Open Source Project Licenses Trending Toward Open Rather than Free 369
bonch writes "An analysis of software licenses shows usage of GPL and other copyleft licenses declining at an accelerating rate. In their place, developers are choosing permissive licenses such as BSD, MIT, and ASL. One theory for the decline is that GPL usage was primarily driven by vendor-led projects, and with the shift to community-led projects, permissive licenses are becoming more common."
Misleading headline (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Misleading headline (Score:5, Informative)
It's also a misleading summary and article.
The proportion of open source projects using the GPL, LGPL and AGPL is declining, not the absolute number of projects.
*GPL may not actually be in decline at all, the article doesn't say, it just says that it's falling as a proportion. This information is pretty worthless on its own.
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well, technically... GPL cant decline unless a project is taken offline, the license doesn't permit the project to get another non-free license after it gets GPL'ed
Re:Misleading headline (Score:5, Informative)
If you're speaking "technically", you're wrong. If I release a project under GPL, I can release it under any other license I like later.
The only time I am tied to GPL is if I choose to incorporate someone else's work into my project, and they don't want to change licenses.
So on a big project with lots of copyright holders, it is nearly impossible to switch to a more permissive license, but that's because it's so hard to get a big group of people to agree, not because the GPL doesn't allow it.
Re:Misleading headline (Score:5, Informative)
FTFY
You can choose to change your license on new code. However the code that is already release will remain GPL and can continue under someone else's leadership.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Not necessarily true. The case law with respect to this is highly lacking. Your stance is what the FSF wants to believe, not necessarily what would be the case if this had more firm case law rulings.
Re:Misleading headline (Score:4, Insightful)
I am not a lawyer, however:
So you base your doubt on the lack of court cases involving forked projects? The lack of case law could be attributed to the contract agreement between the original author and the code users of the GPL version. The original developer convincing the court that the contract is null and void seems like a large obstacle to pass. Especially when the defendant is being accused to upholding their end of the written agreement, and I don't see a revocation clause within the GPL agreement.
The original author is free to make his new code more restrictive, however people who continue to use the code that was originally licensed as GPL has a contractual agreement that they are free to continue to make modifications of said code as long as they make a credible effort to send the changes back to the original developer.
The irony being that the submitted changes are copyrighted by the submitter and that code can not be added to the now non-GPL code of the original author.
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I don't think you need to read case law to know that once you've granted someone a license, you can't simply take it away.
This remark was silly.
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That potentially depends on how you granted the licence, and probably on what jurisdiction you are in as well.
Asking these questions is not silly at all if you're going to be on the wrong end of any adverse legal consequences. It's clear from some of the comments here that some people automatically believe the FSF's interpretation, even though they have never personally talked to a lawyer to understand how copyright, licensing, contracts, deeds and so on actually work in law.
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interesting point. lets assume, nobody "licensed" my work while it was available as gpl, and then i decide to only distribute it under another license. Can somebody say "hey, it were gpl some time ago"?
when i offer my pictures under some conditions, and change the conditions when i notice noone is buying them with the old conditions, you could not insist on buying them under the old conditions.
And the GPL is only effective, when somebody redistributes the work. So a simple user is not enough, when he's not
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So on a big project with lots of copyright holders, it is nearly impossible to switch to a more permissive license, but that's because it's so hard to get a big group of people to agree, not because the GPL doesn't allow it.
You could also go the route that the Wikimedia Foundation took for such a dilemma: Convince Richard Stallman that the license is worthless and put in an "escape clause" that allows a project to switch licenses through a rewrite of the next version of the GPL.
The fact that such a tactic was even permitted for the GFDL should give pause to anybody working with licenses produced by the Free Software Foundation. I admit that in the case of the Wikimedia Foundation they switched from the GFDL to a roughly simi
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wrong. all the authors together can agree to another additional license. Then one of them adds a patch which is only licensed under the new license, and then the current state of the project has only the new license.
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What the article is saying that the GPL license marketshare is in decline, while the other less restrictive opens source licenses' marketshare is on the rise.
In other words, a large number of new open source projects are not choosing to use GPL licensing. While technically the number of GPL projects are not declining, their future relevancy (as far as the general computing community is concerned) is falling.
Since the goal of most GPL projects are to "scratch a particular itch" and not to be the most pop
Re:Misleading headline (Score:5, Informative)
The proportion of GPL is "declining" fast -- from 71% in 2005 to 93% in 2011 (source [itwire.com]). That's if you disregard fart apps and look only at software good enough for someone to package it for Debian. This does discriminate against some Mac/iOS-only stuff, but not by much as anything useful enough and freely licensed will probably have someone port it.
Also, this is the same Apple shill posting the very same data on Slashdot for the third time.
easy tiger (Score:5, Insightful)
Just who in the fuck is Brian Proffitt? Up until now, I'd never heard of him. I can't think of any open source software project he's worked on, or even helped lead.
