How to stop free software from becoming proprietary software
Peter sez, "The Free Software Foundation released a new version of the GNU General Public License (GPL) earlier this year. The GPL is the copyright license used for most of the software found in a typical distribution of GNU/Linux like Ubuntu. The GPL's purpose is to stop free software from becoming proprietary software. Much has been written about the new version of the license, GPLv3, from the perspective of corporate users, but not much has been written about the benefits it provides to developers and the community. This 'Quick Guide' is an easy to read explanation of how the GPL works to defend the community's freedom against attacks from Microsoft and others."
Nobody should be restricted by the software they use. There are four freedoms that every user should have:Link (Thanks, Peter!)* the freedom to use the software for any purpose,
* the freedom to share the software with your friends and neighbors,
* the freedom to change the software to suit your needs, and
* the freedom to share the changes you make.When a program offers users all of these freedoms, we call it free software.
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"the freedom to use the software for any purpose,"
Isn't this branch of the GPL being attacked more and more by RMS in the newest iteration of the GPL?
As far as I can tell, his proposed additions (maybe they are already accepted...I found the whole thing obnoxious and decided to stick with GPL 1 or 2 and NEVER touch anything with 3)...but his additions pretty much takes away the freedom to use it for any purpose.
For instance, if you want to run a webservice, I believe the GPL3 requires that you give the software away along with whatever changes you've made. Why? I can understand if you are distributing this software, but not if you are just running it internally. What is to stop the GPL Ghestopo from coming into a business and stating that they have to prove what they are running and if anything is used to service another client it too needs to be given away.
Personally, I find the idea that forced intellectually property sharing is abhorrent. I love the GPL and it does a lot of good, but more and more I'm liking the BSD guys. Far more mature, and less likely to want to dictate personal morality.
Anyhoo...back to working with my proprietary software...
> "Nobody should be restricted by the software they use"
> "*the freedom to share the changes you make"
Actually, the GPL states a requirement to share the changes that you make - along with many other requirements that best define GPL software as 'free software... but with strings attached'.
Its true - nobody should be restricted by the software they use, however the GPL create numerous restrictions that are often undesireable , leading to the term GPL Crippleware.
When program offers users all of those freedoms mentioned above, without any restrictions, then it actually is free software. The GPL doesn't though fit that definition in the lease bit though.
While the GPL is useful, and I'm glad its here -- the article reads like a summary of the BSD licensing variants, which actually are free and have no strings attached.
The GPL has always restricted your rights to the software in one important way: you may not restrict other recipients' rights to the software. It's language boils down to "You either grant all the rights to people you redistribute to that were granted to you, or you do not have a license to redistribute.". To me that seems an entirely reasonable restriction. Especially given that without the license I'd have no right to redistribute at all. I'd go so far as to say that the GPL places no restrictions on your rights that weren't placed on you by copyright law, it merely doesn't grant you quite as many extra rights above and beyond the ones you have by law that placing the material in the public domain would have.
Oh, and no the GPL, not even v3, doesn't require you to share your changes. It only requires you to make the source available if you distribute your modified software to other people. Which you have no right to do under copyright law anyway, you only get it from a license from the copyright holder. Again, the GPL doesn't restrict your right to redistribute, it merely doesn't extend that right without limitation.
The changes in the GPLv3 are in the same vein. Companies were trying to use tricks to take rights granted under the GPL away from people they distributed the software to, while continuing to enjoy the benefit of those rights themselves. The patent language, for example, boils down to "You can't enforce your patents on GPL'd software while distributing and profiting from that same GPL'd software yourself.". Note that it doesn't stop a company from enforcing it's patents on GPL'd software, it just requires them to choose between enforcing their patents and benefiting themselves from the software they claim infringes.
"Again, the GPL doesn't restrict your right to redistribute, it merely doesn't extend that right without limitation."
Limitations in extention... isn't it the same as restrictions?
