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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 16th, 2023

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  • Apple makes the source code to all their core utilities available? Nobody cares but they do.

    Why do they?

    They are BSD licensed (very similar to MIT). According to the crowd here, Apple would never Open Source their changes. Yet, in the real world, they do.

    Every Linux distro uses CUPS for printing. Apple wrote that and gave it away as free software.

    How do we explain that?

    There are many companies that use BSD as a base. None of them have take the BSD utils “commercial”.

    Why not?

    Most of the forks have been other BSD distros. Or Chimera Linux.

    How about OpenSSH?

    It is MiT licensed. Shouldn’t somebody have embraced, extended, and extinguished it by now?

    Why haven’t they?


  • Some people might say that so many companies contributing free and open code to clang/llvm instead of GCC is real world evidence against the idea that companies only contribute to free software because the GPL makes them. Or even that permissive licenses can lead to greater corporate sharing than the GPL does. Why does Apple openly contribute to LLVM but refuse to ship GPL3 anything?

    According to the web, Red Hat is the most evil company in Open Source. They are also the biggest contributor to Xorg and Wayland. Those are MIT licensed. Why don’t they just keep all their code to themselves? The license would allow it after all. Why did they license systemd as GPL? They did not have to.

    The memory allocator used in my distro was written by Microsoft. I have not paid them a dime and I enjoy “the 4 freedoms” with the code they gave me because it is completely free software. Guess what license it uses?




  • Since you seem so reasonable…

    The restriction that some people object to is that the GPL restricts the freedom of the software developers (the people actually writing and contributing the code).

    Most people would agree at first glance that developers should be able to license code that they write under whatever license they like. MIT is one option. Some prefer the GPL. Most see the right to choose a proprietary license for your own work as ok but some people describe this as unethical. I personally see all three as valid. I certainly think the GPL should be one of the options.

    That said, if we are talking about code that already exists, the GPL restricts freedom without adding any that MIT does not also provide.

    MIT licensed software is “free software” by definition. Once something has been MIT licensed, it is Open Source and cannot be taken away.

    The MIT license provides all of the Free Software Foundations “4 freedoms”. It also provides freedoms that the GPL does not.

    What the MIT license does not provide is guaranteed access to “future” code that has not yet been written. That is, in an MIT licensed code base, you can add new code that is not free. In a GPL code base, this is not possible.

    So, the GPL removes rights from the developers in that it removes the right to license future code contributions as you want. Under the GPL, the right of users to get future code for free is greater than the right of the developer to license their future contributions. Some people do not see that as a freedom. Some even see it as quite the opposite (forced servitude). This “freedom” is not one of the “4 freedoms” touted by the FSF but it is the main feature of the GPL.










  • I cannot see who made that comment. Pretty sure it is not the dev who is getting crucified. I am not sure it is even anybody that contributed to SerenityOS or Ladybird.

    I certainly do not see anybody from the project endorsing that language.

    I mean, I read the comment on Lemmy. Should I now go around saying not to use Lemmy and using that quote as evidence for why?


  • What are we reacting to here? The single comment from the actual dev saying that the project wanted to avoid politics? Or the actual hateful comment from some bystander?

    Ladybird has split from SerenityOS and from that community. Hopefully the bystander has been left behind.

    As for the actual project founder, if all he has ever said is that one statement, I am impressed with his level of restraint given how some have vilified him for it.


    1. using the Linux / BSD situation as a benchmark ignores a lot of history. I would argue that the BSD lawsuit was the deciding factor.

    2. the Linux project is not representative of a typical GPL code base. It rejected GPL3 and features a rather significant exception clause that deviates from GPL2.

    Clang vs GCC is probably a better metric for the role of the license in viability and popularity. Or maybe Postgres vs MySQL.

    Why has nothing GPL replaced Xorg or Mesa or now Wayland?

    Why hasn’t the MIT or Apache license held Rust back from being so popular? Why would Ubuntu be moving away from GNU Coreutils (GPL) to uutils (MIT)? How did Pipewire (MiT) replace PulseAiudio (LGPL)? How did Docker or Kubernetes win (both Apache)? Actually, what non-Red Hat GPL software has dominated a category in the past 10 years?

    If the GPL is the obvious reason for the popularity of Linux, why would RedoxOS choose MIT?

    This is not an anti-GPL rant.

    My point is that choosing the GPL (or not) does not correlate as obviously with project success as you make it sound. It is an opinion that would require a lot more evidence.