Maybe I'm just ignorant about his accomplishments. If so, please inform me of them. Otherwise, can somebody tell me why I should care what he has to say about this, or anything else?
He's a tech journalist, which by itself doesn't say if he's technically capable or not. And that, technical capacity is not a function of one's visible/publicized/recognized technical accomplishments in the field in question. There are tons and tons of people out there that have never contributed to, say the Linux kernel or the GCC toolchain, but who, by usage, observation and/or academic expertise (any combination thereof) can tell any random /.er how that shit works.
Your post smacks of arrogance (as it pairs the possible validity of the argument to YOU knowing the author - I mean who are you?). Secondly, your statement has a pedestrian, juvenile ad-hominem'ey nature. One would think /.ers who think themselves acutely intellectual would recognize it as such.
You don't attack a position by saying "who is this?". You do so by asking "what is this", by analyzing the merits of the arguments being written.
If the sole measure of an argument's worthiness of your time is whether the person who makes it is a publicly accomplished figure, then man, you should go tell Muhammad Ali that he was wrong for using Angelo Dundee (who learned the trade of boxing training and being a corner man by being a "bucket boy".) Or you should go tell countless of MMA fighters not to train with Eddie Bravo (who has no MMA record.)
Strategists and analysts (even in the ethereal fields of software journalism) are not necessarily made from being in the trenches or for having delivered an opus dei recognized by the fanboi masses. To pretend otherwise is just arrogance and an inability to argue a piece's worth without having to rely on ad hominem.
I mean for all we know, Proffitt's work is shit, or people feeds him stuff that he then publicizes on his name. But you don't get to that conclusion by saying "who the fuck he is", but by saying "let me try to be a little bit intelligent and analyze this thing if it makes sense or not."
If you don't have the time to do that, why do you bother asking "who the fuck is he". I mean, who the fuck are you to feel the necessity to say that? That's just being embarrassingly childish and sadly spiteful.
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It's not about more open - it's about more freedom.
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And the BSD-like licenses grant you more freedom, so...
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I couldn't disagree more.
These users get more software because intermediate users had the right to alter and redistribute. There are a hell of a lot of devices out there running custom firmware because of this, just as a starting point. Without the GPL you can miss out on an entire class of software - stuff with added value from middle parties in the chain.
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Misleading... "Open Rather than Free" implies that there is some charge.
I'm not sure it's misleading at all — Free software and open source software are simply terms of art. "Open" no more means that it is supplied at a cost than "Free" refers to price.
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Not just misleading, it's outright incorrect (Score:5, Informative)
Even by the FSF's definition, "copyleft" and "free" are distinct terms. Every license in the summary is considered free by the FSF: BSD [gnu.org] MIT [gnu.org] ASL [gnu.org]
Re:Misleading headline (Score:5, Informative)
From TFA:
That was the conclusion of Matthew Aslett's analysis of recent data from Black Duck Software
Do we even need to say anything else?
http://techrights.org/wiki/index.php/Black_Duck [techrights.org]
Re:Misleading headline (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not ad hominem to point out an entity's likely biases when they release a report conveniently supporting those biases. For instance, you can safely ignore anything ever written by Florian Mueller, Dan Lyons, or Maureen O'Gara about Linux and "intellectual property", because each of them have clearly demonstrated anti-Linux sentiments.
"Ad hominem" is "don't listen to him because he looks and smells funny". It's not "don't listen to him because he has a history of saying exactly this and being wrong about it".
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Actually, it is.
The arguments are what matter, not the person presenting them. Dismissing something out of hand because of the person saying it is by definition, an ad hominem, regardless of their previous history.
Their prior history may provide a clue that causes you to question any new material they place in front of you, but to say you can "safely ignore anything ever written by X" because "they have clearly demonstrated Y" previously is absolutely an ad hominem.
Re: (Score:3)
In logic, ad hominem is arguments of the form "X says Y" and "X has flaws" and then concluding "Y is false". Bad characteristics of a person are not transferred to things they say, which is why ad hominem is a fallacy. Otherwise you could make anything false just by finding a sufficiently odious person to say it, which is obviously not right.
That may be true in a Platonic world of pure logic. In the real world, though, limited time and imperfect knowledge means that most of us have to use heuristics to de
Re:Misleading headline (Score:5, Informative)
The difference is that any works derived or using GPL type licenses also have to be released on the same license.
Correction: may only be distributed under the same license. Please don't accidentally be Steve Ballmer's mouthpiece by spreading subtly misleading information about the GPL.
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"Open Rather than Free" implies that there is some charge.
No, no it doesn't.
You can be charged for either Open or Free software.
The difference is what you can do with the source code afterwards.
