I was actually have been thinking about it a lot lately. Because as you
said the copyleft licenses are in decline and for me it feels
increasingly like I am one against many.
As to your first question the arguments I mainly hear are two:
1. The minority says that GPL requires you to keep the same license if
you fork. That isn't heard much from my side. And I wouldn't count it
that much. Since the people that usually say it want to close source
stuff or that GPL is communistic. Yes this people exist sadly.
2. The second criticism that I usually hear is much more serious to me.
The say that I can't easily link GPL to anything else unless I check the
license. And even then I end up changing the license of something else.
Even if they don't want it.
What we should focus on is mainly the second criticism. Simply because
the first one is what makes GPL what it is and I would never change it
personally.
The second criticism is kind of a sign of the times if you think about
it. 30 years ago when GPL there was the big war of us versus them. And
evil corporations and all of that stuff. Not that these dangerous
corporations don't exist now of course. The danger of corporations is
more than ever. But the people have changed.
People nowadays are far more collaborative and diverse. The simple
number of programmers and licenses and software that we have is hundreds
of time more than 30 years ago. Expecting people to stay only in the GPL
ecosystem, which is not that big to begin with, is basically driving
people away. I can't think of a single programmer that I can convince to
use GPL with all of the legalities and considerations of dependencies it
can have.
And to be honest I think the biggest gift GPL gave to the world is
Copyleft. Not some kind of viral nature that seems to be antiquated by
modern standards.
I can mention at least two examples like that:
1. I like a certain license that is not Free Software. But it is
Copyleft. I can't be sure unless I contact fsf or start reading the
legalities of the matter if I can combine that license with GPL.
2. Supertuxkart the well known game to the Free Software community.
Recently went MPL-2. The reason was the same. Legalities. There was too
many random licenses for the tracks that they don't know if they match
and the can't integrate SDL2 into it. Plus other issues.
One big success story of Copyleft license is the Activity Pub ecosystem
if you know it. Mastodon, Pixelfed, Peertube, WriteFreely and more all
under AGPL-3.
The thing we have to keep in mind with Copyleft is that it is still not
the time for it in my opinion. We live in a time of extreme corporate
propaganda. And fake openness everywhere. While at the same time they
lock into their ecosystem. Two big examples is the Web with the
Google-Chromium monopoly and systemd.
Both of them started as open but ended up incompatible with everything
else. Guix needs to have elogind for example to keep up.
But this doesn't mean that FSF still can't do some work to improve
things. And GNU of course.
I don't want to get this too long so I think we need to consider two things:
1. Is FSF and GNU as a whole happy with the current situation? We
technically have more Free Software than ever. But the Copyleft and user
abuse is as high as it has ever been.
2. Is FSF and GNU the center of thing anymore? Do we want it to be?
Because I can tell you that there are Copyleft Licenses outside of GNU.
Few but exist. And there are developers that left GNU for some reason
but still work on Copyleft software. And of course the young developers
that haven't heard of FSF or GNU. Or don't want/bother to join.
Marinus Savoritias
On 9/22/20 12:02 PM, Pen-Yuan Hsing wrote:
(whew, finally changed my registration on this list to my FSF member
alias address! :D)
Ugh.
I don't know if it's by chance, but recently I've read many an opinion
claiming that copyleft free software licenses such as the GNU GPLv3 are,
among other terrible qualities:
1. Viral
2. Cancerous (!!!)
3. Harmful to the "open source movement/principles/ethos"
4. Restrictive
5. Anti-social
6. Unfriendly
7. [other negative adjectives...]
Usually, the same people would advocate for the "permissive" set of free
software licenses like the increasingly popular MIT license, or BSD,
Apache, and so on. Some reasons I've seen are that these "permissive"
licenses are easy to use so "you don't need to think about it", are
highly compatible with other licenses, "truly open source", "truly free"
because they don't come with any restrictions like the "restrictive"
GPL, or that "history has clearly shown permissive licenses to be more
successful and welcomed." Once, I asked a self-identified open source
(not free software) advocate whether they're concerned "permissively"
licensed code would be incorporated into proprietary software, and they
said no: "If I create a piece of open source software, and it helps
others even if that means it being used in proprietary products, I'm
fine with that."
