the GNU GPL is a Communist ideal!!! (LOL)

[ataradov]

You work for Microchip I've heard. Does the work you're doing for Microchip give you similar rewards - people using whatever you have done and being happy about it?

I see what you are trying to do, but this is an incorrect analogy. My work for Microchip is governed by the employment contract. There is expectation of payment set by that contract. Not a single free/open source licence sets this expectation.

If I change the licence of the software I create on my own time from BSD to GPL, I will not all of a sudden get paid for it. But I know for sure it will create more problems for people wanting to use it.

BTW, most of the Microchip code is published either under BSD or Apache licence. And I do get paid for supporting that code. And the same would apply to my own code - it is free for taking, but I reserve the right to charge you if you need my help with it.

[NorthGuy]

BTW, most of the Microchip code is published either under BSD or Apache licence. And I do get paid for supporting that code. And the same would apply to my own code - it is free for taking, but I reserve the right to charge you if you need my help with it.

Looks like you get the best of both worlds 

IMHO, when you design something, the feeling of satisfaction comes from the creation process (and result) itself. Choosing a license is rather a business decision.

[kaevee]

FreeBSD and Linux were available for people from pretty long time.

FreeBSD (BSD): Released in November 1993. 1.1.5.1 was released in July 1994.

Linux (GPL) distribution (Slackware): Released in July 1993, Kernel Version 0.99.11 Alpha

Though both were available with similar set of tools and capabilities, Linux ended up being used everywhere compared to FreeBSD. Today, we can see Linux in enterprise class servers, computers, mobile devices and embedded devices. Companies like Google had an option of choosing any one of them, but, they choose Linux. FreeBSD has grown leaps and bounds, but has been overshadowed by Linux.

Notwithstanding the restrictions imposed by GPL, it has done good for the community. People in developing world would have not had access to technologies at a cost affordable to them. For example millions of people in India could not have bought a mobile phone for $100 and go online for $2/month (1GB per day with unlimited calls).

[ataradov]

Though both were available with similar set of tools and capabilities, Linux ended up being used everywhere compared to FreeBSD.

That is not for licensing reasons, for sure. Big companies bet on Linux and supplied it with development kits, so that's what people started to use, and it snowballed from there.

Linux may have been easier to port to new targets, but this advantage is marginal. Although even marginal things may be a deciding factor.

Linux has the advantage of being standalone. A lot of our customers just use the kernel we've built for our hardware and don't even bother building it themselves, much less extending it. And whatever happens in user land is not affected by the fact that Linux is GPL.

At the same time, for us the major incentive to contribute back to the project is not compliance with GPL, but the need to maintain our patches if changes are not mainlined. Same applies to other companies as far as I can tell. So if Linux was licensed differently, it would not affect contributions from the corporations that want their code in the project. And companies that don't want to share their code can still do so (Nvidia) or they can publish a huge mess of patches that nobody wants to deal with.

[cdev]

The relative freedom of Linux from encumbrances makes a huge difference in many situations. Linux was a game changer for me, I know that. This is why the idea of free software and free software licensing needs to be given protection it doesnt currently enjoy at an international level. Read that paper I cited earlier, its very much worth reading. BTW, its from India, Kaevee.

Working Paper 37 Centre for WTO Studies

Trade Rules on Source Code: Deepening the Digital Inequities by Locking Up the Software Fortress

[NorthGuy]

Companies like Google had an option of choosing any one of them, but, they choose Linux. FreeBSD has grown leaps and bounds, but has been overshadowed by Linux.

Apple chose BSD. There are about 5x times more Macs in the world than Desktop Linuxes. Even with smartphones, iPhone is ahead of Android I believe.

Although, GPL is irrelevant here. Linux is an OS. Its GPL doesn't apply to the applications you develop and run under Linux.

[brucehoult]

Though both were available with similar set of tools and capabilities, Linux ended up being used everywhere compared to FreeBSD.