Unfortunately, while nerds are friendly to case-sensitivity and have nominally accepted Free to mean "Free Software" and "free" to mean "free as in I hand you a beer and it's your beer" this does not come through in the headline.
Essentially, you are therefore complaining about the term "Free Software" (which is the correct term) and not about the headline, which simply uses
Re: (Score:2)
You missed the Free with a capital 'F'. It's the geek code for freedom rather than free beer.
Open vs Free (Score:5, Insightful)
There is very much a difference. A lot more licenses are considered 'open' [opensource.org] than 'free [gnu.org]', even while containing provisions that make it more palatable for the software creators. Look at the 2 lists that I linked to. The ones mentioned as 'open' are simply listed and categorized by their utility, w/o any judgement calls about their ethics, while GNU is more interested in listing them according to their purity i.e. similarity to the GPL itself. So it's small wonder that projects would pick an 'open' but not 'free' license - there are simply more of the latter than the former, and w/o onerous restrictions on software creators.
Contrary to myth, the Open Source movement, rather than the FSF, is the reason we have such major open source software such as Open Office, Firefox, Chromium, Apache, Android, and so on - if you notice, most of them are not GPL, and even Linus has decided not to make his kernel GPL3. If anything, companies like Sun went for things like the CDDL because it is not GPL. Oh, and before anyone says 'Android is Linux', Android is released under an Apache license and not GPL 2 nor 3.
I'd credit the likes of the OSI in helping popularize the Open Source model and bringing it to where it is. Unlike the FSF, it is not hostile to corporate interests and prefers to promote the advantages of this development model, rather than moralizing about the 'ethics' of 'Free Software'. Speaking of which, what is this 'community' that RMS, and you are talking of? People typically buy/download for free/copy software that they want to use, and use it. Most people don't, and won't, tinker w/ source code, nor pay someone else to tinker w/ them - if a software doesn't work the way they need, they either look for alternatives or workarounds.
ESR mentioned some of that in the 'Cathedral and the Bazaar', where he noted that worse than the confusion over the word 'free' was the perception that the FSF was down and out hostile to business. I'd say that that perception is accurate - name me one company (not non-profit organization like FSF) that Stallman endorses. As I've pointed out several times in the past, Freedom 2 of GNU is the poison pill in the GNU charter that makes it the most business hostile model. If a company, otoh, is fine w/ distributing its source code to its customers, but restricts re-distribution further downstream (for the obvious reason that they want to sell to those downstream potential customers themselves, and not have the value of their work diluted by other people who put no effort into it simply distributing it for free or their own profits), then they are more likely to find a sympathetic solution from OSI than FSF, who probably wouldn't give them the time of day.
There is only one case that I can think of where 'free' is a better idea than 'open'. It is the case of when a company is releasing support software for a competitor, like the recent story on /. about a TI employee writing FOSS drivers for QCOM in his free time the same way that he was writing FOSS drivers for TI in his work time. In such a case, it would be a good idea to use something like GPL3, just so that QCOM cannot make use of a non-employee's unpaid work and then include enhancements after making that proprietary. While it would have been perfectly ethical for them to do it w/ their own paid employees, it is somewhat unethical for them to do it w/ work done by employees of their competitors off the clock.
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Yea, reading the summery I immediately thought the Open vs Free intro was described the opposite in the rest. I envision GPL to guarantees the code remains open, while the others are free to be enslaved. It boils down tho the argument, Is a county more or less free if you have the freedom to enslave others?
Re: (Score:3)
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The GPL is about the user's freedom not the developer's
Is the user more free because he can't distribute a plugin that uses an LGPLv3 library with a program that uses GPLv2 while exercising the FSF's Freedom 2 (The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor)? Is the user more free because he can't combine libraries using either the Apple Public Source license, the Mozilla Public License, the Common Development and Distribution License or the Apache Software Foundation License (all FSF-approved Free Software licenses) with a GPL'd application?
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Is the user more free because he can't distribute a plugin that uses an LGPLv3 library with a program that uses GPLv2 while exercising the FSF's Freedom 2 (The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor)?
Is it actually the case that he cannot distribute the plugin, or only that he must distribute all the source code?
Re:Freedom is an absolute. You have it, or you don (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Freedom is an absolute. You have it, or you don (Score:4, Insightful)
Example: look at BSD. It was developed at Berkeley, then Steve Jobs took it and closed-sourced it for free. The developers of Berkeley are the one's who developed it, received no compensation from Steve, but the code got closed from THEM, not just the users.
Re:Freedom is an absolute. You have it, or you don (Score:4, Informative)
Goodness me, your post is almost totally devoid of facts.
BSD is still open source, the original developers still have full access to it.
Apple's modifications are also open and available, also to those developers.
