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posted by
martyb
on Sunday September 03 2017, @11:51AM
from the can-you-have-copyleft-without-copyright? dept.
from the can-you-have-copyleft-without-copyright? dept.
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) provides a rebuttal, the supposed decline of copyleft, to assertions from Black Duck regarding the uptake of reciprocal versus non-reciprocal licenses. In the rebuttal, the FSF works to stem a cascade of articles and blogs which have proliferated based on some initial disinformation. While there does seem to be an increase in the use of non-reciprocal licensing in general there are several possible explanations and the rebuttal goes into detail and backs each possibility with data. In short, both styles of licensing are increasing in popularity
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Fascinating is a word I use for the unexpected.
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(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Monday September 04 2017, @08:41AM (2 children)
Both the data supporting and rebutting the argument is flawed. Counting the number of packages doesn't really tell you anything, especially on Debian where, for example, LLVM and clang are combined in a single package but gcc is split into half a dozen (most of which are useless without the others). I'm responsible for a bunch of GPL'd packages on FreeBSD that haven't had any activity upstream for a decade, but I fixed them recently to work with newer versions of their dependencies so they're still there and would add to the GPL-is-active count here.
OpenHub is a pretty nice resource, but if I go to my profile page it lists a bunch of languages that I've never used as ones that I've contributed code in. I've traced a few of them to understand why with the help of someone who works there (they used to be pretty responsive on their issue tracker, but I realise that it's over a year since I visited the site) and found a lot of bugs in their language-detection algorithm, so I don't have much hope for their license detection.
Similarly, GitHub is likely to over-report because the model involves forking (but some features such as search are disabled if you use the fork button, so people often clone and push instead), so you end up counting things multiple times if you try to use them.
In my personal experience, I can say this: I've been paid to write permissively licensed replacements of copyleft libraries, but I've never been approached to do the converse. I've also seen a shift from some companies towards writing permissively licensed code rather than proprietary when they need a replacement for something GPL'd.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 04 2017, @11:00AM (1 child)
Citation needed. Here is the list of packages built from the gcc source package: https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/gcc-7 [debian.org] . Going through that list, I can see language-specific compilers (gcc, g++, gccgo, etc), language-specific runtimes (libstdc++, libgnat, etc), and multilib packages (lib32*, libx32*). Then there's a few binary packages that are not language-specific: libgcc (base support), libgomp, libmpx, libquadmath (high-precision math support), libitm, libatomic (threading primitives) and lib*san (runtime debugging). The way they're provided, every single language compiler can be installed without pulling in the runtimes for the other languages, and every language runtime can be installed without pulling in the entire compiler.
So which packages are useless, according to you? The Debian base install usually already includes libstdc++ and libgcc, Would you rather have Debian install 8 compilers and 3 library environments every time a package requires libgcc, for example?
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Monday September 04 2017, @11:17AM
I'll give you gccgo, but gcc, g++, gobjc and gobjc++ are basically the same code. In contrast, there is a single clang package, which provides C, C++, Objective-C and Objective-C++ compilers. Oh, and the only Objective-C runtime that appears to be packaged is the (GPL3 + linking exemption) one from gcc that supports a 15-year-old dialect of the language and not the (MIT) GNUstep one that supports all of the modern language features.
sudo mod me up