This, whilst correct, is disingenuous.
The issue at debate here is what the GPL requires that you do with contributions you make to the software, or for that matter, with other original software that is used in conjunction with software encumbered by the GPL.
The simple 'redistribution' case is not interesting, and has not been for decades.
A better question to ask is "what is the utility of free software"?
The quote above:
is grossly misleading in my opinion. (The use of 'we' is particularly vexing given that there is no way of knowing who 'we' are or why 'we' should be trusted to say anything about free software).
It is not unreasonable to argue that the current state of the industry (software, telecommunications, etc.) has been heavily influenced, and I would argue enhanced, by free software.
One of the critical attributes of 'free' software in this context is the ability to build 'not free' things - things that cannot be built 'free' for any number of reasons - more readily.
The argument that this is the process of taking 'free' software and making it 'proprietary' is laughable - it is a scare tactic on a par with 'national security'.
If I use a piece of free software as a component of my not-free software product, it has not 'become proprietary'. The free software is still free. What has not happened is that my proprietary software has become 'free'.
This is an important thing to bear in mind. If I want to get paid - if I want to eat, feed my family, and afford the spare time to work on free software - I have to be able to sell not-free software. Or, I guess, I could make hamburgers for other people while they make not-free software.
It is important, I feel, for free software to continue to be encouraged. It is particularly relevant when this software embodies implementations of things that are considered fundamental; things like zlib, SQLite and even WebKit are good examples of components that are valuable to not-free software but which benefit everyone by being truly free.
The GPL in all its incarnations is an interesting thing, but at its heart it is an attempt by one school of thought to influence and constrain the actions of others.
It is not a software license that encourages the development and use of free software.
How do you rationalize that statement with the fact that GPL software is widely developed and used?
Ignoti,
Well, to be honest, for myself it was out of ignorance. When I was starting out, I licensed a lot of my code that I wanted to share with people under the GPL, because it was the "done thing" and the received wisdom from other coders at my university.
After a few years, and some reads of the various different licenses, I realised that other people taking my contributions private wasn't really doing me any harm, and that the limitations I was imposing on people went against the spirit in which I was offering the software. So I switched to the BSD license.
"If I want to get paid - if I want to eat, feed my family, and afford the spare time to work on free software - I have to be able to sell not-free software."
Is that true for just you or for everyone? I know people who give their software away for free and still make a living from that same software.
@Mike Smith:
As the author of a piece of free software, that's my price for letting you use it. I'll let you use mine if you let me use yours. It seems a fair price to me.
If you think my price is too high, shop around or write it yourself.
Given that the vast majority of work in IT is in any case custom work rather than selling not-free software, I have to question the accuracy of your claim.
In custom work, the GPL becomes a customer protection covenant, but not a particularly onerous one. Mostly, you have to give your clients the source code which the clients were probably demanding anyway.
Yes, yes it is. A mild one - strictly opt-in - but the heart is the building of a better world. You might argue about whether it is in fact a better or worse world we're building, but that is the heart.
And if that is the heart, the "mind" of GPL is that it results in high-quality software at low cost.
GPL: Free as in Herpes.
GPL is a means of contractually guaranteeing that if you don't do jack shit with the software you release and some other party picks up and runs with it, they have to share their shit with you.
It is akin to a five year old getting bored with a toy but requiring anyone who does something interesting with said toy share with them.
I.e. a license for people lacking in self confidence.
Me?
BSD or MIT license, thanks. Truly free and I never have to worry about using said software in whatever project or within whatever company I'm working for. If there isn't true value in posting back the changes it means one of two things:
- the changes aren't worth posting back
- the open source community couldn't give a shit about the project and, thus, it is time for a major shift in focus anyway
#7, #8: Mike is not alone in needing to be able to sell his software in order to make a living. There is such a thing as consumer software, for example, video games, where the entirety of the product revenue comes from the sale of the non-customized software itself. Sure, there are subscription-model online games where you pay for continuing access to a proprietary server, but they are only a small fraction of the entire market.
