> The issue is that whether the free software people want it or not, the copyright system over code exists, and historically has been used as a cudgel against smaller players. If we got rid of copyright over code entirely I'd totally be down for this. And IIRC RMS has said the same thing; that he'd be in favor of the removal of copyright over code as a concept even if it meant neutering the protections of the GPL.
As someone else asked, I would also want a citation, but I agree.
Actually, I want a license that you can do pretty much anything you want to do with it (including: lack of attribution, distribution without source codes, distribution with source codes (whether they are the original source codes or reconstructed), lack of copyright notices, reverse engineering, circumvention of your own copy and write reports about anything you want to do, to use or not use the software (and to modify or not modify) at your choice, etc), but that you are not allowed to add further legal restrictions to it (with a few exceptions dealing with trademarks (but not all) and allowing conversion to GNU (A)GPL 3 and CC-BY-SA 4.0 if you are able to satisfy the conditions of those licenses) or to derivative works, and that if someone will try to use legal processes against you relating to this, then anyone can countersue.
> And IIRC RMS has said the same thing; that he'd be in favor of the removal of copyright over code as a concept even if it meant neutering the protections of the GPL.
Do you have a citation? I was under the impression he defended copyright because copyleft depends on it.
> Even if the community could not legally force people to play fair with open source code (by releasing modifications, not charging, or whatever the terms are), people would still continue to write it.
There was a reason I made clear to mention GPL advocates. There are differing definitions of "software freedom" that target the developers of software and the users of software.
When your political movement aims to ensure that the source code for the software that people are using is actually available and stays available then you need something like copyleft.
If your idea is instead to ensure that people are free to release source code for free if they wish, then there's not actually a battle to be had! That was how software started out after all, but that was also what led eventually to users being closed off from their source code.
> I prefer not to BSD-license my works because then copyright could be used against me to take my rights from me
I agree with you about GPL now vs. ideally no copyright, but one thing that would definitely be lost is the ability to coerce releasing source code. Companies in a hypothetical no-copyright future could still keep source code secret, and still release compiled/obfuscated software. They could still take code others had released, make modifications, and then only release obfuscated binaries. They wouldn't be able to sue if someone leaked the source code, but is that enough of a protection?
Personally, I'm willing to live with it, because I think in the long run people would rather share. But from, say, RMS's point of view, people are losing some measurable level of protection.
> I dislike the GPL, and the stigmatization of proprietary software for any reason, and the notion that it's inherently evil and unethical.
A flaw in OP's assertion is that I feel that most of what we have today wouldn't exist if it weren't for the GPL licensing.
Edit: Despite RMS's unique bent on things, he hasn't been wholly wrong about the nature of free/nonfree software. If the Linux kernel, or the GNU software suite hadn't been GPL'd in the first place - we wouldn't be using it today. Instead, it would have died out or we'd be using some proprietary fork. I think, in the long term, GPL software benefits everyone because we can fork and share modifications. It fosters a mindset and community that's beneficial to a hacker culture (as in tinkerer, not as in black).
> Why not just make it public domain? That's the default in a world without the right of ownership of code.
Because if I do that I'm just unconditionally transferring wealth to corporations just as you claimed. No point in doing that while they still get to be "all rights reserved". It's only fair if nobody's protected.
> How would you make money of it? It's not like you can sell it.
By using it to do improve our own systems. Apparently what the GPL already provides used to be the norm back in the day before copyright protection was applied to software. We should go back to those days.
> How would it be paid for, since there's nothing that could be sold?
Selling copies after the fact doesn't make sense. Paying for the product before the work is done does. Crowdfunding, patronage. I'm sure they'll figure it out if they have to.
> To be clear, the issue is that this code that people produced for free is too free[?]
No, it is not free enough.
It is indeed paradoxical, but you have to remember that we are not dealing with the natural world, we are dealing with a world with copyright in place.
If the GPL is viral then copyright is a zombie. You can whack it once, but it will never stop coming back. GPL has to be viral because of the zombie-like nature of copyright. It's a hack and a pragmatic solution but defeating copyright for software entirely would be the ultimate solution.
> For GPL, it seems like a lot of people (including RMS) value the license more than absolute code quality. They would rather have worse software, under their idealogical license, than use better software under a less restrictive license.
RMS wants free software to be as good as non-free. He realizes that takes a lot of work, which he has dedicated his life to. We all realize it takes a lot of work, the difference is, some of us are willing to put in the work.
That said, sometimes the "ideology" behind a thing is important. Personally, there are certain products I don't buy, certain companies I don't endorse, becaues I don't want that blood on my hands.
And yes, BSD is a great license for people (companies) who just wants to profit off others' (work) and never give back.
