TinyX: Small Featured X Server

Wayland still does not for work me for basic stuff though. I will make a list once I try it again but so far I have only experienced issues with it, no issues with Xorg.

(And thus, I avoid anything Wayland.)

Well, "at the time" is a funny way to put it. That thread is from 2023. The first commit in the repository is from 2013, importing the already existing source tree.

I recall having played around with DSL/TCL (Damn Small Linux & Tiny Core Linux) around 2010 or so and IIRC they already had their minimalist X11-but-not-Xorg server even back then, which I found fascinating at the time. I'm pretty sure I took a curious peak at the source code back then, IIRC it simply didn't live in git yet (tarball and a few patches?).

The XVesa code base that this is forked off of is of course much older.

The answer to your question is in the next sentence, "While the original codebase is MIT, any changes here are GPLv3. Supporting closed devices with this code is not a goal."

That's the entire point of a permissive license. You grant other parties the right to do as they wish, given a very lax set of requirements (usually just attribution). Would you feel offended if someone only distributed a binary build with their changes, or even charge for that? That's literally what the permissive license is about.

What may not be immediately obvious, is that it still favors the downstream developer to contribute their changes back; the network effect scales exponentially with the number of participants. Making the changes copyleft complicates the matter, as their copyright status may become less clear as further downstream contributors chip in.

There's always some trade-off, but this is exactly what the MIT license permits. If it bothers you, you'd probably find yourself preferring copyleft anyway.

Protection against corporate interests taking over the project in the future.

Usually ideology. GNU/FSF people love switching software from permissive to copyleft.

The dude that worked on it prefers GPL over MIT.

Not less permissive, just targeting the end user instead of the developer rights.

I think they want assistance with the project, not for corps to take it and build it without contributing back. It's why Linux has grown more feature/driver rich while others grow at a slower pace (no necessarily a bad thing).

There’s no argument for the change in the general case. There’s rationalizations, sure.

But no euphemisms like “public”, “free software”, “copyleft”, make the change anything less than taking away a freedom and calling it “free as in speech”.

If it is good enough for OpenBSD it is good enough for me.

It's stable and it works for me.

Well, sadly NeWs isn't supported anymore.

The GPL is not about becoming huge, it's about building a community around shared software. The goal is not to prevent Microsoft from stealing your software, it is to promote the idea amongst software authors and users that software should be free to modify and share and that there should be no distinction between users and authors; There is no such statement with the MIT. I believe this makes sense regardless of the size of the software.

> And even if they do modify it, how would you know. How would you prove it's your codebase they modified?

Via dissasembly? It isn't that hard.

However i think you miss the point. GPL is more a statement of principles than anything else.

> If you want your idea to make the world a better place, use permissive, liberal licensing and move on.

Most examples of this directly contradict what you say. Whilst Apple has contributed somewhat to BSD, the vast majority of their work is closed up and sealed off. It's not making the world a better place.

GPL3 and AGPL are really the only defense against the tragedy of the commons.

> It's the equivalent of screaming "why can't we all just get along" into the Matrix.

You have it the wrong way around. MIT is screaming for people to place nicely and work together. GPL sets a strict contract and rules for playing, there is no screaming and there is no room for people to create their own forks and not work together.

While I favor BSD and MIT licenses myself that's all I will use, obviously we've had very successful software that is copylefted.

There are people who won't contribute to your program if it's BSD or MIT. There are those who won't contribute to your program if it's GPL.

A program with any license is at risk of being abandoned as a quirky curiosity, if it, doh, is a quirky curiosity.

Copyleft licenses like GPLv3 and AGPL make it slightly harder for tech monopolists like Google and Amazon to take over the project and profit of your work.

And contributors have the security that the project will stay free and will not do the classic MIT switch-and-bait to a commercial license.

> Copyleft isn't how the world works.

How do you explain the success of software projects such as the Linux kernel?

> MIT and Apache and liberal licenses liberate ideas for reuse and practical application in the real world.

No. The likes of MIT and Apache allow for royalty-free commercial use of third party software. Aka free labour.

The likes of GPL arguably have a greater impact on the whole concept of reuse because they require consumers to also be reusable by third parties.

It's ok if your goal is to just use someone else's projects for your own commercial benefit. I do that all the time. However, it's not right to try to frame it as something else.

> Copyleft isn't how the world works. MIT and Apache and liberal licenses liberate ideas for reuse and practical application in the real world. If you want your project to be a quirky curiosity visited and abandoned by people searching for some better solution for their problem, use copyleft.

Outside of software, copyleft is much closer to how the world works. In the real world, nothing is free, but reciporical agreements are common. Something like a free trade agreement is kind of like a copyleft license.

> Forking something from MIT to GPLv3 is disappointing, from this standpoint.

How can you both find that disappointing and support MIT licenses at the same time? Feels like contradiction. The entire premise of a BSD/MIT license is that people should have the right to do this.

> Copyleft isn't how the world works.

One way to think of copyleft is it neutralises copyright. Permissive licences do not do that. People who support free software do not believe software copyright should be part of the world.

Why are people downvoting your comment? It's not against the guidelines, is it?

I strongly think you are wrong, and I strongly disagree with your points, but I don't see why your opinion should disappear, lest this thread turn into an echo chamber.