a very strict reading of copyright for their own works (source code) while at the same time arguing for unbounded sharing of other people's works (books and papers).

If you agree with libgen and scihub then you should definitely not see anything wrong with copilot, because what copilot is doing is considerably milder, they are not reproducing anybody's works.

If you disagree with libgen and scihub because they are illegal only then can the argument that copilot is infringing be made.

> It's self-serving hypocrisy when programmers argue for a very strict reading of copyright for their own works (source code) while at the same time arguing for unbounded sharing of other people's works (books and papers).

Yes, if those were the only two things being discussed, it would be.

But almost all of these people think a certain amount of copyright for songs and movies is good too. And I bet a vast majority of them support copyright for books too, or at least most books.

The vast majority of research authors want their work to be freely available. The industry is just organized in a way that prevents that from happening without harming your research career.

I'm all for copilot if microsoft gets treated the same way libgen/scihub are for creating it. or if we abolish copyright, but the fact that they can just decide to do this and it's fine, but scihub gets DNS-blocked reveals the asymmetry at hand here.