The original developers received no compensation because they chose to release the code under a very permissive licence. They did this on purpose and required no compensation. You're trying to make it look like Apple "stole" something, which is a totally nonsensical position.
The BSD licence was specifically created for this purpose; it's deliberately very permissive. However, taking that code and forking it does *nothing* to "close off the code from the original developers".
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Your point... I do not think it means what you think it means.
How can the developers get "shafted" by deciding specifically to release code under the BSD licence by choice, only for that code to later be used exactly as the licence intended?
If they wanted to make money off the code they would ave released it under a different licence. If they wanted to do something more like the GPL then they would have released it under a different licence.
My point is that they were in no way "shafted" because Apple decide
Re:Freedom is an absolute. You have it, or you don (Score:5, Insightful)
In order to have true freedom, then someone must have the freedom to take away any and all freedoms from someone else...
A truly free system will never last, because a few will always abuse that freedom to subjugate others. That's why we have society, where everyone is provided a certain level of freedom while sacrificing some too.
It's a compromise, because going too far either way doesn't work... The GPL works the same way as society does.
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You only have to return changes back to the community if you redistribute the resulting program. You're free to use the altered app privately, including within a company.
Re:Freedom is an absolute. You have it, or you don (Score:4, Insightful)
Does anyone remember the adage "your right to swing your arm stops at your neighbor's nose"?
BSD is that you can swing your arms however you like and if you wanna punch someone's nose, go for it
GPL says that you can swing your arms as long as you don't punch anyone in the nose
Punching someone in the nose, obviously, is taking open source work and making it proprietary.
So lay off the false dichotomies and admit that freedom is not an all or nothing proposition.
Another example, btw, is having the freedom to drink beer but not having the freedom to rob a liquor store.
Hyperbole alert! (Score:3)
Punching someone in the nose, obviously, is taking open source work and making it proprietary.
So what do you call it when someone copies an open source work and makes a proprietary fork? Because you are making the classic mistake of theft vs. copyright infringement all over again. If I copy your source code I have not taken it, because I have not deprived you of it, which is what happens when you take something. It goes from one person's possession to another and the first party has had something taken.
As it turns out, the first party has been deprived of an unnaturally created "right" to control wh
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Sorry, BSD is not a punch in the nose. They can't take an open source work and make it proprietary. They can make a COPY of the open source work proprietary. The open source work itself is still open. Anyone can get a copy of the open work and use it to do whatever they like. They don't take anything away from you by making their own private copy.
Re:Freedom is an absolute. You have it, or you don (Score:4, Insightful)
If someone can write code better than you, that's your problem.
If you don't like it, -- gasp!! -- write your own code in the future.
Stop being all butt hurt cuz you can't take someone's work, make it better, and release to people who were willing to pay for it. In the end, your creation is obviously making the world a better place if you share it, so put it on your resume/cv and move on with life.
Re:Freedom is an absolute. You have it, or you don (Score:5, Informative)
If someone can monetize your code better than you, that's your problem.
GPL is for people who don't mind if their code is monetized, in fact they may even encourage it, as long as the code (and derivative code) remains open. It isn't about monetizing, it's about staying open.
Re:Freedom is an absolute. You have it, or you don (Score:5, Informative)
If you're telling the end user that they'll be raped by the DMCA if they try to tweak your proprietary product which was based on my open source project, don't you think I'd be kinda pissed?
This is exactly the sort of thing that the GPL prevents. It keeps you from using my code to be a dick.
My open soruce GPL code is mine just as arguably as your proprietary product is yours.
So how is your freedom to lock out your users and competitors any different from my freedom to not let you use my code to do it?
What's good for the goose is good for the gander. If you want the freedom to be proprietary, I should also have the freedom not to cooperate.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
GPL is not viral. It can't "infect" code that isn't derived from GPL'd code. That makes it heredity, not viral.
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GPL is not viral. It can't "infect" code that isn't derived from GPL'd code. That makes it heredity, not viral.
The GPL is considered viral because mixing GPL'd code with more permissively licensed software pretty much makes the combined work GPL-only. In other words, once you've introduced GPL'd software into the project, the whole project becomes de facto GPL even if technically you can pull that GPL'd software out. GPL'd plug-ins might not be so bad, but if it is a critical feature covered by the GPL'd software, you might as well re-license the whole project under the GPL.
Copyright lawyers really have a heartbur
Re:Misleading headline (Score:5, Insightful)
If you don't mix things at the source level, there's no reason to ever have heartburn. If you do, then you should be getting heartburn regardless of what licenses are involved because it's just an inherently messy situation period.
Beyond that, there really is no problem. Atlhough some people like to lie about the situation to suit their particular agenda.
Some fanboy trying to distract from the fact that Apple is openly hostile to Free Software being a good example.
