I used to prefer permissive licenses and now favor copyleft

> Even if some company were to make a closed source fork, who cares?

They can add sufficiently popular functionality to said closed source fork and make the open source original a) obsolete and b) incompatible with the combined ecosystem, and thus deprive the users of a feasible free option.

> There is no possible way for users to be hurt by a permissive license. Even if some company were to make a closed source fork, who cares? The original is still there, still just as free as it ever was.

The users of the closed source fork are harmed. They are unable to use the software to the full extent (e.g. inspect, modify, fix bugs). This is what copyleft intends to protect.

Closed source reduces the software into an appliance and the user into a consumer.

I have a different take on permission license. I offer up what little code I produce under the assumption that anyone can use it for whatever, just give me credit. Why? Because it might result in an interesting collaboration on a project I like. If someone uses my existing code to accomplish something neat and sees who I am, they can reach out to me for more, which I'm open to since it would likely result in some growth for me as an amateur. I'm not particularly interested in making money since I recognize that I am nowhere near that level, yet, but creating a future opportunity seems like a good idea since I enjoy coding.

> But I'm sick of the false idea of "you're just subsidizing big business" being promulgated. That isn't true.

All the permissively licensed code that came with my mac disagrees. This is even more true of iphone software: you can technically look at some of the code that comes with it, but you can't modify it.

As a reminder, the GPL (or any other Free Software license, by definition - it's "Freedom 0" in the list) places absolutely no restrictions on users. Its provisions only kick in for those who want to go beyond merely using the software.

There are alternatives. We can dual license software under a strong copyleft and a proprietary license, so that users (developers) who don't want their derived software to be copyleft can pay the proprietary license fee. IMO this is the approach that everyone should be taking - it rewards the developer rather than them subsidizing your derived works with their free time.

Obviously this has constraints. The developer must have full rights or ownership to redistribute the work under other licenses. This can be obtained from contributors via agreement, where every developer retains ownership of code they write, but grants permission to relicense it for the benefit the project. Ideally, contributors would also be rewarded for their time via bounty systems, contracts or direct employment.

It's possible to make non-derived works which utilize copyleft software. The license's conditions apply only to the derived works, and not directly to your code unless it unquestionably a derived work such as a fork. If your application is written in a way that it can function without dependency on a copyleft software, but can be augmented using copyleft software using a plugin system, then you're able to distribute your software under any license you chose, and only the plugin which uses the copyleft software would be required to be licensed under a compatible license. The "aggregate" would need to be distributed under the copyleft license - but there are also ways around that - simply distribute your software without the dependency on the copyleft work, and have it optionally download the copyleft plugins separately so that they're not part of the "aggregate".

Permissive licensing won't sustain itself unless the developers who depend on it start donating to the maintainers of the permissively licensed works they depend on. In some cases this happens, but mostly it's just the case that you can make money using software other people have given away and continue to maintain for free. What happens if they decide to stop maintaining it? Is your product still viable if you have to take over the task, or employ someone new to maintain it? Would it be viable if you, or your users, had to purchase a proprietary license fee for an alternative dependency?

Users lose because the tools with the most functionality, the applications with the most interoperability, the software with the most mindshare,... will be proprietary software.

That does not follow. You might as well make it "source available" and sell proprietary licenses.

You can sell GPL software. You can even sell GPL software under proprietary license as long as you are the copyright owner (dual-licensing).

Really, when you take time to understand real restrictions, as opposed to repeated myths, the only argument in favor of permissive license is that they help big players use free labor.

Why do you believe you can't sell copyleft software?

I just don't really want to support the sale of any software. I see it as directly harmful compared to subsidizing the development of modifiable, free software, which is the true allure of computation.

I'm not completely familiar with the details and haven't done it myself, but what's stopping you from selling non-restrictive licenses to a GPL project? Can't you just etch out an exception for each customer?

Instead of using open solutions, big business then copies the open solution

i highly doubt that. sure technically they can copy it, but they could not guarantee 100% compatibility. yes, the model would work, but at least they would compete on somewhat equal footing.

what happened to redis, elastic search, mongodb etc was way worse. people switched to amazon and others because they got the original and did not have to risk issues when switching. further more, they also didn't have to risk lock in. (or at least had the impression of not risking lock-in)

in other words offering a functional copy vs taking the original (without paying for it) are two very different value propositions.

but amazon could have made the same offers using GPL software, or even AGPL. yes, it would have cost them more, but not as much more as developing their own. so the fact that they could afford to develop their own clone is not an argument for the original developer to just allow them to use their software without restrictions.

"you should just give this to me because i could afford to just clone it and put you out of business." what kind of choice is that?

small businesses can use GPL licensed software just as they can use permissible licensed software. if using GPL software hurts your business model more than spending the money to develop your own well then maybe it's the wrong model.

i'd argue that using GPL software can jumpstart your business faster than developing your own, and once you make enough money you can develop your own like everyone else who doesn't want to use GPL software. permissible licensed software doesn't provide that much of a jump-start. it also makes it easier for your competition.

and most importantly, it all happens at the expense of the original developer. why should they accommodate that?