What prompted me to write this post is an academic paper I just saw:
Wilson, G., Bryan, J., Cranston, K., Kitzes, J., Nederbragt, L., & Teal,
T. K. (2017). Good enough practices in scientific computing. PLOS
Computational Biology, 13(6), e1005510.
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005510
This paper is licensed CC BY (which is commendable and sadly still rare
in peer-reviewed academic literature, though I'd prefer CC BY-SA even
more), and IMHO it's actually very good in recommending "good enough
practices" so that scientists who are not programmers can begin to
improve their scientific computing practices. Quick side-note: I have an
academic science background and I can write a thesis lamenting the
terrible state of software development in many academic disciplines.
Physics/mathematics/astronomy are better for sure, but scientists in
most fields are well-meaning but horrible programmers (if they can write
code at all, many still use proprietary GUI spreadsheets to wrestle with
huge datasets) who don't comment their own spaghetti code that manages
to just squeak by (usually just once, before a reboot) to produce an
analytical result just "worthy" enough of publication. And since they
don't really know much about programming, many genuinely think that's
adequate. So I can say with some confidence that the paper I just cited
is already huge progress.
To their credit, the authors of this paper emphasise the importance of
including a LICENSE with your code, which - believe it or not - most
other "recommendations" in the scientific literature don't mention at
all, effectively keeping tons of scientific code unintentionally
proprietary.
Sadly, those authors also state:
"We recommend permissive software licenses rather than the GNU General
Public License (GPL) because it is easier to integrate permissively
licensed software into other projects; see chapter 3 in [17]"
Where [17] is the book:
St Laurent AM. Understanding Open Source and Free Software Licensing.
O'Reilly Media; 2004. http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/osfreesoft/book/.
The above was literally the only justification they gave for
recommending a "permissive" license. Now, many scientists will just read
this without critically considering its implications (somewhat ironic in
itself) and use MIT (or similar) licenses for their code. In my opinion,
that statement is misleading and gives the impression that the GNU GPL
is somehow bad for code.
In case it's not already clear, I'm deeply disappointed by the almost
complete lack of support I've seen for copyleft free software licenses.
Other than perhaps some people on this mailing list, I have *literally*
not interacted with any other human being who prefers copyleft licenses.
Zero.
Also in case it's not clear, a value I hold deeply is to assume good
faith and by default I truly respect other opinions regardless of how
much I might disagree. Here the disagreement is regarding the nature of
free software licenses, and it troubles me deeply.
My personal reason for desiring copyleft licenses is, in my opinion,
simple: Software freedom is a value I hold dearly, and I want to ensure
that freedom is perpetuated. In my view, the only "restriction" of a
copyleft license is that it insists that freedoms are not infringed. On
a high level, isn't a crucial mechanism for freedom to work the rule
that "you are free to do anything as long as it doesn't infringe on
other people's freedom?" Unless I am grossly mistaken, this is what a
copyleft license does. Is that so bad, or "cancerous", as some might
say? If anything, licenses such as the GNU GPL *protects* freedom, yet
practically everyone I've ever talked to think it *limits* freedom. I
totally understand why the FSF lists permissive licenses as free
software-compliant, because they technically are free. But without
protection of those freedoms, we have seen time and again how derivative
works of free software have been locked up into proprietary products
(with Apple's Mac OS lineage of operating systems perhaps being a famous
example that derives much of its core from free software - some
technically cool features, yes, but tragically proprietary and
ultimately user-hostile).
At this point, if you also prefer copyleft licenses, I hope for your
constructive thoughts on two sets of questions:
(1) WHAT are some common well-intentioned arguments YOU encounter for
permissive licenses and against copyleft licenses? And what are your
constructive responses?
(2) WHY do copyleft licenses seem to be in steep decline? What are
positive, constructive solutions to encourage its adoption? Any big
success stories other than the Linux kernel?
Or, if you do prefer permissive licenses, are you concerned about
software using those licenses being used in, or made into, proprietary
software? Are there concrete ways to secure software freedom with
licenses such as MIT?
If there are lots of constructive responses to this post, I'd be happy
to compile them into a FAQ of sorts and put them somewhere like the
Libreplanet wiki or elsewhere. Ideally, I hope to foster some sort of
curated and well-reasoned set of constructive arguments to advocate for
copyleft licenses.
It goes without saying that I know this can be a contentious topic, but
I know we are much better than starting flame wars and making personal
attacks. So let's be excellent to each other. :)
Hope to learn from you!
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