Unless you're not interested in treating other people's stuff as your own private personal property, there's really no problem.
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The real problem that lawyers have with GPL is not that it's "more viral" or something - after all, proprietary third-party code being used also comes with an EULA. No, the problem is that, with GPL, more often than not there's no single code owner. With proprietary stuff, if you find out that you infringe on their copyrights (e.g. because you licensed it for a specific use and then used it elsewhere), it is dealt with simply by "upgrading" the license, and possibly paying damages - unpleasant, but it doesn
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I don't make it sound "like GPL is a virus". I'm simply explaining why legal departments in many proprietary software companies are so paranoid about it - because they can't buy their way out of it if they end up there, which they normally can do with typical proprietary licenses.
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Anyway, GPL , BSDL, ASL, and MITL are all licenses that are both 'free' and 'open', so at least the summary is horribly misguided.
Term clarification, please (Score:5, Funny)
black duck (Score:5, Informative)
Surprise, surprise, yet another anti-GPL study from Black Duck software.
Re:black duck (Score:5, Informative)
Depends where you look (Score:5, Informative)
If you look at the work that Apple supports (clang, etc.), they are using non-GPL licenses. Same goes for code on CodePlex (the Microsoft site for C#/.NET open source projects). If you look at any of the ruby, python, javascript projects on GitHub, they tend to use a non-GPL license.
C/C++ projects make up 11% of the projects on github and these tend to be the languages that use GPL.
I personally use GPL for my projects because I am happy with that license, and use other projects that are GPL. Others may not, so they are free to choose a different language.
And we have heard repeatedly from Brian Proffitt that the GPL is dying/dead, but is still being used for new projects. Oh and this is article dated December 16, 2011, so why is this news now?
Welcome to the FUD machine.
Re: (Score:2, Flamebait)
Apple is pretty hostile towards GPLv3. They won't distribute any code licensed under it. That's almost certainly why they stuck with an older version of Samba in OS X until they could replace it with their own implementation. Pretty much, once something goes GPLv3, they're going to fork & maintain, or rewrite from scratch.
Re:Depends where you look (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Depends where you look (Score:4, Funny)
Apple is pretty hostile towards GPLv3. They won't distribute any code licensed under it. That's almost certainly why they stuck with an older version of Samba in OS X until they could replace it with their own implementation. Pretty much, once something goes GPLv3, they're going to fork & maintain, or rewrite from scratch.
I wonder which side the hostility comes from.
Bullshit (Score:5, Informative)
MS-PL? Who on earth has ever heard of that license? Perhaps the fact that the only source of the data is a company that is connected to Microsoft [techrights.org] has something to do with its mention? The fact that the same company has been emitting anti-GPL propaganda since 2008 is also interesting.
Slashdot, please don't propagate astroturfing.
Re:Bullshit (Score:4, Informative)
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It's possible, but to make a concrete example, as a user, the only reason I could upgrade my phone firmware after its manufacturer stopped supporting it is that Android's kernel is under the GPL
The only reason I can upgrade my phone firmware after the manufacturer stopped supporting it is that the manufacturer (HTC) chose to release an updated (but unsupported) version of the blob that controls the GPU and a few other things to the community. As far as I know, there are no Android phones that have a completely open stack, or even a completely open source set of drivers.
This sounds like more of a reason to embrace community-friendly manufacturers than any particular license. The GPL in Linux
The word you are looking for is copyleft (Score:2)
All of these licences are opensource and all of the permit you to create derivative works. In what way is, for example, a MIT licence not free?
Shenanigans. (Score:3)
This is bullshit. It's counting by project, not by importance or size. I'm sure if we counted by lines of code, the GPL would still be #1.
What's happening is that we are seeing new "projects" being created at an alarming rate, most of this projects being wordpress plugins that do nothing important, collections of shitty javascript functions, and themes for various CMS, forums, etc.
Sure, it's full of kids that "just learned" the latest "cool" language (you know the type, Ruby, Python, etc) and just create some project that is either trivial, or is going nowhere past "we uploaded a readme and a roadmap to sourceforge". Half of sourceforge is dead projects.
The truth is that projects aren't jumping ships. No GPL projects are trying to change their license.
I could report "The earth is getting smaller and less important", but the truth is that the inflation of the universe doesn't change the size of the earth, just what percentage of the universe it represents.
Re: (Score:2)
The Black Duck KnowledgeBase includes over 540,000 projects
Looks like you're right, they must be counting every hipster Github project.
As for projects with actual users, I've seen more migrations from GPL2 to 3
Re:Shenanigans. (Score:4, Interesting)
The truth is that projects aren't jumping ships. No GPL projects are trying to change their license.
