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Comment by beering | Hacker News Reader

Someday, that might come full circle and you'll be the one who won't be enriched because the original code was MIT and not GPL.

Here's an example: you buy some embedded hardware for a personal project, but you find out that the toolchain for that chipset is a pile of proprietary blobs built on Clang and it only runs on Windows. If it were built on GCC, then the GPL would force them to make the source available and people could adapt/update/rebuild it as needed.

Making something MIT/public domain is free for one hop, from you to the next person. After that it can become even more restrictive and demanding than the GPL (i.e. proprietary binaries).

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I can't find the link, but I remember someone from the X Window System regretting that X11 was under the MIT License - it's the origin of the MIT License - rather than copyleft, precisely because so many companies just would not give code back.

Keith Packard on this in 2015:

https://list.waikato.ac.nz/pipermail/wlug/2015-September/013...

> Keith made it clear he prefers GPL-style (copyleft/sharealike) licences to MIT/BSD style ones. Net contributors of code tend to prefer the former, while net consumers of code (those who don’t want to give back to the community) tend to favour the latter. In other words, freeloaders.

> while net consumers of code (those who don’t want to give back to the community) tend to favour the latter. In other words, freeloaders.

I think this is a really unfair statement - "net consumers of code ... freeloaders".

While there are surely plenty of users of code who are not contributing at all, and they would be freeloaders, the phrasing "net consumers" means that some of the consumers are contributing back code, just not as much as they consume.

I would wager that most end users are freeloaders (they never commit code back).

I would further wager that most developers are closer to end-users.

Finally, I would wager that the vast majority of developers who contribute code are net consumers, not producers.

To me, it's not so surprising that a few people who put in the most public effort sometimes feel bitter that others don't carry their weight.

GCC has the GCC Runtime Library Exception: the resulting binary of code compiled with GCC doesn't need to licensed under GPL.

Grandparent is talking about a modified GCC. Not some binary compiled with GCC.

If they aren't distributing their modified GCC with the hardware, they have no obligation to release the source code either.

> If it were built on GCC...

This assumes that if the only option available to the embedded hardware company were the GPL, that they'd go with that option. (more likely, the product would never come to market)

In reality, releasing something under the GPL typically just ensures that it won't be used by businesses. This is a real bummer, because it means it is off-limits to me during my day-job.

I would love to try and convince my coworkers to write some Scheme, but the majority of that community uses the GPL, which makes it a bit of a non-starter.

Thisnis because most businesses don't understand GPL.

Are you telling me nobody would sell cable boxes or TVs if they had to provide a URL where I could download the code? That sounds ridiculous.

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