this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2023
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Copyleft licences are the only true free software licences. All other open source licenses are just proprietariable.
What do those words mean? What is proprietariable and copyleft? Or is that the joke?
Not a joke.
Copy left is like the Robin Hood of the copyright world. Basically, it’s a type of licensing where, sure, you can use, modify, and distribute the copyrighted work, but there’s a catch. You have to give the same rights to anyone else for any derivative works. So, if you modify the work, you can’t just slap a new copyright on it and restrict its use. It’s a way to ensure that the work stays free for everyone to use. It’s pretty popular in the open source community. It’s like copyright turned on its head, hence the name “copyleft”.
Kinda based ngl. Using copyright to devalue copyright.
Copyleft tooling built all the most common and widespread tools today, and the foundations of the open web.
It's a shame the strategy is now failing because software as a service is so popular. Nothing in the GPL forces you to distribute your changes if you don't distribute the program. So just put the program on a webserver and let users interact through an API and hey presto, steal as much GPL code as you like.
Everyone crucified MongoDB when they tried to create a licence that prevents this, and FSF have declared that the problem can't be solved with licences and everyone just has to boycott non-free software (good luck!).
End of free software as we know it, IMHO.
Wasn't the Affero GPL (AGPL) created exactely to enforce copyleft in a SaaS environment?
Quoting from the GNU website:
The problem is these licences treat network interaction as intrinsically different to linking against a dynamic library. If you link against the code with a binary API that's a violation, but if you link against it with an HTTP API it's not.
GNU Affero doesn't help with that. Under either GPL or GNU Affero, all you need to do to defeat the virality of the licence is package the code as a service and put all your modifications into a separate proprietary program that interacts with it.
That's why MongoDB tried to force users to open source their entire service if it involves a copyleft program. It's clumsy but I can see why they did it. We need a modern licence that treats any form of interprocess communication the way the GPL treats linking.
(The page you linked goes on to say that GNU Affero doesn't solve the SaaS problem and it's impossible for licences to address it.)
proprietariable just means the code can be taken and rerelased as proprietary (no freedoms all rights reserved).
You think that a license that imposes more restrictions on its use is more free than one that imposes fewer???
Where my
Apache-2.0gang at?This argument reminds me of the Tolerance Paradox described by Karl Popper, who stated that in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must retain the right to be intolerant of intolerance.
In the licensing context, yes, the Apache and Expat licenses may grant your users the freedom to create proprietary software out of your works, but at the cost of sacrificing all the basic freedoms of all the users that will use the derived non-free product.
So, like Popper said that you should prefer removing the "smaller" freedom for a society of being intolerant in order to guarantee the "greater" one of remaining tolerant in the future, since you still have to choose which freedoms you are going to negate, it's preferable to use copyleft and impede the "smaller" freedom of creating proprietary software than not using it and allowing the crushing of future users' fundamental rights.
I don’t think it applies at all. The basis for the tolerance paradox is that intolerance harms others. While using permissively-licensed software in proprietary products certainly omits benefits to others, it can hardly be argued to be harmful.
In other words, the intolerance paradox relies on people agreeing that “harming others is always evil”. While applying it to copy-left relies on people agreeing that “non-reciprocity of good is always evil”. I’m sure some people think that way but I doubt most people would.
Well, it depends on your perspective. Copyleft licenses restrict downstream developers in order to protect the rights of downstream users.
MITboi here.
GPL is so free that it conflicts with other versions of GPL because this version wants to prevent you from restricting freedom and that other version tries to restrict your freedom by preventing you from restricting freedom.