Hacker News Reader

Comment by icebraining | Hacker News Reader

If you need the portability of Linux coupled with a license that lets you freely redistribute in order to sell an appliance you will be hard pressed to get around NetBSD.

It's perfectly legal to sell an appliance with Linux, people do it all the time.

View on HN

You can't "freely redistribute" it though. You have to comply with the viral decidedly non-freeing provisions.

You can redistribute it as much as you want, providing you permit recipients to do the same thing. Entire industries have found this to be completely reasonable.

The only freedom you give up by using the GPL is the freedom to screw your users over by denying them access to the source code. All you are demanded is to let others enjoy the freedom you enjoy. That, surely, isn't too much to ask.

Meh, hardware vendors routinely ignore GPL, and for the money it takes to sue them in court you could in most cases reverse engineer their drivers and write them for scratch.

Yeah, NVIDIA is an "example" of that.

While I can appreciate that point of view (i.e. as a vendor), the definition does depend on whose POV you are looking at it from. From an end-user (individual or business) POV, the GPL is absolutely 'freely redistributable' what you're talking about is your inability to limit that ability. That's the GPL doing its job.

> That's the GPL doing its job.

It also makes it really hard to earn a living with actual software (not services) that depends on GPL.

Buy commercial licenses from authors of GPL code, so they will earn something too.

It is astonishing how many people don't know that they could do it.

I can see how that works for code that has zero compile-time dependencies on other copyleft software. I.e. a very limited usecase. Or am I getting something wrong?

Yes, you're absolutely correct. The GPL, and resulting GPL'd software, does not exist for the benefit of commercial software vendors. While some business models are viable under it, that's a side-effect rather than an objective of it.

i.e. it's condemned to be a hobby for almost everyone involved, besides some key players who can live off of donations or those who sell services based on mostly other people's software.

Selling services 'based on mostly other people's software' is not some crime or bad thing. Servicing cars or houses made by other people is an honorable profession. So are software services. If the thing needs servicing, then I salute those who stand ready to do the dirty work.

And I didn't say it is. Only that it's usually the only way of building a business around GPL software. This is fine for serving some people, but it has a huge blind spot for those who mainly want to write Software and try to live off of it. IMO this is the main reason why Desktop linux never took off - you just don't have enough userland software that's ready for production use in a professional environment - see desktop publishing, audio, video etc. This sort of software is not going to be written as a hobby, it needs full time professional developers and investors who can see the ROI starting at around 1M$.

And to many it's fine if it is. The GPL wasn't created to benefit the software industry, it was a reaction to it. That's also part of the reason that some commercial interests (most famously Apple) have been moving in the direction of MIT/BSD-style licenses. It's OK to align your efforts with licenses that match your requirements. The GPL is most aligned with the interests of users, not commercial developers. MIT/BSD is the reverse.

All of the software I have written for money is free software. In some fields it is hard to not do that: Wordpress plugins, for example, are GPL licensed by default. Can you elaborate what problems you have run into?

How would you solve the following use-case: You want users to be able to try your software for non commercial use, but you want them to pay for commercial. I don't see how GPL licenses can do that for you. In fact, I don't know any common OSS license that has non-commercial limitations with the option of purchasing a commercial license.

Creative Commons works that way. So its possible.

People keep saying CC, but that license has never been intended for software. Did it ever stand up to a trial in court for this usecase? See also [1]. Why isn't there something like CC NC geared for software?

[1] https://wiki.creativecommons.org/index.php/Frequently_Asked_...

> We recommend against using Creative Commons licenses for software. Instead, we strongly encourage you to use one of the very good software licenses which are already available.

Is it important if court has tested the license? A software license is like a will, in that it describes the authors intention in a legal binding document. A infringer would need to prove in court that their activity does not conflict with the requirements of the license, and the words "non-commercial" would be quite hard to sneak around. The main reason that FSF and similar activly advice against such license is primarily because "non-commercial" is ambiguous and there is a clear risk for the recipients/re-distributors if the original author starts to act abusive. A common example I have heard is public schools vs private school, where the later is a commercial activity and the former is common viewed as not. How that would translate to a student using it in a student project would be up in the air.

If I where you, I would instead copy the license of the unreal engine. That is, you don't look at the commercial status but rather on profits from products that include your work. If someone is earning profits, regardless of the nature of the organization who do so, then a cut is required to be given to you. Its simple, it fixes the school problem above, and there is a "industry" example to use if it ever became a court case. The big drawback is that its not an open source compatible license.

You can always dual-license the software. The GPL version of your software can always be a basic version, customers could pay for features they want to have.

Yes, but we're at the start again: Only when you don't depend on other GPL software at compile time (and even runtime bindings can be tricky AFAIK). So it only works if all people do is write a bunch of siloes and don't work as a community at all.

So, looking at Linux system software as an example, it only works as long as you stay far away from the kernel.

If you depend on software, the authors of the dependencies have done a part of your job for you. GPL basically says the authors only agree to help you on the condition that you also help others. You can always choose not to be a part of such a community, then you will not get help. What is the problem?

For me the problem is that GPL mixes up the requirement of "Open Source" (which I'm fine with) with a requirement that anything depending on it has to be GPL as well (which I have a problem with). Basically, if GPL would allow someone to sell licenses to his software as long as he keeps publishing the sources, it would go a long way to enable a userland application market on top of GNU based kernels.

Gnu.org could even demand a percentage of revenues going towards the GNU foundation. IMO that would make Linux even free-er since it would democratise the way kernel development is funded (i.e. redistribute some of the influence away from the big software corporations who currently chip in). Right now kernel development works fine because you have the right gatekeepers at the top (especially LT), but I wonder what happens when he retires - will some committee take over?

You're right, you can't "sell" GPL software. What you mean by "sell" is "grant a license for usage" and that's exactly what the GPL or a similar FOSS license does. So the two things conflict. Really you're describing a situation that the GPL is not designed for.

Your desires are more inline with Microsoft 'shared source' type of situations.

The GPL and the FSF's world-view isn't particularly aligned with what you want (I believe). Either use the GPL and live with the constraints, or use something else. Something else's that come-up in a GPL but commercial context are:

a. Service or Support. You've said you want to be paid for creating the software and not for providing services, so this one is out. Note that SaaS is now the easiest way to achieve what you want.

b. Dual licensing. You said "you can't depend on GPL software then". Well yeah, because GPL is about a commons of equals 'sharing' and you want to charge for sharing - so you don't get to use other people's stuff for free. Seems fair to me.

But, your actual concern isn't really valid - there are lots of things you can write without depending on GPL software. This is probably more realistic than you think.

c. Open core. Someone described this to you earlier, I think.

d. Validation and/or IPR. Probably outside the boundaries of most individual developers. But think of the way that Java is licensed on the basis of it being a 'valid' implementation and then IPR and trademarks.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com