> you might think he'd have something to say about releasing code into the public domain
Author of the post here. I'm Austrian - the whole concept of public domain does not even exist in my legislation. I cannot legally waive copyright currently. The closest to putting code into the public domain is probably something like the WTFPL but I am perfectly fine with my stuff having a few more restrictions through the MIT/BSD to avoid license confusion.
> How is licensing your code under the copyright monopoly supposed to be "post copyright"?
It is not. However there is a certain trend ongoing that people wish the whole copyright system would be reformed and that would have more impact on Copyleft licenses than MIT/BSD.
Aside from all of that I don't want to make license decisions for other people. :-)
> how do we get the benefits of the GPL - especially receiving things like source code - if we no longer have copyright?
It’s not obvious to me that enforceable copyleft licences have increased the availability of free software to such an extent as to outweigh the loss of freedom effected by normal copyrights. Abolishing copyright (or less radically, rejecting the prevailing interpretation of copyright law which says that software is a “literary work”) would do more to advance the four essential software freedoms than any copyleft licence. Notably, copyright is the only thing standing in the way of freedoms 2 and 3. As for freedom 1, companies would still treat their source code as a trade secret, but without copyright they’d have no recourse against people republishing leaked source code, which could then be incorporated into free software projects.
> I want copyright to be abolished. I do use CC0 [3] for many works. For software, however, I like to use GPLv3 specifically to prevent my labour from being used in a way that limits the freedoms of others. If we abolish copyright, then I would be all the happier that my works no longer require the GPL to protect these freedoms
If we abolish copyright, you certainly no longer have to worry about protecting those freedoms, because those freedoms would no longer exist. Anyone could copy your software, modify it, build the modified binary, and distribute that modified binary without source, and locked down as tight as they want with DRM, and requiring updates be signed with a key only they have.
You could try to counter this, of course, by carefully only giving copies of your code to people who enter into a contractual relationship with you in which they agree to not do any of those things you do not like, and to keep your code secret from others who have not entered into such an agreement with you...but it only takes on person leaking the code to the public and then it is game over.
> I want anyone to be able to do whatever they want to with my code. That includes developers wanting to create a proprietary application. Telling them they can't is not freedom.
This is clearly up for debate.
Software-freedom as an interesting social factor is first and foremost about users, not software-publishers. Basically as a user of free software, I should be free to modify the code of the program I'm using.
While I as a professional programmer prefer using permissively licensed libraries (MIT/BSD), because they are easier to integrate, that means I take free software and make it into non-free, commercial software in the process.
That means the users of my work-output will enjoy less freedom than I had (as a publisher, a non-user). That's undebatable. So freedom is lost.
When not constrained by work-requirements w.r.t. licensing, and I write on my own spare-time hobby-projects, I'd like that code to be free and remain free.
I'd like that any user of that code I just wrote (note end-user, not someone bundling my code inside a different project) should have the freedom to modify and fix that code.
And the only way to guarantee that is with a copyleft license like the GPL, because it preserves end-user freedoms which BSD/MIT-style licenses (intentionally) doesn't.
So that's the only license I use.
Yes. That means developers just like me won't use it in commercial projects, but I don't care about that. I care about end-user freedom.
> Free software / open source licenses have effectively made copyright disappear for open source code.
[...]
> I think open source software is a good example of what happens when you get rid of copyright - people still feel ownership for what they make [...]
I think this is a quite a stretch given the prominence of copyright in popular open source licenses, including (for example) the extremely popular and permissive MIT license. You can copy it, modify it, distribute it, etc., but I still own the copyright, and you still have to give me credit for the initial development. I can choose whatever license I want, which may or may not impose restrictions on who can use my code in derivative works, etc., and how.
In a very real sense, I do own the FOSS software I've released to the world. If legal codification of that ownership isn't important to open source developers, why are so many pixels spent discussing it?
Nobody's freedom is impeded. They didn't have the freedom to modify the code in the first place, since they didn't have the source code. Nothing they could do before has been taken away.
It's really intellectually dishonest to use this freedom and morality rhetoric when you're actually talking about compelling people to give away something they have created.
Not that I think it's conceptually a bad idea. I see nothing wrong with the idea of the GPL as a concept. A contract that says 'if you use this software, you agree to also give away any code you base on it' seems fine.
But I see no reason not to just call it 'permanenrly malleable' software or something like that.
It's the faulty rhetoric around freedom that is presented as a moral crusade that is a problem.
>> When the automaker changes that code, do you really want it back?
The license was never about "the community". In this case it's about the owner of the car having the ability to modify it.
Most people dont want to modify the software they use, but those that use these licenses want the people who use their code to have that option.
>> If you love our industry, please help your fellow devs by giving them the maximum ability to use your work in their own work so that they can create businesses, pay the bills, hire other devs, and so on and so forth.
