Re: "Licences Wars"

Hi Omer!

Sorry for the late response.

On Sunday 09 November 2008, Omer Zak wrote:
> 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.

I am against them in the sense that I prefer not to use them for my code. But 
I accept the fact that some people want to use them. However, I do think that 
the SleepyCat licence is preferable over the GPL for the reasons I cited 
below.

>
> > 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.

The Artistic licence is not strong-copyleft. I am not against the Artistic 
licence (at least not as much I am against the GPL or the SleepyCat 
licences), but on the other hand, what I mean is that the GPL and LGPL, are 
too over-complicated, incomprehensible, and heavily misunderstood to be a 
wise choice as a licence.

>
> > > 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).

I have researched it to some extent.

>
> 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.
>

Well, the same thing can be said about forks of BSD-style-licensed projects 
that are both kept under the same licence. In regards to proprietary 
spin-offs - given enough motivation on those who remained FOSS, they can 
continue working on the codebase, and gain inspiration from the properietary 
spin-offs. 

> >  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.

Interesting analogy. Well, companies who wish to develop proprietary software 
have enough BSD-licenced (or possibly also LGPL/Artistic/etc.) code or 
alterantively proprietary code that they can build on (like the Microsoft 
APIs) for them to not have to use any GPLed code.

Furthermore, I don't think the FOSS world is under any threat from proprietary 
software vendors, that can be prevnted if I GPLed all my code. Can you cite 
any possible substantial threat?

>
> >  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.

Like I said, I still prefer LGPL-like-licences that are not the LGPL, because 
the LGPL is based on the GPL (only more complicated) and because I don't 
understand it.

>
> >  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.

"Invent a future"? If I release software under any licence, I invent a future. 
The licence affects the kind of future there is going be, but not its 
substance.

>
> > 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.
>

Have you noticed what I said about the Hacker Ethics? This is not about 
complying to the originator's whims. This is about making sure everyone in 
the world will build on each other's efforts instead of having to waste time 
in duplicating them. 

> > 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.
>

I said "often" not "always". People such as RMS would claim that all 
proprietary software is Evil and should be avoided. My argument is that often 
it doesn't cause any damage.

For example, someone integrated my Freecell Solver library in a shareware 
(without source) game he wrote titled Freecell 3D:

http://www.ambermango.com/php/am/f3d/index.php

He sells ths game online. It did not do any damage, because there are plenty 
of Freecell implementations around. I on my part am pretty happy with the 
open-source PySolFC.

On the other hand, it has some innovative features that we can now duplicate, 
or draw inspiration from.

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

-----------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish       http://www.shlomifish.org/
Understand what Open Source is - http://xrl.us/bjn82

Shlomi, so what are you working on? Working on a new wiki about unit testing 
fortunes in freecell? -- Ran Eilam

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