Projects aren't relicensing (it's really hard!), but GPL'd projects are seeing competition from more permissively licensed alternatives. It looks like in FreeBSD 10 we'll be able to replace all of the GPL'd components of the base system with permissively licensed alternatives. Doing that five years ago would have been impossible.
GPL is counterproductivenow (Score:2, Insightful)
This is because (I'm wearing my flame-retardant suit) the GPL isn't necessary to preserve software freedom anymore; and in its own way is restrictive of those freedoms.
1) It scares off a lot of people and companies who might otherwise use such software. Nobody wants to be caught staring down the barrel of a loaded lawyer because of their choice of software. Whether or not this fear is *realistic* is not relevant - it is a *real* fear.
2) By using a license to force-propagate specific freedoms, we restrict o
Re:GPL is counterproductivenow (Score:5, Insightful)
Free software is here. We've won. The strict rules of the GPL aren't necessary because people are willing to create, use, and propagate free software without them.
Citation needed.
GPL3 focuses on anti-tivoization and patents. According to your reasoning, that's not needed because companies are voluntarily allowing their users to hack their devices, and they're not patenting software? You must live on another planet. Without an axe to wield like the GPL, free software is dead in 5 years. It's annoying so many people are just so incredibly naive, or corporate brainwashed, in this regard.
Re:GPL is counterproductivenow (Score:4, Informative)
A lot of newer projects are more concerned with getting their source adopted and in use than with making sure users contribute back. And the best way to get better adoption is to use a license that doesn't scare people (and lawyers).
Licenses which aren't the GPL scare me, because I always assume that eventually the critical people will end up working for some company that manages a closed fork.
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A lot of newer projects are more concerned with getting their source adopted and in use than with making sure users contribute back. And the best way to get better adoption is to use a license that doesn't scare people (and lawyers).
Licenses which aren't the GPL scare me, because I always assume that eventually the critical people will end up working for some company that manages a closed fork.
That's definitely possible, yet this does not give those core contributors - or their new corporate overlords - the means to remove the original source from circulation. It can still be picked up by others and improved upon.
And if the project is so reliant on those specific individuals that this isn't realistic, I would argue it's not safe to rely on such a project to begin with due to the unpredictable nature of busses.
Screwdrivers and Religiions (Score:2)
Choose a license the way you choose a screwdriver, not the way you choose a religion.
What are your goals? Are you inventing a new protocol that you want everyone, everywhere, to integrate and ship with their software, be it open or proprietary? Then you want a BSD-like or MIT-like license.
Do you want to have control over the commercial uses of your work, while keep non-commercial use low cost? Then GPL or similar is for you.
At one hardware company I worked at, we released drivers under BSD. From the com
Who's Making Software, for What (Score:3)
Copyleft licenses like GPL have always been ideal for projects where you're trying to build something you use in conjunction with others that use it. It's a community contract for building a shared tool with many contributors where one competitor forking it is a danger. This is great for things like LibreOffice or Webkit. Developers are large users and so long as it is a shared resource no one party gets an advantage.
Open, permissive licenses like BSD have always been better for component level technology or proposed new standard protocols or other software that requires both interoperability and adoption to have value. Things like drivers, services that run communication protocols, and generic system services all fit into this category. In these cases barriers to adoption (like dropping it into a bunch of closed source code) are detrimental to the project as a whole. It's better if MS takes it and incorporates it into Windows, even if they don't contribute anything back.
So an increase in the proportion of the latter category is hardly surprising as technology trends change. The move to mobile devices, cheaper targeted hardware manufacturing, and smaller, more efficient computing components lead to an increased number of projects in this latter category. Building a service to print wirelessly from your tablet? Why wouldn't you want you code as widely adopted and thus as widely supported by printer makers as possible? Does a competitor closing the source on the audio driver you built really give them any sort of advantage over a GPL where they have to give bug fixes back (but probably won't do much since you already made a feature complete product)?
It used to be the only place we saw this sort of development was in the Linux and BSD server markets because hardware costs made it out of the reach of those who built small devices. Now WindRiver and the like are taking a back seat as the market is flooded with cheap, small components. Most everyone in the industry has seen this trend ramping up for a long time. It isn't an ideological shift. We are all still applying the licenses that make sense to our projects. There are just more projects in the latter category now because the environment has changed.
GPL vs. BSD = liberalism vs. libertarianism (Score:3)
They're two different kinds of freedom, the GPL, like liberalism, uses rules that are technically anti-freedom to actively defend the (in-practice) freedom of the parties involved. The BSD license, like libertarianism, is like setting out a very barebones set of rules (theoretically very free) and hoping for the best.
How does it work in practice? Well which license gets its softeware incorporated into closed commercial products while the developers get a big fat nothing, and which one was updated with new rules when a loophole allowed similar behavior? So you have to choose whether you want freedom in theory or practice.
Re:My reason (Score:5, Informative)
FUD.