That's quite literally asking to use someone else's work for your own profit. Someone else asked about royalties and I think I see room for a license that would prevent such exploitation without compensation. That would be a commercial license.
Say EvilCompany takes the code, puts in in their buggy operating system, distributes it under a commercial license, and then you end up being prevented from fixing the code that you wrote.
Because that’s what happened to RMS, and that’s why we have the GPL.
It’s freedom; not for the author, and it’s not freedom for the developers or the vendors, it’s freedom for the users.
> I believe everyone should be given their own freedoms.
Absolute freedom does not exist (or even make sense).
> The plugin boundary should be exactly that, a boundary between the primary app and any created plugins. Why do you feel entitled to force a license decision on a third party's work?
That's the expectation I set when I develop the host software. If I was fine with third party proprietary plug-ins I could set my plug-in headers as MIT or something. Just like if I only wanted my software be used by people who have no revenue or live in $COUNTRY I would put that as a license instead of the GPL.
> Yeah, my work might not function without your code, but your code is your code and my plugin is mine.
this is super super entitled. You're fine with leveraging GPL work which is release for free for your own benefit, but do not want to reciprocate. As I posted elsewhere: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Rule ; this is the most basic expectation one can have.
> but your code is your code and my plugin is mine.
but the GPL code is and will forever be freely available ; anything that goes against increasing the pool of freely available thing is a no-go. The end goal of all that would be to change laws so that ownership of ideas, patents, etc..., is itself ended ; ultimately, licenses and copyright shouldn't even need to exist.
> If I choose to make use of a proprietary library because it makes sense to me, like for example CAD solvers where the FOSS alternatives aren't there yet, that's my decision for my plugin. All your GPL license does is infect my work.
Again you seem to forget that your plug-in depends on an existing host software and seem to want to use the work done there without giving anything in return. If there was some kind of public standard for CAD solvers so that the GPL part of your plug-in could be also used with free solvers, that would be a non-issue - ship your plug-in, and end-users can install a free solver or a proprietary one separately if they are fine with proprietary code.
> I want anyone to be able to do whatever they want to with my code. That includes developers wanting to create a proprietary application. Telling them they can't is not freedom.
I look on the GPL somewhat differently. I look at it as a means of payment to the community (and to myself by extension for my own work).
I want to be paid for my code and the things I create. But I also want to give back to the community. The GPL allows me both. You may ask, though, what kind of money can I get if I give the code away?
I don't want money.
I want code.
Code for code. That's what I want as payment. I want the code so I can learn from it. So I can make my code better. So I can make the thing I made better, and so I can give that better thing out to others, so they can make their things better.
I could make my code proprietary and "closed" - but that doesn't mean I'll get any payment for it. In fact, it might be copied and pirated. Proprietary code also doesn't allow me to share the code.
Releasing it BSD-style allows me to share the code, but I still might not get any payment for it. Honestly, I don't want the money - I don't need the money.
But code? I can always use more code. I can always learn from other's code. Code is very valuable to me.
Another thing - I know that if I die, or if I stop giving away my code for some reason (by choice or not) - my code can live on, and continue paying back to others in code. I don't have to worry that someone out there won't be able to use the code or run the code because the hardware has changed so much (they might have to recompile, or perhaps rewrite some of it - but they have the code to do so), or if it has a bug, they can fix it with the code.
I look at the GPL as a means of paying for code, and getting paid for code - by being paid in code.
> Which is odd, because it feels like it is totally against the spirit of the free software movement.
And yet, it is completely within the original intended spirit. It is not about "giving source code away for free", it is about the user (who may very well have paid for the right to use the software) being "free" to do whatever they want with it...up to and including modifying the source code for their own benefit. With traditional proprietary (aka "non-free") software, even if you had access to the source code, you are not legally allowed to modify it. And then GPL goes a step further and allows you to redistribute your modifications! That's freedom.
The idea that "open source" means "give everything away" is imho one of the primary mistakes of the "free software" movement. and why RMS now encourages the term "libre software" instead.
As someone else asked, I would also want a citation, but I agree.
Actually, I want a license that you can do pretty much anything you want to do with it (including: lack of attribution, distribution without source codes, distribution with source codes (whether they are the original source codes or reconstructed), lack of copyright notices, reverse engineering, circumvention of your own copy and write reports about anything you want to do, to use or not use the software (and to modify or not modify) at your choice, etc), but that you are not allowed to add further legal restrictions to it (with a few exceptions dealing with trademarks (but not all) and allowing conversion to GNU (A)GPL 3 and CC-BY-SA 4.0 if you are able to satisfy the conditions of those licenses) or to derivative works, and that if someone will try to use legal processes against you relating to this, then anyone can countersue.
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