That is not for licensing reasons, for sure. Big companies bet on Linux and supplied it with development kits, so that's what people started to use, and it snowballed from there.

Linux may have been easier to port to new targets, but this advantage is marginal. Although even marginal things may be a deciding factor.

I think the biggest factor may have been that Linux has been more progmatic about concentrating on performance rather than some pure architecture.

But mostly it's just that at some point more people were working on improving Linux than were working on BSD or Windows or anything else, and so it improved faster, which made more people work on it, which made it improve faster, which made more people work on it...

It could probably have been either one.

At the same time, for us the major incentive to contribute back to the project is not compliance with GPL, but the need to maintain our patches if changes are not mainlined. Same applies to other companies as far as I can tell.

Exactly.

That's the main reason, for example, that we're happy about RISC-V becoming a standard architecture for LLVM in the current release cycle. We can and do maintain our own branches in our own repos, but when everyone in the world who is making changes to LLVM compiles the RISC-V back end and runs the RISC-V tests whenever they make changes, then if they break something it's *their* problem to fix it before they upstream their changes, not our problem to fix it afterwards.

[kaevee]

But mostly it's just that at some point more people were working on improving Linux than were working on BSD or Windows or anything else, and so it improved faster, which made more people work on it, which made it improve faster, which made more people work on it...

It could probably have been either one.

I think it was commercial off the shelf software vendors who helped the adoption of Linux to some extent. They released their software for Linux (using GPL or some license similar close to GPL). GPL suited them perfectly as they did not want lose hold on their cash cow, the corporations who are paying them for sales, support and maintenance. Some of the commercial software released as GPL were ported to *BSD flavors, but not all of them.

Further, if a company wants to go commercial in future, they would probably release their code using GPL as it allows them to control who competes with them. I have seen many projects which started out as GPL and turn into commercial products. Whether we like it or not, GPL has been attractive option to commercial software vendors.

[hermit]

Companies like Google had an option of choosing any one of them, but, they choose Linux. FreeBSD has grown leaps and bounds, but has been overshadowed by Linux.

Apple chose BSD. There are about 5x times more Macs in the world than Desktop Linuxes. Even with smartphones, iPhone is ahead of Android I believe.

Although, GPL is irrelevant here. Linux is an OS. Its GPL doesn't apply to the applications you develop and run under Linux.

Nice to quote desktops and leave out that Linux owns the server market and super computing world.  But if you want to throw in desktops don't forget Chromebook is up and coming using the same ploy Apple used to get market share, the educational space.
https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/linux-market-share/

[Nominal Animal]

Communist? In my opinion, GPL is the one that ensures software projects compete on an even field, and is therefore closer to the free market model than communism!

Here's the typical licenses I use:

• CC0 or Public Domain for code examples, including library use examples
• FreeBSD / 2-clause BSD / Simplified BSD license for drivers, dual-GPL-2.0 if contributed to the Linux kernel
• GPLv3 for free/open source applications and service daemons
• AGPL for web-based services
• LGPL for libraries, and for graphical user interfaces for proprietary libraries
• Proprietary licenses, when required to support the development

When I use a variant of the GPL, I do so because I wish to ensure that any derivatives will be licensed under the same or a compatible license.  That way I ensure that if someone creates a derivative, the two implementations compete on an even field; and if I find a nice enhancement in theirs, I can avail myself to their enhancements as they availed to code I wrote, and enhance my version.  To me, it is all about having the implementations compete on an even field.

It has also occurred that a part of a GPL-licensed project turned out to be useful in someone elses completely unrelated, proprietary project.  I have provided a differently-licensed copy, free of charge, when I have ascertained that it would not affect the "competitive field" -- that the proprietary project is not in the same field to begin with.

What I do not do, is shrink-wrap EULAs that restrict user rights. (I do not want to restrict how a single user uses my projects; all I need is control over the distribution, really.)

