Context:

Permissive licenses (commonly referred to as “removed licenses”) like the MIT license allow others to modify your software and release it under an unfree license. Copyleft licenses (like the Gnu General Public License) mandate that all derivative works remain free.

Andrew Tanenbaum developed MINIX, a modular operating system kernel. Intel went ahead and used it to build Management Engine, arguably one of the most widespread and invasive pieces of malware in the world, without even as much as telling him. There’s nothing Tanenbaum could do, since the MIT license allows this.

Erik Andersen is one of the developers of Busybox, a minimal implementation of that’s suited for embedded systems. Many companies tried to steal his code and distribute it with their unfree products, but since it’s protected under the GPL, Busybox developers were able to sue them and gain some money in the process.

Interestingly enough, Tanenbaum doesn’t seem to mind what intel did. But there are some examples out there of people regretting releasing their work under a permissive license.

  • DreamlandLividity@lemmy.world
    4·
    5 months ago

    The “problem” is that those contributions can be taken and exploited by large corporations.

    You say exploited, I say used. Or on the other hand, you can argue that large FOSS projects like Linux distros are exploiting smaller projects they package, since they don’t share their donations…

    IMO there is no issue if the wishes of the author are respected. The authors wishing for companies to use their code is just as valid as wishing to restrict it to FOSS.

    • rglullis@communick.news
      1·
      5 months ago

      There is no fundamental problem in working for free either. It’s second-order effects that we should worry about. Those who are “working for free” because they “just want have software being used by people” are diluting the value of the professionals and in the long term end up being as detrimental as professional designers or photographers who “work for exposure”.

      If you ask me, the reason that is so hard to fund FOSS development is not because of bureaucracies, but because we are competing with privileged developers who are able to afford giving away their work for free.

      • DreamlandLividity@lemmy.world
        2·
        5 months ago

        I disagree. Sure, for some larger crucial projects, companies would pay. But for the majority of (small) projects, we would just handwrite an inferior solution from scratch rather than handle the bureaucracy. The result would be wasted additional effort, inferior features and more bugs.

        And even if that was not the case and bureaucracy was not an issue, the question is how much better would the paid for “professional” FOSS software be compared to the free one. If it was so much better, that it justified the price, it would outcompete the free one anyway. And if it is not, then by definition it is better we use the free one.

        • rglullis@communick.newsEnglish
          1·
          5 months ago

          we would just handwrite an inferior solution from scratch rather than handle the bureaucracy.

          What company are you working for whose leadership thinks that it is a better use of their time to reimplementing FOSS solutions just because they can’t get it “for free”?

            • rglullis@communick.newsEnglish
              1·
              5 months ago

              So what is your argument? Who is responsible for the decision-making process that leads to “hand writing an inferior solution”? Why do you think that this at all acceptable and reasonable?

              You’ve been writing nothing but opinion-as-fact and resorting to wild rationalizations to justify your preferences, now you want to couch yourself under the questionable ethics of “it’s done this way and I can not fight it, so it must be the correct thing to do”?

              Let’s make a simple test: if you were in charge and had the choice between spending some $$ to dual license a GPL package or to pay for the development of a GPL-only system vs paying $$$$ to do it in-house because you did not find a MIT/BSD package that does what you need, what would you do?

                • rglullis@communick.newsEnglish
                  1·
                  5 months ago

                  If you want to talk about fallacies, here are some good examples:

                  we would just handwrite an inferior solution from scratch rather than handle the bureaucracy.

                  Bandwagon Fallacy

                  If it was so much better, that it justified the price, it would outcompete the free one anyway.

                  Failure to understand basic microeconomics

                  I did not write 90% of the things you claim I did.

                  That is true and at the same time does not contradict my point. The whole discussion is about how MIT-style licensing is not as effective for software freedom as GPL licenses. And because you do not have anything to stand on to make an argument against the statement, you keep bringing points that do not address the main issue. When asked directly what you would do, you refuse to give a definite answer.