Do you have any examples?

You can use LGPL licensed-software in your proprietary software, as long as you only link to it dynamically - i.e. you provide a clear separation between your software and the LGPL software.

Why would anyone serious argue that?

This is ridiculous. He said he just wants anyone to be able to use his code. Licensing it copyleft will just restrict the user base.

Maybe, I do think it really depends on the type of software/situation.

In an argument about how much someone is able to use something, I think you could argue that a copyleft license turns more people away than it would force to participate, so the overall amount of work that is freely available is less than it would have been with a permissive license. (That is, if 10% using a permissive license don't contribute back and 90% do, you end up with more contributions than if 100% of users contribute back to copyleft but you only have 50% as many users.)

I do think it's very situational though - clearly Linux being GPL has been a huge boon in forcing contributions, and I think the killer bit here is that forcing those contributions means that people are able to use their hardware that might otherwise only run proprietary operating systems. That is, it's the forcing open of something that hardware companies would otherwise keep closed.

On the other hand, I don't see any huge reason why a good regex library, for instance, shouldn't be permissive - making a regex library copyleft isn't going to force open some proprietary software, they'll just use some other (maybe worse, maybe equivalent) regex library, and you might get fewer overall contributions and end up with a worse overall available library.

Usually when I hear "robbery" it brings to mind someone stealing your phone or wallet at knife-point. Certainly not training some model on some code that involves neither violence nor depriving anyone of anything.

The concept of copyright is the fiction that information - something that can be freely modified, copied, or transmitted - is of the commodity-form, that information should be treated as if it were a single real object that were inherently scarce.

It is a fiction that exists to serve of some of the most hateful, mafia-like firms - your Disneys, UMGs, Getty Images, and the like.

So if the AI interests are powerful enough to deal that whole rotten system a serious blow, then I'm all for them.

“Fair use” is a notion related to copyright. The authors in Europe who won in cases of free software licensing violations did it on the grounds of breach of contract law.

A clause in a license which states something like "You may not use this work for training an artificial neural network" should suffice.

If the AI developer ignores the term and trains his AI with it anyway, they would clearly be in violation of your licensing terms, and then it would be for a court to decide.

Having the term in your license would be preferential than omitting it, since it's hard for a court to rule that they're not in violation of your license when its written there plain as day. If you don't have the clause then you basically have no defence as it can easily be argued that they've followed your licensing terms, which don't prevent its use for such purpose.

> ...release the source code for your deployment/provisioning infrastructure...

SSPL works a bit similarly: https://www.mongodb.com/legal/licensing/server-side-public-l...

> If you make the functionality of the Program or a modified version available to third parties as a service, you must make the Service Source Code available via network download to everyone at no charge, under the terms of this License. ...

> “Service Source Code” means the Corresponding Source for the Program or the modified version, and the Corresponding Source for all programs that you use to make the Program or modified version available as a service, including, without limitation, management software, user interfaces, application program interfaces, automation software, monitoring software, backup software, storage software and hosting software, all such that a user could run an instance of the service using the Service Source Code you make available.

Not really a free software license, at least typically not considered one though.

>g to their most recent 10-Q Barbie sales have been flat YoY so I guess they felt like they had to do something.

No thanks. Seriously please no, I do not want to see it, that stuff has negative value.

Try doing that in Rust, C++ or Go. It's not only incredibly annoying, it's also often technically unfeasible due to macros/codegen/templates/generics, so you end up with ugly stuff like linking exceptions clauses and stuff that - guess what? often boil down to a worst version of the MPLv2

That doesn't work for languages which require all the code at once just for compiling, like C++ (if any of the code involves templates), template Haskell, or Rust (at least, not without heroic efforts).

You could make sure the LGPL code only works through a C-API like interface, then you can sub-divide it off more easily, but that can be quite a bit of work.

Well, no, as someone else already stated forcing people to ship object files is a PITA and it's really not feasible with languages that do codegen, templates, ... because you inevitably end up injecting copylefted code inside of your files.

I like copyleft as a way to protect my code from freeloaders, but I don't think that imposing the same view on other people is fair TBH. I want people to be able to use my code without being forced to "convert" to my creed first

Tech companies that I use and (more importantly) I pay for and I think there is a "respectful" relationship: Google (via Android), Microsoft (via office365), OVH (via servers), Proton (via email). And there are others, but tried to select known ones.

Do I like all that they do? Definitely not. But the services for which I ended up paying are reasonable. I would not like to build my one OS for a mobile, install the 10s applications required in an enterprise or manage my own data center/mail server.

Of course there are some that I find adversarial, but that is more a personal feeling - like Apple which asked X times more in price for minor (in my view) better quality for their devices.