I do prefer copyleft (like GPL) over permissive (like BSD/MIT/Apache) licenses for two main reasons: one is practical, the other is emotive.

• Users should always be able to adjust their tools to suit their workflow, rather than having to adjust their workflow to suit their tools. This only works when they have the sources, to at least the user facing part of the tool.  Permissive licenses allow binary-only distribution.
• I love competition, when the rules are the same for all players.  I find copyleft licenses to be a simple, easy ruleset, which allows good competition between software projects; and ensures that all code sharing paths can be reciprocal.  That is, copyleft licenses ensure that a "player" cannot avail themselves to other "players" sources, but keep their own proprietary.  When the projects compete for usefulness/users, I find copyleft rules preferable, emotionally, to permissive rules.

The first one means that if you ascribe to Unix philosophy and KISS principle like I do, having the sources for your tools, or at least their user-facing parts (so you can edit them if needed), is very useful if you have the development skills.

[HB9EVI]

Well, to admit - if GNU GPL is considered communist, I have no problem with that communist attitude;

I appreciate the opensource and free-software community very much, and, if I can, I contribute in finding and fixing problems and bugs.
After first starting with Debian in 96' and a 3 year intermezzo in the BSD world, I stucked with Debian - on servers from the very beginning, on all clients since 2003.
And guess what: I'm not missing anything. I got every piece of hard- and software to work; sometimes with temporary workarounds only, but there was never the moment, I wished Windows back. I'm living a happy IT life with GNU Linux only - the only pure proprietary devices in the networks are the DSL modem and the ethernet switch.

I admit, I switched away from PIC mcus to AVR 'cause of the lack of a fullfeatured opensource environment; yea, I know there is SDCC, but it's really quite far away from being complete yet; and since I did the step to 32bits, I have GNU ARM gcc, that's all I need.

Personally I don't want to spend money for software, although I bought an ancient Win7 licence for 5 bucks to run on my laptop - in case I have a stubborn piece of customer hardware unwilling to be maintained or updated on the Linux way. Otherwise I'm glad if I can save my bucks for the hardware.

The ones who want to use proprietary software, shall go for it. The only serious problem I see with the use of it, are our governments and medical facilities - which certainly work on sensitive data, also my personal ones, which I don't really want to see in hands of Big Data, where MS and Google certainly belong to. That also the reason, why I use my cell phone for nothing else but calling.

[cdev]

How much money have you spent on this "Debian" and "Gnu" ?

[ataradov]

How much money have you spent on this "Debian" software?

$0, I guess. Unless you count some fluffy stuff like time spent learning a different system.

It is commmunist in a way that everyone has donated a bit of their time to get a great system. But again, I doubt it was only due to GPL. Debian has plenty of software licensed under more permissive licenses.

[Nominal Animal]

It is commmunist in a way that everyone has donated a bit of their time to get a great system.

No, that's commons, not communism. We humans need that sort of a commons to maintain our sciences, languages, and culture. I don't think it is communism...

But again, I doubt it was only due to GPL. Debian has plenty of software licensed under more permissive licenses.

Definitely not "only due to GPL", no.  Yet, I distinctly recall that in mid-nineties to the turn of the century, Linux gained ground with respect to BSDs, exactly because potential developers chose the copyleft ecosystem over the permissive one.  Lots of flamewars and misunderstandings and such.  The kernel being GPL made it natural to pair it with GNU userspace tools, and that gave a really big boost to Linux' popularity among developers at least.

I would like to point out that one should really make a distinction between kernel drivers, other kernel development, hardware interface libraries, and userspace applications. Even Linux kernel driver developers recommend using a dual GPL-BSD license for new drivers, so that they can be used in other OSes (BSDs in particular) as well.  Similarly for hardware interface libraries: they are just a thin layer between hardware and userspace software, interface glue, and therefore using a permissive license makes most sense, to ensure the library gets as widely used as possible.  Internal kernel innovations, like scheduler or I/O elevator details, are what really distinguish operating system kernels, so to compete with a level playing field, Linux kernel devs want to keep those GPL'ed.  Userspace applications is the space with most competition, and permissive licenses allow closed-source derivatives to compete with their open source ancestors; and that is definitely not a good thing for users like myself (who are capable of modifying their software tools to fit their own needs).

