Re: "Licences Wars"

On Thu, 2008-11-06 at 20:33 +0200, Shlomi Fish wrote:
> On Thursday 06 November 2008, Omer Zak wrote:
> > In an ideal world, in which all software vendors act fairly and compete
> > only over the merits of their products, politics would not be necessary.
> >
> > But in today's world, politically-charged licenses - on at least part of
> > the software running the world - are essential to keep the unfair
> > software vendors in check.  For, without viral licenses, they can take
> > over any Free Software and create closed source derivatives out of it.
> 
> The SleepyCat licence is a viral licence, but is much less politically charged 
> than the GPL, and I didn't have a problem understanding it. As a result I 
> recommend using it instead of the GPL, should you decide to use a viral 
> licence.

I understood that you are (not strongly) against all viral licenses,
regardless of whether they provide us with protection against the unfair
software vendors.

> Similarly, the Artistic 2.0 licence is LGPL-like, and should be used instead 
> of the LGPL because it's less politically charged and problematic.

See above.

> > Unrelated to the above, consider the fragmentation of the Unix world in
> > the 1980's vs. the natural tendency to converge in the Linux world.  The
> > GPL played an important role in making this convergence happen.
> 
> Possibly - I'm not sure. It preceded my time. However, there's a strong 
> convergence in the BSD, X11, and Apache worlds today, and they are all based 
> on BSD-style licences. GPL doesn't positively prevent fragmentation, as it 
> explicitly allows forking.

1. Research this!  The above fragmentation can be considered to have
preceded also my time, because I was not conscious of this world until
1991 (unrelated to Linux).

2. In practice, it turns out that overwhelming majority of GPLed
software does not fragment.
While the GPL allows forking, in practice it turns out that there is an
incentive for people to stick together in a single project, because if
the original GPLed project has forked into two projects, then they are
allowed to use each other's improvements, and eventually one of them
turns out to be better (code/documentation/management/politics/business)
and wins over the minds and hearts of developers and the other project
dies natural death.

>  In any case, I'm not too worried about trying to undermine "unfair 
> software vendors".

You can afford the luxury of not being too worried about unfair software
vendors, because other people do the heavy worrying in your behalf.
This is like parents who get away with not vaccinating their children
against childhood diseases due to ideological reasons, and it turns out
that their children stay healthy because the other children in their
kindergarten or classroom have been vaccinated.

>  If they pose a threat (which I don't think they do), then 
> no amount of keeping my code GPLed will prevent that threat.

This is a case in which every little bit helps.

>  If they don't 
> pose a threat, then making my code viral will not help them and may likely 
> pose a problem to many benevolent developers (also of FOSS).

I think that LGPL is the best compromise - LGPLed software can be part
of proprietary software, yet any modifications to the LGPLed part must
be available in source code to users of the proprietary software, along
with means for linking modified LGPLed modules into the software.

>  To quote Alan 
> Kay, "Don't worry about what everybody else are doing. The best way to 
> predict the future is to invent it.".

This quote can be invoked as a reason to use GPL/LGPL, not only as a
reason against it.  By using GPL/LGPL on your software, you invent a
future for Free Software.

> One thing I forgot to note is that the GPL often stands against the Hacker 
> Ethics as presented by ESR in http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html 
> (and which I agree with), that says that "No problem should ever have to be 
> solved twice.". For example, the FSF now started the GNU PDF project so it 
> will be a GPL version 3-licenced code because both ghostscript and xpdf are 
> GPLv2-only. Or the story here - http://www.osnews.com/story/7241 that said 
> that:
> 
> {{{{{{{{
> Once before, someone had contributed a patch to add boolean operations, but 
> that patch relied on a polygon clipping library provided under an 
> incompatible license. There's little more frustrating than having a solution 
> in hand, only to be hamstrung by legal problems. Even though it was an 
> important feature for us, we regretfully postponed development of it into the 
> distant future on our roadmap and proceeded with other work. 
> }}}}}}}}
> 
> Or the fact OpenBSD is now re-implementing a lot of GNU GPL code from scratch 
> because they find the GPL too restrictive.

The people, who slapped the GPL license on their code, expect to be paid
in a way (not monetary), which OpenBSD is not willing to pay.  This is
not different from re-implementing a proprietary software application on
your own because the one you can buy in shop is too expensive for you to
buy.

Your argument is not different in essence from the argument of someone,
who wants to buy a Ferrari car but grumbles about its high price.

> And I should also note that often one can build upon non-GPL-like-code and not 
> release the derived work as FOSS, without it causing any harm, and actually 
> causing a lot of good. Which is otherwise prevented if the code is GPL.

RMS would disagree with you, and he could cite the printer driver
example as an counterexample to your point.

                                             --- Omer
-- 
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