The only time 'users' get involved in legal action is when those 'users' are releasing GPL software as part of a product, and not releasing the source.
If you don't want to get sued over redistributing a piece of software then closed source software must make you piss yourself.
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Back 10 years ago, when they started suing companies who violated the GPL, I figured that this wouldn't turn out good for the GPL, Why because the success of the GPL was based on sharing of ideas, once they brought lawyers into the mix you increased the cost of the use. If people are afraid to get sued for improper distribution of hybrid work, then they will work with less restrictive licenses.
The BSD and MIT licenses encourage sharing, however they don't demand it. One of the side effect of freedom is th
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There's nothing FUD about this at all. Yes, there is F, but we've progressed way past U and D with the busybox and Oracle lawsuits.
You mean that busybox and Oracle have started suing users of, say, Android phones?
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What kind of hideous shit are you doing that requires "man-years" of documentation for someone to just _build_ the software...
Perhaps you should look internally for the problem instead of blaming others for your horrible code / build processes
Re:My reason (Score:5, Informative)
Ooh, just off the top of my head
The Linux kernel
Build process?
# make
# make modules
# make modules_install
# make install
Sounds like you got duped by some devious vendor who wanted to ensure years of future support needs from you
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A sheep's way of saying "I don't like what you say".
Not really, your post was just incorrect bullshit. SFC doesn't start suing for software they don't own the licensing to, unless they are hired by the copyright holder.
If you don't care what your users do with your software, there's little point in using the GPL.
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No, your post either is FUD or is the result of having been fed FUD.
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sheep
A adolescent's way of attacking the person making a point, rather than addressing the substance of the comment. Specifically, that the topic, as characterized, is FUD.
Users
don't get sued when they fire up a piece of software that the publisher/distributer doesn't properly document.
Your
statements are meant to muddy the waters, cause doubt among end users about whether they'll end up in court over someone else's half-baked compilation instructions, etc. Give it a rest.
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From the GLP:
âoeInstallation Informationâ for a User Product means any methods, procedures, authorization keys, or other information required to install and execute modified versions of a covered work in that User Product from a modified version of its Corresponding Source. The information must suffice to ensure that the continued functioning of the modified object code is in no case prevented or interfered with solely because modification has been made.
If you convey an object code work under this section in, or with, or specifically for use in, a User Product, and the conveying occurs as part of a transaction in which the right of possession and use of the User Product is transferred to the recipient in perpetuity or for a fixed term (regardless of how the transaction is characterized), the Corresponding Source conveyed under this section must be accompanied by the Installation Information.
This has been used to pressure companies or individuals to give up proprietary build processes or special software. It's not just theoretical, I'm afraid.
Re:My reason (Score:4, Interesting)
This has been used to pressure companies or individuals to give up proprietary build processes...
You say this like it's a bad thing.
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Lawyers and "interest groups" leeching on other peoples work
I'd be surprised if US law lets a lawyer take action for copyright infringement other than on behalf of the copyright owner? I can understand if you don't like the actions of the SFLC but, somewhere, someone must have instructed the lawyers — to them, perhaps the lawyers are not "leeching" from them, but helping them, even if you consider that they are not helping you?
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(I'd like to consider myself a geek first, but I am employed as a lawyer, which might mean my view on this is a biased one, although, like the OP, I am questioning as to whether suing to enforce the GPL is the right approach.)
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I'd be surprised if US law lets a lawyer take action for copyright infringement other than on behalf of the copyright owner?
With GPL, it appears that all you have to do is submit a change to get your name on the list of copyright holders, and you can apparently then sue on behalf of the entire software package. The original authors don't seem to have to be consulted.
The US also allows transfer of copyrights (which I consider illogical - the creator doesn't change because money or paperwork changes hands), which makes it even muddier - the onus is on the one who uses a piece of software to track down the current copyright holder
Re:My reason (Score:5, Interesting)
Thank you for your thoughts.
With GPL, it appears that all you have to do is submit a change to get your name on the list of copyright holders, and you can apparently then sue on behalf of the entire software package. The original authors don't seem to have to be consulted.
I can't see this working as a matter of copyright law, but I don't know the US way of doing things. To my mind, you'd only have grounds to sue for an infringement in respect of the copyright of which you are the owner — if your change does not amount to a copyright work, I'd be surprised if a court would find you had standing to sue for anything, as your copyright has not been infringed. Making a minor (but still sufficient for copyright protection) change might be the way forward for that, though.
The US also allows transfer of copyrights (which I consider illogical - the creator doesn't change because money or paperwork changes hands)
The creator does not change but, when you buy a house from someone, you (or the bank...) owns the property in that house, not the creator — since copyright is a property right, the same rules apply. (You might prefer to be an author in jurisdictions where moral / authorial rights are regarded more strongly, where it is indeed impossible to assign ownership, as ownership is tied so closely to authorship.)
