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The Universal Donor (Open Source Licensing)

posted by martyb on Thursday January 18 2018, @02:27PM   Printer-friendly
from the waiting-for-the-multiverse-donor dept.

canopic jug writes:

Over at the Meshed Insights blog, Simon Phipps writes about why the public domain falls short and more detailed licensing is needed in order to extend rights to a software community.

Yes, public domain may give you the rights you need. But in an open source project, it's not enough for you to determine you personally have the rights you need. In order to function, every user and contributor of the project needs prior confidence they can use, improve and share the code, regardless of their location or the use to which they put it. That confidence also has to extend to their colleagues, customers and community as well.

Source : The Universal Donor

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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by turgid on Thursday January 18 2018, @08:47PM (2 children)

    by turgid (4318) Subscriber Badge on Thursday January 18 2018, @08:47PM (#624372) Journal

    Nope, he's exactly right.

    No he isn't. He's trolling. Look at his wording and the pejorative term "infected with the GPL." In recent years, it has become for ACs to troll the GPL with wishy-washy pro-BSD arguments and FUD regarding the GPL. In my opinion there is a place for BSD, GPL, closed-source, Public Domain and all sorts of licenses (and lack thereof) for software. Many people, and corporations prefer BSD because it gives them the right to take code developed by others, to modify it and to distribute the binaries of the changed code without having an obligation to make the changed source code available to the end user. This is in fundamental contrast to the GPL, which enforces this right for the end user. Personally, in my own time, at home, I prefer GPL but I'm not an ideological purist. I use all kinds of FOSS and very little closed-source software. Over the years I have developed various proprietary embedded systems, on FOSS and non-FOSS platforms. None of them infringed the GPL or BSD or any other license. Everything was done ethically and legally. I've spoken up to senior management with concerns in a polite and constructive way when I've seen things that needed addressing, and they always were.

    A lot of humans, when confronted with a set of rules, will try hard to figure out how to do what they want without violating the letter of the rules.

    Indeed they will. That's how the law works, and it's how it has to work in a democracy. I fully support that, with the caveat that the law is continually reviewed, revised, amended with full public scrutiny as required.

    Both programmers and lawyers tend to exhibit this characteristic, because it's beneficial in their chosen professions (a lot of programming is trying to make something possible within the constraints of the system that you have to work with).

    Correct. I've sat in on various presentations about Intellectual Property by some pretty well qualified and intelligent lawyers.

    The best way of getting people to do something is to convince them that it's in their best interests. No license can do this, only a community.

    Yes, the licenses are necessary, but not sufficient.

    If a community makes it easy to submit patches then it's easy to convince someone that it's cheaper to submit their improvements upstream than to maintain a fork. If the community helps to fix bugs, then it's easy to convince them that it's worth developing things in the open.

    Yes. Any how does this relate to "GPL infection" as the OP trolled? If you don't like the code/language/license/community chose a different package. If you can't find one for free, write one yourself, pay someone to write one or get one off the shelf.

    This is freedom of choice, liberty and an open and free market. To which part specifically do you and our OP troll object?

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 18 2018, @08:58PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 18 2018, @08:58PM (#624386)

    Over the years I have developed various proprietary embedded systems, on FOSS and non-FOSS platforms.

    Thanks for confirming you don't get paid for FOSS. You just exploit the free labor of everyone who never got paid for the FOSS you use. How do you live with yourself knowing you benefit from standing on the shoulders of starving coders?