This has been happening on HN too. The vilification of GPL and AGPL as ”not free in the truest sense of the word”, the usage of RMS and his personal image to label the free software movement outdated/fanatical/toxic is a testament to how corporate rebranding efforts have succeeded in replacing free software with open-source — software that is conveniently licensed so that corporations can bake it into their product without a single concern for the longevity or well-being of the developer or the software itself.
Free Software and Open Source are essentially the same, despite the philosophical differences. The issue here is against the copyleft (GPL and AGPL).
No ... no they are not
>>despite the philosophical differences.
And those differences are HUGE and make them incompatible
Then see how many of those are OSI approved licences (thus open source).
It was like this at least 20 years ago.
Really as an end user, I just don't understand who would be against the Free Software philosophy: either you don't care, or you want as much control as you can on what you buy, but why would you ever say: "I don't want those weird licenses that give me more access to the stuff I buy, I want the other ones that make it completely proprietary and inaccessible".
Of course as a company, you want permissive licenses, such that you can use it for free, but keep it proprietary (because companies like to think that this one bugfix they made is very strategic IP).
> When we call software “free,” we mean that it respects the users' essential freedoms: the freedom to run it, to study and change it, and to redistribute copies with or without changes. This is a matter of freedom, not price, so think of “free speech,” not “free beer.”
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#apache2
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#X11License
Permissive licenses are "free" in the sense that they allow to distribute free software (e.g. I can distribute a binary together with its sources even if they are MIT-licensed, and that would be free), but they also allow to distribute non-free software (e.g. I can take MIT code and distribute a proprietary binary).
Copyleft licenses enforce the freedom downstream.
I guess my original point is that I don't understand why people don't like copyleft, because copyleft enforces free binaries.
Does that make sense? Thanks for the correction.
To answer your underlying question: I like permissive licenses because I am not ideologically opposed to unfree software, and I’d rather software be used by a company than not at all.
My opinion differs here. First, the free philosophy is nice for me as a user: for instance say I buy a Marshall "smart" speaker, for which the software kind of sucks and is essentially not maintained (but still it connects to the internet...). I don't see how it would hurt Marshall to enable an open source ROM. After all, they sell the hardware, right? And a big part of the software running on that speaker is open source; they did not pay anything for it, and more often than not, they "forget" attribution for permissive code.
But companies try to minimize their costs, and contributing a bugfix back upstream is seen as a cost (conveniently ignoring that they did not pay for the software in the first place). With a copyleft license, of course the company can keep ignoring the license (like they do for attribution in permissive licenses), but at least it gives the developer an argument for contributing back upstream.
And it doesn't have to be GPL. LGPL and MPL are easy to handle.
> I’d rather software be used by a company than not at all.
If the software has value, I am convinced that they can deal with copyleft (see Linux). And if the majority of open source software was copyleft, then companies would be used to it. Copyleft is really not that bad, it is just perceived as a source of cost by companies.
> When we call software “free,” we mean that it respects the users' essential freedoms: the freedom to run it, to study and change it, and to redistribute copies with or without changes. This is a matter of freedom, not price, so think of “free speech,” not “free beer.”
This Venn diagram is FSF's view of the taxonomy:
Permissive licenses are free in the sense that they allow making free software (but they also allow making non-free software).
GPLv3 enforces the complete derived work to be free. LGPLv3 says that the particular library should stay free.
GPLv2, LGPLv2 and MPLv2 say that the source code (either of the whole derived work or just the library) should stay free, but tivoization allows making the product non-free.
Is that about right?
That was what I meant initially: in HN there's a strong opinion against copyleft, not necessarily free software.
To me, writing software in my free time and open sourcing it under a permissive license is shooting myself in the foot. I did the work for free, it may as well benefit me as a user. At minimum it should be MPLv2.
https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2021/mar/25/install-gplv2/ https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2021/jul/23/tivoization-and-t... https://events19.linuxfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017...
I wonder if this is a point of disagreement between FSF and SFC -- I know they now have several disagreements.
In a similar time frame, I criticized attestation features in trusted computing because they would allow (in fact one of their main purposes was to allow) network services to allow only certain software configurations to interact with them. And I thought I was talking about a similar concept!
Thanks for sharing those links.
Attestation is indeed a big problem today, especially around Android devices and proprietary apps that won't run on libre Android distributions. The attestation feature of WebAuthn could also become a problem, but that is somewhat mitigated by the Apple passkeys not being attestable.
(that doesn't mean the difference isn't important though)
I don't really get why people are for non-copyleft licenses. LGPL is fine license.
Yes they are, according to people who use both terms. All “free software” licenses are also “open source” licenses and vice versa.
In practice, pretty much every Open Source license is also Free Software license and vice versa (there are some very nitpicky exceptions, but I guarantee they're not where you'd expect them to be).