I prefer to use a more liberal license if I can
It sounds as if, in reality, you're more inclined towards a licence being a statement of intent / request — that you'd like someone who uses your code to do so in a particular manner, but that you are not going to chase after them with a legal stick if they refuse. However, since this would be difficult, if not impossible, to construct as a form of licence, you use a permissive licence to achieve the same ends?
This biggest disappointment to me is that, as with property generally, I cannot choose to disclaim ownership — for most of what I write, I'd rather simply disclaim it to the public domain. Whilst those using my work in an academic context will be bound by academic rules in terms of citation and the like, if someone else can benefit, great — since copyright was neither a driver not an enabler to the creation of the work, I'm unconvinced that copyright should exist over that work, but, since it does as a matter of law, I'd like to refuse to accept it. Which I can't...
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And you can just say that the only requirement on using it is not to claim anyone in particular created it.
That's pretty much the most open license you can have.
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the most open license
Thank you — yes, that's an approach which could be used to approximate the outcome. Similarly, I could use CC0 [creativecommons.org].
The problem for me, though, is that it's an approximation, rather than the real thing. It's a licence, which requires something to be licensable, and, whilst the last attempts to be as far away from a restrictive licence as possible, it only work because of the existence of copyright, which is the very thing I wish to disclaim. Licensing under such terms might be t
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This biggest disappointment to me is that, as with property generally, I cannot choose to disclaim ownership â" for most of what I write, I'd rather simply disclaim it to the public domain. Whilst those using my work in an academic context will be bound by academic rules in terms of citation and the like, if someone else can benefit, great â" since copyright was neither a driver not an enabler to the creation of the work, I'm unconvinced that copyright should exist over that work, but, since it does as a matter of law, I'd like to refuse to accept it. Which I can't...
You know I rarely use my moderation points since I don't come across any really good posts. In fact my moderation points just expired last night. This is one of the best things I've read on slashdot in a while though. I wish I had points to mod you up.
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I can't see this working as a matter of copyright law, but I don't know the US way of doing things. To my mind, you'd only have grounds to sue for an infringement in respect of the copyright of which you are the owner...
Well, disregarding the triviality of submitting a small change to the upstream source, technically what is happening when you grab the source, change it, and then distribute it is that you are distributing a derivative work to which you are the owner.
So there will certainly be some cases whe
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As a manager, if you are worried about using GPL software you need to get some concepts clear: GPL lets you use the software however you want to, it only cares about what you must do if you give someone a binary copy of the program. So you don't have to really worry unless you
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It doesn't matter what license the source code is under. If you're going to use it and distribute it to your customers, you better be dang sure your lawyer has vetted your right to use and distribute the code and that you are following the terms of said license in the first place. This is just as true for so-called open source as it is for proprietary code that you've licensed. I don't understand why people such as yourself make such a distinction between the GPL and other licenses. If MS produced a uti
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Small projects tend to work to incorporate into other bigger projects. Large projects stand for themselves, they are not going to used with with other projects, it makes them easier to stay with the GPL, and you are not going to be breaking the GPL easily. The smaller projects are often tools to make bigger projects easier to complete. And a more Open to developers license makes them seem more attractive.
GPL license subscribes to the idea that everyone agrees with GPL Ideals, and has an infrastructure de
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The LGPL is perfectly fine for tools and libraries and building blocks.
Big corporations can build commercial proprietary products with such tools and libraries just fine. All of this stuff is actually pretty simple once you understand what copyright is actually supposed to be about. There are a very particular set of rights that are governed by Copyrights.
The GPL is being confused and conflated with your usual Microsoft style EULA that can do all sorts of crazy things to expand the rights of software distri
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Only as far as resources permit.
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You're welcome to choose whatever license you wish for your own code of course. But your talk of "[enforcing] Richard Stallman's restrictive ideals" is disingenuous at best, dishonest at worse. GPL was never about being free to distribute the code in any way you want with the code but rather the developer of the code being free, and guaranteeing derivative developers the same freedom. If you don't agree with the GPL, then write your own dang code, negotiate a more suitable license, or leave it alone. It
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I wont ever use the GPL and prefer MIT and BSD style licensing.
That's great but it seems to me that those licenses give you less latitude for negotiation with business entities who are simply able to pick up code projects and use it as they see fit. Apple and Microsoft are two fine examples of companies making lots of money of BSD licenses.
To me GPL code was more about the software being "freed" with it's own intrinsic set of rights, specifically, on modification. Which also meant it's possible to create cashflow based on expertise using that software.
Frankly, the GPL is ANTI-SOCIAL as it restricts freedom and creates a burden of enforcement upon those who put the license to use.
Exactly. It res