So, to compare licenses, one should be very specific about the use case, because it matters a lot.

[cdev]

No, that's commons, not communism. We humans need that sort of a commons to maintain our sciences, languages, and culture. I don't think it is communism...

Remember what happened to the commons in the UK, it was enclosed. In the Enclosure Acts.

Thats whats happening now on a global scale to all the remaining 'commons' of every kind. Everywhere, just about. Only a few countries are not in this system in some way. (And they may be soon, as major pressure is being put on them).

Everything needed by people is being aggressively defined as commercially owned, in international fora where people do not exist as legally present.

Huge amounts of property that has been farmed from before history by people is being sold off to corporations and those people just shooed off like they were flies, all around the world.

Even the existence of a right to exist is in essence, disputed, as illustrated by the battle over whether there could be a right to drinking water in the EU. (As far as I could tell they couldn't come to agreement).

This is the context driving my fear for FOSS.

I am afraid corporations and the nations that are owned by them might argue that it has no right to exist because its preventing profits from being made which otherwise would be made.

So advocates need to get ready for this and set up some international body that supersedes these corporate owned courts to sue countries. Its going to be very hard because some would literally go nuts at the very idea that people, the prey, might be given some representation when so much work over so much time, has gone into stripping them of it, see the problem?

[ataradov]

There is absolutely no way anyone can stop me from publishing the code.

Corporations benefit hugely from FOSS, most of the contributions to the Linux kernel is done by corporations. So even if there is some question which is better, open or closed, it would be a battle of corporations with other corporations, not corporations and people.

Stop worrying about nothing and go write some free software.

[cdev]

I really wouldn't count on their help. That would be very very unwise. The biggest corporations have an agenda and its not what we think it is.

This is a discussion about the new NAFTA that although not about this specific issue, might give some insight into how everything is being skewed in one trade deal after another to force deregulation globally, a web of deregulations that creates entitlements to compensation if anything is subsequently re-regulated, forever. No, people cant vote to reverse mistakes, such as privatization of large areas of policy (we should be very worried about public education) or shedding of allegedly 'expensive' protections, (how much value do you think might be argued is lost because some software is free?) Once something like health care becomes even slightly commercial it gets put on a ratchet bearing path that is designed to totally commercialize it bit by bit, it matters not in the least how unworkable the outcome might be, thats even framed as a plus (profits) Needed drugs become insanely expensive? Great! "People should have to pay a lot if a drug saves their life", (even if it was available before for pennies).

Really, the hidden picture is just insane, and it sets up endless numbers of traps, where taxpayers must pay literally a kings ransom, to ever fix these things. "Future expected lost profits".

One corrupt government can sell out a country so badly that everybody would have to leave to ever prosper again, while poor. These agreements even survive a nation's dissolution and subsequent creation of a new country in the same territory. Drug prices soaring into the stratosphere? based on an argument that software is getting more and more important, Software might be forced into becoming just as expensive. These courts are above national courts like the "Supreme" Court in the US, and are rigged, and the people don't even exist in them. They only work one way, corporations sue countries. Countries don't get to sue corporations in them.

FOSS licenses would be portrayed as regulations that if enforced by a governments courts, would present forbidden trade barriers.

https://www.iatp.org/documents/new-nafta-imposes-hurdles-delay-and-weaken-public-protections

[legacy]

Here's the typical licenses I use:

• CC0 or Public Domain for code examples, including library use examples
• FreeBSD / 2-clause BSD / Simplified BSD license for drivers, dual-GPL-2.0 if contributed to the Linux kernel
• GPLv3 for free/open source applications and service daemons
• AGPL for web-based services
• LGPL for libraries, and for graphical user interfaces for proprietary libraries
• Proprietary licenses, when required to support the development

When I use a variant of the GPL, I do so because I wish to ensure that any derivatives will be licensed under the same or a compatible license.  That way I ensure that if someone creates a derivative, the two implementations compete on an even field; and if I find a nice enhancement in theirs, I can avail myself to their enhancements as they availed to code I wrote, and enhance my version.  To me, it is all about having the implementations compete on an even field.