The majority of games sold today are single-player, non-networked experiences, which simply would not be developed professionally if they could not be sold for profit. Ancillary sales due to merchandising (t-shirts and toys and lunchboxes) could not make up for the cost of development alone.
IT is not entirely a service industry. Some of us make mass produced consumer end products.
It must be one of those internet rules: any discussion or article about the GPL quickly yields an GPL versus BSD flamewar.
People can pick whatever license they damn well please. It's been their trouble, so they can rightly choose on what terms they release it to the world. Or not, as the case may be.
Some programmers want other people to close up their code, so they release it in the public domain, or perhaps under some permissive license.
Other programmers don't care what happens to their code, as long as they get paid and can browse Slashdot four hours a day. Fine too.
And still other programmers want their code and any derivatives to remain free, always. If other programmers are not okay with this, they are free not to use this code.
There's absolutely no reason to flame about this. Chill. There are those who say that certain licenses are better for the end user. That may very well be, but the end user should be able to decide that for himself, since only he really knows what he wants.
@Crash (#10): Video games are one of the areas where the corrosive effects of non-free software are quite visible: it used to be that the lesson about sharing was "did you bring enough for everyone?" Today, we're heading toward quite a different lesson, where sharing is nasty and wrong. Is that a world we want to live in? And for what - games?
As a Faustian bargain, that's quite poor, even as Faustian bargains go.
Of course, the whole position is somewhat hypocritical: on the one hand, you want to restrict your customers much more strictly than the GPL ever does; yet on the other hand you complain that your suppliers restrict you too much with the GPL.
In the end, the choice is yours: if you don't like the GPL, don't use it.
#11: Indeed we do not use any GPL software for that reason. I am only contesting the untrue assertion that no one in IT earns or should earn their living by selling software.
"Software should be free! By the way, please follow this link to donate money to Miro."
"the freedom to share the changes you make."
Yeah, like the freedom to pay taxes. Subject to lawsuit, loss of rights if you don't. That's no form of freedom.
Yes, the GPL is bad and evil.
I wrote an allegory about this some time ago:
http://dewimorgan.livejournal.com/8848.html
The allegory is, of course, in the public domain and may be used any way you wish, including sticking it in an anthology and selling it for cash; including editing it to support the GPL, then copyrighting the edited version under the GPL and giving it away "Free(tm)".
In the latter case, though, I might sue for defamation if my name were still attached, unless the nature of the edits were made very clear.
Crash, why should someone (or a group of someones) spend hundreds of hours developing a software package then give it to you to bundle into a commercial package with no further benefit to the initial developers? If they choose not to, who are you to complain?
I know there are problems with the GPL v3, but I also think there are problems with the MIT and BSD licenses. I think GPL v3 is "more fair," if that term can be used, to the spirit of "free" software.
A game using free software components probably had fewer man-hours spent on the proprietary components than the time invested in it's free portion.
All software should be free. Software is not a scarce commodity, therefore anyone who restricts our ability to access and copy existing code is creating an artificial shortage.
If I refuse to share with you when the cost to me is 0 and the benefit to you is significant, I'm being unethical. Nobody is entitled to be compensated for something which costs them nothing to do.
The business model of selling copies is both practically unfeasible and morally wrong. Developers should seek compensation the way everyone else does - get paid for our labor, not the artificial ability to grant and restrict access to copies of labor we did long ago.
The GPL grants the freedom to use software in any way, including profiting from it, except for the freedom to restrict access to copies.
I don't want a world where people are free to arbitrarily restrict access to software simply because the government has determined they have the exclusive right to control all copies. That may be a "freedom", but it's not one that has a place in my society, just like the "freedom" to steal from one's neighbors.
So I use the GPL.
