cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/44059967
for those not familiar with Mark Pilgrim, he is/was a prolific author, blogger, and hacker who abruptly disappeared from the internet in 2011.
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.bestiver.se/post/968527
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/44059967
for those not familiar with Mark Pilgrim, he is/was a prolific author, blogger, and hacker who abruptly disappeared from the internet in 2011.
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.bestiver.se/post/968527
GPL is especially popular with people who don’t want their labor of love to become a source of free labor for corporations who will tweak it, close the source, directly profit off it, and never donate or contribute patches. For them, it’s an antiparasitic license.
I’ve heard that “corporate parasite” argument way too often, but it’s massively overrated. Open Source allows selling anyway, MIT, BSD and GPL all do. If someone makes smart changes and lives off it, that’s awesome, not reprehensible!
GPL only forces source disclosure when distributing binaries, not for every damn thing – imagine you land a juicy company contract: you tweak a GPL work, deliver the binaries, and only have to hand the modified source TO THAT COMPANY, NOT the whole world! That’s why AGPL fanatics had to invent their SaaS trap. For me as a hobby coder, GPLs are just pointless headaches instead of real freedom.
This is naive. Very naive.
We would not have such a huge Linux infrastructure and support for all those different components without GPL.
Every modern car uses Linux. I repeat, one of the most locked down industries uses Linux on custom hardware on millions of cars.
Indeed, very limiting.
Or, gcc, the Compiler everybody uses to build Linux stuff and the kernel? This is a direct GNU project. Without GPL and the requirements to provide changes, we would have thousands of gcc based, closed source compilers. Most likely expensive to, to build optimized arm code and other stuff.
But, feel free to protest the usage of GPL by not using any GPL licensed software.
It’s not naive – naive is believing Linux’ success comes only from GPL. That’s ridiculous. Windows sells like crazy too, does that make its license the nonplusultra?
Linux booms because of Open Source (not just GPL), sponsoring (IBM, RedHat), thousands of volunteers, and pure luck. Without GPL? Sure, some BSD-derivative would’ve eaten that niche.
GCC? Without GPL we’d have more compilers – not just one monopolist. You’re confusing protection with innovation death.
This one is so stupid, I had to think how to respond.
Why? What prevents anybody to implement a new Compiler, looking at LLVM … ?
What we would have are closed source gcc forks, that is not freedom. This is the opposite.
I am old enough to remember buying a fucking Borland license
I work on gcc code, I know how ugly, historic in parts and confusing the Codebase can be. But I also know why. LLVM has no such legacy, and this is a good thing. I believe some day LLVM will replace gcc because of that. And LLVM uses Apache 2.0.
So, what exactly was your argument here?
Duno, you tried to convince me that the xGPL restrictions are only for my benefit. I strongly disagree with that opinion, that’s all. And I do not really care about argument, if something is used more often, then it’s best suited for me. I avoid to contribute to GPL projects and prefer some with MIT or BSD licenses.
I hope you are old enough to agree with me that TurboVision was fucking awesome.
All the hate on you. No, no, joking, I appreciate your work. gcc is a mess, I know.
Look at the number of MIT projects with such founding and contributions. Compare them to copy left projects.
What you will find is, that copy left projects have far more backing, financial support and contributions.
There are studies on this…
Qnd to keep Microsoft as an example. If the kernel would be permissive, what would Microsoft stop from using it, adding some property stuff on it and use their monopoly to force those feature everywhere.
Now they have taken the work of thousands of contributors and take all the money.
I have no problem with it.
Did you contribute to the kernel? Because, I for sure have a problem with it. And I did contribute.
Well at first, nice that we have a kernel developer here, it’s not so easy to get your code into. And second, nope, I do not contributed to the kernel. I once wrote a module for educational purposes a long long time ago. Then FUSE came along and it helped me to solve the task with “more comfort”.
I did contribute once. And it was a pain. 20 lines of code but hours of work, Mailinglists, feedback, …
Don’t het me wrong , it was fun. But would I have done the same for BSD, so that apple could use this? Hell no
OSX and FreeBSD show that it isn’t an overrated argument.
What’s wrong with OSX?