* the term "open source" predates the term "free software" in the FSF sense
* "open source" was proposed as a synonym for "free software" in the late 90s
* liguistically, the term "free software" emphasizes freedom, while "open source" emphasizes source-available * there is no law mandating everyone use OSI's definition of "open source"
* consequently, there is ambiguity in the term "open source", ambiguity exploitable by those who want the social cachet of free software but are not philosophically aligned with it
* there is ambiguity in the term "free software" as well but don't worry, if they mean it in the FSF sense they will certainly take the time to explain
I humbly submit therefore that the GP framing is essentially correct, that RMS was right not to endorse the term "open source", and that whatever OSI says the term is philosophically compromised and should be "considered harmful".
What if i love and use the AGPL, but also won't involve myself with the FSF because I think they are runining the movement and also definitely want no direct association with RMS.
I think RMS is an active harm to the cause of Free Software.
GPL, only enforces redistribution of software you distribute, "to" the people you desteibute it to, aka customers.
Most other licenses (MIT, Apache, BSD, etc) don't require any code redistribution (though some require attribution).
GPL ~= redistribution to customers Other ~= no redistribution
Red Hat is complying with the GPL requirements even for BSD, Apache, and BSD licensed code, which I think is good.
I think a more sinister trend forming is around open core, and essentially proprietary code mixed with no code redistribution at all. This makes open core essentially closed source for all intents and purposes. Companies are using open core simply for free marketing and to drive technology adoption in the sales/marketing funnels.
RHEL Clones: Take finished source code, rebuild, test, release.
RHEL: Work upstream to develop features / submit features upstream before inclusion in RHEL, maintain specific versions of upstream, test hundreds of upstreams together to make sure they can be shipped together as an operating system, develop "glue" software like Anaconda to install + manage the whole thing, take source, build, test, release, accept bugs, start over again for next minor release or major release as needed.
And, of course, this elides all the certification work that makes RHEL an attractive enough project to rebuild in the first place because people want very specifically a RHEL compatible distribution to run an application or applications on top of.
What people get pissed at Red Hat about isn't that they don't get to access the source. They're pissed they don't get the convenience. Largely speaking, the people who get pissed aren't concerned about Free Software, either - they just want easy to run binaries. As I understand it "get binaries for free" is not mandated by the four freedoms. The source code is still out there for people to study, change, use, and redistribute. That seems entirely compatible with the free software ethos - but incompatible with the freeloader ethos.
Red Hat might have the legal right to gate their product, but it seems really slimy to build RHEL on the work of who knows how many people that publish it for free and then to put road blocks around their derivative.
I don't really like reductionist blaming, but I feel basically forced to wonder what Red Hat would be doing if IBM wasn't involved.
I'm always curious that people get angry at Red Hat profiting on the work of others, but few people get angry at the companies that use a RHEL clone to run their business and pay nothing and contribute nothing.
Red Hat is still releasing source code. The only thing that it's not doing is making it super-convenient to rebuild exactly its product.
Seriously - for most purposes CentOS Stream is just fine if what you want is a distro that feels like RHEL. Its one drawback is that it's not a one-for-one clone of RHEL, which generally only really matters if you are using it to run your business. Which gets me back to - why are people so pissed at Red Hat but not all the organizations that make money using RHEL but don't pay towards its development?
Releasing only to their customers and only if not redistributed. If you held redhat to the same standard for the open source they redistribute they couldn't exist.
CentOS wasn't selling support contracts tho.
Not that I think anything they are doing is in any way wrong mind you.
[1] https://www.redhat.com/en/about/open-source-program-office/c...
And I think an analogy is apt. Someone was one telling me that religions that are slightly different (think Protestantism versus Catholicism) lead to far greater strife than religions that are vastly different (like Buddhism and Catholicism.) Maybe people are just louder about the things they care about and feel close to.
GPL tries to guarantee an environment for user freedom (not developer convenience, like permissive licenses). It has builtin protection against someone closing the source. It doesn't protect against some company pulling an Internet Explorer on you (i.e. providing a free equivalent) with your own code, because this doesn't directly concern user freedoms. You don't have to be actively helping them though.
I think ultimately free-of-charge mirrors should exist, but I see good potentials in companies discovering business merits of GPL, and hopefully AGPL. We need more vigor for those, after getting lucky once with Linux. We cannot rely on good will of corporations (only enforced law works on them), so any sign of luring them into copyleft somehow is a good thing. This would be a long road, but who knows what could happen in the current "AI" chaos and regulation scares.
[1] Of course only have to assuming that you are not the original author and you're building on someone else's code received under GPL.
That is not the case, RHEL is not possible with out the wider ecosystem, and to say Rocky Linux is a "dirtbag" for repacking RHEL, would be like saying RedHat is a "dirtbag" for packaging any number of free software projects they consume into their product.
It completely antithetical the free software movement for which Linux is Licensed
However it is perfectly on brand of the "Open Source" corporatist movement that seems to be supplanting free software