Don’t spread FUD please. Middlemen can’t change Ladybird’s license or prevent anyone from seeing its source code.

I know that’s not what you meant, but it is what you said.

If you look at the parent comment directly above in the hierarchy, it is pretty clear that they are talking about a company coming in and taking it, adding stuff to it, and calling it their own browser. I think you have to try pretty hard to read in that GP is saying that the original source code license would be changed.

That is a complete nonsensical claim & willful attempt at spreading misinformation:

Permissive licenses doesn't grants you less freedom than GPL, infact it grants you more because the user also has the freedom to modify source code without being enforced to make it public.

Companies copying the codebase to their propietary ones won't automatically strip right of users, licenses don't work like that, the original codebase will still be fine. Whether said companies will contribute back is irrelevant.

So pre-civil war USA was more free, because people had the freedom to own slaves?

We have to simply ignore the bit about slaves having no freedom…

(If you read this comment and think I am pro-slavery, you are not apt at human communication and should take steps to improve)

I'm guessing you're being downvoted for comparing software to slavery. Generally speaking, the modern society seems to have forgotten that the world isn't binary - you can make comparisons and have similarities that are far apart on the spectrum so aren't equalities, but can still find informative meaning.

But to your point, this exact argument was used by top southern politicians to justify slavery! It was the freedom of the slave owner, their right to own property, that justified slavery. James Hammond famously made this argument to congress shortly before the Civil War broke out. If this is interesting to you, Eric Larson just released a great book called "The Demon of Unrest" that covers this.

The point is understood, but it is a problem with copyright laws, and not only with the license.

This is why I had suggested before, that if you cannot just abolish copyright laws, then to make the license which will allow freedom except that it cannot further restrict anyone by further copyright. No attribution is required, no notices of changes are required, etc; the only requirement is that any further restrictions you claim on your version will be invalid. This is therefore effectively similar than as though you did abolish copyright laws, but only this program. (However, for practical purposes, I had allowed to (optionally) relicense by GNU GPL3 and GNU AGPL3, although only if you are able to follow the terms of those licenses (e.g. having the source codes available, knowing who wrote the original code, etc).)

Who are the slaves in this analogy?

I would say that the users are the slaves. Without GPL software, we could end up in situations where hardware vendors stop shipping software updates, so we are slaves to capitalism by having to buy things we shouldn't need to buy.

This goes hand in hand with right to repair in my opinion.

I don’t think you’re pro-slavery, but I do think you picked a metaphor not for the light it sheds on the issue, but the heat—and then preemptively dismissed a strawman objection to it instead of, say, improving your own communication.

The parenthesis was an edit that I put after receiving downvotes.

I think the comparison is correct, in that who claims copyleft licenses are less free only considers their own freedom, not that of the society as a whole.

And it seemed a good example since most people will have heard of that, if not studied it in school at the very least.

You can copy GPL code, modify it and use it personally and nobody is going to care unless you’re making tons of money. The entities pushing for MIT style licensing are massive and for profit.

> The entities pushing for MIT style licensing are massive and for profit.

I license all my stuff with permissive licenses because (in my opinion) they are more free than the GPL and such licenses. I don't have any massive for-profit company pushing me to do so. Mr. Kling is also not a massive for-profit company, he's just a guy making the software he wants to make. Your argument is in very bad faith.

“Open source” was literally conceived and organized in its inception as a corporate-sponsored competitor to the threat of Free Software.

> you allow middlemen to strip this right to users of your software.

That's not true.

Somebody can take the source code and build something closed on top of it, but the original code will be already free, and you will always have the right to see it.

For example, PlayStation OS is based on FreeBSD (AFAIK). They took it, adapted it and added a lot of stuff. Did you lose the right to see the source code of FreeBSD ? No. Can you see the source code of PlayStation OS ? No, but you never had that right, so you have not been stripped of anything.

GP is clearly talking about this is the same context that the GPL does. This is a decades-long running debate and it isn't as simple as you and the sibling commenters are trying to make it.

Of course it doesn't change the original project. But when people take the codebase and build a new product on it, what GP says is absolutely the case. The devs can withhold all code and rights to it from the next user. This is most commonly an issue when it comes to libraries rather than end products, but not always.

It doesn't also have to mean that the original project dies or disappears, it can just rob from their growth potential. Examples are quite easy to find. There's been a big hullaballoo over cloud providers taking open source projects and competing with them by offering managed versions of the service that are well-integrated into their ecosystems. Economically this is also a problem because the cloud provider can then undercut the price of the managed service compared to the official one since they aren't bearing the burden of building/maintaining the codebase.

I'm by no means against "permissive" licensing (MIT, etc), I think they have their time and place just like GPL, etc, but I am against dismissing valid concerns with shallow replies.

as you said, this is a decades-long running debate, and pretty much every argument has been heard, ad nauseum. That makes this "valid concern" a pretty low-quality reply.

The first freedom that GPL-lovers have is whether or not to use the project.

I think it will come down to distribution. The current crop of browsers are already open source and available. I'm not sure that a closed fork will really work for much or be a significant risk.

At least not now or the foreseeable future. I also don't think community support would work towards that.

I'd favor the more permission mit/isc as long as reasonable myself.

Is a PlayStation user a FreeBSD user? Yes, clearly. Can he see the source code of the FreeBSD derivative he is using? No, obviously not. Did FreeBSD make this possible? Yes, obviously.

> If you release software under MIT or BSD licenses, you allow middlemen to strip this right to users of your software.

No you don't. You're being extremely disingenuous with this phrasing. No matter how many other parties take the source code and make a closed source product out of it, the users of your software will always have the same rights you granted them to begin with. No freedom has been lost.

And before you say "but your users won't have the same rights to the derivative works", that isn't a loss of freedom. They never had those rights to begin with, therefore they cannot lose them. Not gaining something is not the same as losing it.

Well, with MIT, you can make your own (A)GPL fork of you like and carry on. Best of luck.

I think permissive here is a technical term, and is being used correctly from a legal perspective as far as I understand although I am not a lawyer. The GPL is less permissive than a BSD or MIT license because it places more restrictions on the licensee. This is a legal fact and not a matter of spin.