@ #15
As I noted previously, the issue here is not whether the GPL is compatible with other GPL'ed software, but rather how free software fits in with the rest of the software universe.
Because it is an intentional tool of a particular faction's agenda, and that agenda is hostile to those of other factions, it does not.
As for the 'spirit' of free software, I don't think there is any real consensus on what that might be. If you ask the FSF and their groupies, they clearly believe that the 'spirit' of free software is that all software should be free.
If you were to ask another faction, you would almost certainly get a different answer.
The FSF have attempted via the usual techniques to seize the high ground and claim that their definition of 'free' is the one and only.
I resist, and resent this claim; it has done all of us that work in this domain a great disservice.
@ #6
You assume post hoc ergo propter hoc.
The GPL is widely advertised as "the true free software license", much as various brands of soda are widely advertised as what you should drink if you want to be seen in some particular light. That it is used for a large body of software says nothing about its effects on the development of that software.
The only strong correlation that you can point to in this particular context is that GPL'ed software is not used in many situations explicitly due to the effect the GPL would have on other code involved in the undertaking.
It is this specific issue that I was speaking to when I said
@ #16
This is also fallacious. Instances of a given piece of software may not be a scarce commodity, but uniqiue pieces of software most certainly are.
As there is no tangible result of the software development process other than an arbitrary number of these instances, and as both the creation of the original and the distribution of these instances have a non-zero cost, that cost must be recovered somewhere, in some fashion, if the exercise is to avoid making a loss.
As a software-writing volunteer producing free software, I accept that my exercise will incur a loss and plan to offset that loss in a reasonable fashion.
But as a software author attempting to use those skills in order to earn a living, I cannot afford to do that. Thus, I must in some fashion ensure that I am compensated by the beneficiaries of the software that I create.
The most common resolution to this dilemma is to create a gating factor of some sort on the replication of the software, and to extract a payment for passage through this gate. Unrestricted replication explicitly denies any such gating factor, and thus explicitly denies me any opportunity to recover my costs (or for that matter, to make a living, expand my business, hire more programmers, or indulge in other free software development).
It can be argued (and the FSF and their followers do argue) that writing software should not be a compensated activity; that it should be purely a labour of love or a loss leader for the sale of tangible things.
As someone that makes a living writing software, I don't subscribe to this fantasy. If you get paid for your creative output, whether it be code, words, pictures or some other form of expression, I don't think you would want to either.
Mike Smith (5):
There's precious little use to a school of thought that doesn't.BTW, your comment #17 is very tidily argued. (That's approval, not agreement.)
Mike Smith (20) said:
The most common, perhaps, but certainly not the only resolution. Right?
(emphasis mine) This is where your argument falls apart, because as you implied above there are other ways to get payment for writing software. You are only denied one method: recovering your costs by charging money for the bits themselves.Take Red Hat as an example. You don't buy bits from Red Hat - you get those for free. People pay Red Hat to write the software for them and help them to use it. Red Hat, in turn, pays people to work on that software. People like me, in fact.
Free Software is not a fantasy. It's how the business operates and it's how I make my living.
I'd note that the question of how the GPL affects someone's code applies in one and only one circumstance: where the affected person wants to use someone else's code that's available only under the GPL, and at the same time wants to not release the combined code (theirs and the GPL'd code) under the same terms as they're subject to. I think that needs emphasis: they want to distribute someone else's code. When they talk about how they're being restricted in what they can do with their code, that restriction occurs because their code is mixed with someone else's code, eg. they're building their program based on GPL'd core components, or their code is a feature added to a GPL'd program.
I think part of the confusion is "free as in speech, not free as in beer". Most GPL'd software is available for no monetary charge. But there is a price: instead of paying in dollars, you pay in code. You want to benefit from GPL'd code? The price is you let others benefit from your code. If you don't want to pay the price, you don't use the code. When the price is in dollars that's intuitively obvious. When the price is in kind, I think some people get tripped up.