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What’s your ultimate unpopular opinion? (lemmy.ca)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml
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[–] -2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

@mholiv@lemmy.world It's common misconception that copyleft licences stop rich companies stealing open source.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    I mean you can’t steal open source code if you tried. The code is too respectful of your freedoms. I don’t think anyone is arguing against you here.

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  • [–] 0 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    @mholiv@lemmy.world So there's no reason not to use non-copyleft licences like BSD or MIT.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago* (1 child)

    If “theft” is your only concern yes. It’s a common misconception that copyleft licenses stops rich companies from stealing. It does not.

    I am more concerned about societal enrichment vs corporate enrichment.

    If you release some code under MIT that a company finds useful, they could take it, improve it a bit, and resell it back to the community. This enriches the company at the expense of the community. Without the original code the company could have never taken it as a basis to sell and the community that wrote the code gets nothing.

    If you release that same code as AGPL the company can take it, improve it and sell it to the community. BUT the difference is that the community now benefits from those improvements too. Maybe more improvements happen. Maybe a second company takes those improvements and sells them too. The community would have all the improvements and would benefit from greater competition.

    With copy left licenses. The community is enriched and companies are enriched.

    With MIT style licenses. Companies are enriched at the expense of the community.

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  • [–] 0 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    @mholiv@lemmy.world It looks you believe that magic letters G, P and L make company release their improvements to the public. Actually they do the same with MIT and GPL code: include it into closed source products and that is. Because there's no way for you to check if there was GPL in closed source program.

    But the GPL style licences bring licence compatibility issues while MIT style do not. (And that's why Linux cannot include ZFS driver despite it's being "GPL style" licenced)

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    Ask Cisco how they feel about it. There is a precedence of companies using copy left licensed software and the community benefiting from it.

    If companies are just going to be blatantly criminal and violate software licenses they were going to do that anyways. I’m not sure how much experience you have working in or with mega corps but the ones I have worked with in the past HATE the idea of opening themselves up to being so blatantly liable.

    When I worked in big tech we had a license scanner that checked the libraries we were using. Anything strongly copyleft would be flagged and we would be contacted by legal.

    You might have experienced working with companies that act otherwise. I encourage you to call them out, maybe work with the FSF to get another Cisco style ruling.

    Funny you mention ZFS though. It’s not the GPL that was the issue. It is CDDL that’s incompatible. GPL is generally comparable with foss licenses. MIT, MPL, Apache, BSD all are comparable. It’s just CDDL that’s incompatible with copyleft in general.

    If you think the community will benefit more from MIT licensed software than copyleft I think you need to look harder at the modern corporate world. Corporations are not altruistic.

    This being said I’m not sure there is much more to be said here. You’ve gone to saying I believe in magic and that there are corporate GPL conspiracies. I just don’t see the proof and I think there is not much more to be gained by such talk.

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  • [–] -1 points 1 year ago

    @mholiv@lemmy.world Going criminal is not a goal in itself. I think you know, corporations exist for profit. If violating a licence gains profit they'll do it. You know companies doing open source? I know too. Why do they do it? Because of GPL? No, they do because they profit from it. (And they like how copyleft licences restrict others from benefiting).

    You see problem with CDDL? Problem would be any other copyleft licence. No copyleft licence is compatible with GPL (except they include special exception), neither CDDL, nor GFDL (despite GNU in its name), nor any other. Funny you mention MIT, MPL, Apache and BSD in this list, because they're all permissive that are compatible to both GPL and CDDL. It is not CDDL, but copyleft making these licences incompatible. I mentioned CDDL specifically because it is an iconic example how copyleft (allows a company to) hurt open source.

    You're speaking about "conspiracies", and ask me for proofs. But what proofs do you need? That companies violate licences? There are known cases of open source licence litigations. Actually problem is deeper, not that companies violate licences, but that there's no effective way to enforce such licences (without totalitarism).

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