Great summarized! Thanks a lot!

[cdev]

Its worthwhile to read up on the English "Enclosure Acts" (or "Inclosure Acts") because many of the arguments used against the peasantry there might well be used against the free software peasantry around the world today in order to take it away.  "making the field more productive" etc. 

[SiliconWizard]

I really wouldn't count on their help. That would be very very unwise. The biggest corporations have an agenda and its not what we think it is. (...)

I kinda see where you're going (combining this with all your other posts), but I'm really not sure I get your point though.

Even free software licenses can only be defended through justice courts. If you ever lived in a country where the justice system had become corrupt (as you seem to be very wary of government corruption, which I don't completely disagree with), the license would probably not help you much.

So I'm not sure it's a guarantee against the totalitarian regimes that you seem to be fearing (and again I can understand that).

[NorthGuy]

This is communism.

Les Trois Mousquetaires "Un pour tous, Tous pour un". I think it pre-dates communism.

[SiliconWizard]

This is communism.

Les Trois Mousquetaires "Un pour tous, Tous pour un". I think it pre-dates communism.

Actually, not really.
The story takes place in the 17th but the book was written around the same time that first books on communism were (1844). Not sure if there is any link or if this is purely fortuitous. Haven't studied Alexandre Dumas enough to know that.

[ataradov]

The story takes place in the 17th but the book was written around the same time that first books on communism were (1844). Not sure if there is any link or if this is purely fortuitous. Haven't studied Alexandre Dumas enough to know that.

Dumas popularized Latin "Unus pro omnibus, omnes pro uno", which is older than any of this.

[brucehoult]

This is communism.

Les Trois Mousquetaires "Un pour tous, Tous pour un". I think it pre-dates communism.

Voluntary association is the opposite of communism.

Not everyone in a population will agree with what the communists want them to do, and the only thing that can be done about it is to kill them. Stalin and buddies killed probably 20 million of their own citizens. Mao killed probably 40 million between the actual Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward.

Aside from the sheer evil involved in this, it at the same time takes the most sadistic and ruthless people to the top, and eliminates the artists, inventors, and good teachers, which causes the downfall of the country within a few decades unless the entire world is conquered first.

[cdev]

I suspect that both figures, especially the Chinese one are way too low.  Mass purges like Stalin's "terror" and the similar events in other totalitarian nations of both the left and right, definitely do fit your description. Totalitarianism is explained in great detail in Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism (1960) which is one of the best political analyses of anything anywhere, and also available to read online and it is very much worth reading.  Robert J. Lifton has also written some extremely good books about totalitarianism and cults including communism. His book on thought reform and totalism in China is particularly good.

But, in terms of deaths, the 'famines' are a different thing, I think should be clear. They impact a much broader number of people, and for that reason the Holodormer and the Great Leap Forward and the subsequent 'famine' are complicated events worth studying as extreme examples of administrative failures and denial. Jasper Becker's book, Hungry Ghosts, which I have but unfortunately have not been able to find, (Ive literally been ransacking my house trying to find it) is a very good, well researched work on them both. (It also includes the 1995-1997 North Korean famine which is structurally quite similar)

IMHO, something like that could happen under any government with an extremely rigid ideological system that is inflexibly trying to represent itself and its ideology as perfect, and force it onto a society..

For example, a very similar mass starvation occurred in Ireland, part of Great Britain at the time, the world's richest country, in 1847, for quite similar reasons as the others.