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Comment by fsckboy | Hacker News Reader

>It is rather ironic that in some ways, one has more freedom in how one licences a kernel driver for Windows than the freedom one supposedly has in writing a kernel module for Linux.

it is not ironic at all: freedom in Free Software is the freedom of USERS of the software to be able to see and modify the source. This is a freedom granted by the writers of the software, and copyleft means that this right is ensured through any chain of modifications by additional authors.

In this same way, the GPL and like licenses are the most permissive licenses from the perspective of every eventual user

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> the GPL and like licenses are the most permissive licenses

This is a deliberately confusing statement. It's fine to prefer the GPL over MIT/BSD-style licenses, but the term "permissive" is well-understood in reference to non-copyleft licenses. Misapplying that term just muddles the issue unnecessarily.

See also: [the wikipedia page on permissive licenses](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permissive_software_license).

Yeah, it's already confusing enough with "free" and "open" having too many competing meanings.

you are creating more confusion by selectively quoting me out of context. You left out "from the perspective of the eventual users"

You are saying that from the perspective of developers, taking open source software and not permitting users to see the source is... permissive. It's like the right to put people in jail is extra freedom, because you get the freedom to do that! I can't believe that's not in the bill of rights! I find that to be confusing.

I did not create the confusion that surrounds licensing, I'm trying to clarify it.

It's the most permissive, in that it yields the most permission.

The permission denied to your company to take without giving, is outweighed by the permission granted to everyone else.

Everyone who ever complains about the gpl is just a slaver complaining about their freedom to deny another their freedom.

If that awful gpl software is so stinky, great news, you don't have to use it! How awesome is that?

There is no irony, I think there is just confusion. The Windows license is much more restricting, you are never going to be able to ship Windows for your customers alongside your Windows kernel module unless you/they pay for Windows. GPL allows you to distribute Linux for your customers at your behest as long as you satisfy certain requirements, namely, source. The way I view it, it is not adding restrictions whatsoever, it is actually adding allowances. More permissive licenses add even more allowances.

In particular, that quote mixes up freedom and power: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/freedom-or-power.en.html

Being allowed to choose a license that denies freedom to others isn't freedom, just like being allowed to own slaves wasn't freedom.

The term for this "communal freedom" rather than "pure individualist freedom" is Negative Liberty: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_liberty

It's one of the core tenets of modern freedom, for example: you're free to say what you want (Positive Liberty) as long as it's not a threat of violence that would silence someone else, so that other person is free from your threat of violence (Negative Liberty).

That is not what the word "permissive" habitually means in the English language, especially if you consider a more broad view of users including those who are writing the software and integrating it into their products.

Not to say GPL is bad, just that the VAT-style "only the last user counts" view of things is playing with semantics.

> writing the software and integrating it into their products

That's distribution, not use. (Except for when they're testing it or running local instances, and GPL doesn't get in the way of those things.)

> Not to say GPL is bad, just that the VAT-style "only the last user counts" view of things is playing with semantics.

By my understanding VAT doesn't work that way. Once a user pays VAT and starts using something, that's it. The taxes are done with, and VAT doesn't pass on to later users.

the VAT reference is that businesses don't pay VAT, only end consumers do. If you buy something and then integrate it into another product, then re-sell it you are exempt from VAT (details are more complicated, but it's _not_ like sales tax)

if you resell items, then you don't pay sales tax on them, so that part fits your description

VAT is not a sales tax because it's an income tax. That's what value added means, profit, income, the measure of the value you've added. Wether it gets hidden in the price or tacked on to a fake price makes little difference.

My understanding (based off a French accounting class from many many years ago) is that VAT also can be deducted for things like factory equipment or, say, desks for your office workers. It's not purely a "if it's for resale you don't pay sales tax" thing, but a "if this is used for business then you can get a deduction for your VAT" (with some exceptions).

I would not really describe VAT as an income tax. It's not a tax on an income, it's a tax on the value add. Income tax means something specific, and perhaps VAT is one degree away from that, but money is fungible! On a long enough time scale everything is inheritence tax and income tax I guess!

EDIT: rereading my original post at the start of this thread I now feel a bit silly saying the explanation is "VAT-like". Metaphors and similes are bad!

> By my understanding VAT doesn't work that way. Once a user pays VAT and starts using something, that's it. The taxes are done with, and VAT doesn't pass on to later users.

VAT works something like this: when you buy X, you pay VAT on X. If you then sell X, you reclaim the VAT on X from the government. The last "user", the one that didn't sell X to anyone else (or integrate it into a larger product that they sell to anyone else) is the only one that effectively pays any tax once you draw the line.

I'm making a distinction between "user" in scare quotes and actual user.

If you did nothing but buy it, hold it, and sell it on, you didn't use the product. If you integrated it and sold it on, you didn't use the product.

Once you start actually using it, once it becomes a 'used product', selling it has no VAT and you cannot reclaim VAT. At least that's what google results told me. Were they wrong?

The whole point of VAT is that there is no such definition of "used product" or "end user". If you buy a book from a store, and have a receipt showing that you paid 1$ + 10 cents VAT, then you later sell the book to someone else for 2$, you owe the government 20 cents VAT on your sale - 10 cents which was already paid, so a total of 10 cents.

The exact law may be more complicated (you may have to pay the full 20 cents now and file for a 10 cents tax rebate; you may not be eligible for this if you are an individual and not a registered organization, etc.) but that shouldn't affect the basic principle.

For example, if you buy a computer for 100$+10$ VAT, and you then use that computer in you back office to keep your accounting, and you sell 1000$+100$ VAT worth of haircuts in the month where you bought the computer, you only owe the government 90$ of VAT even though you are an end user of the computer by any reasonable definition.

If you later sell the computer on to a refurbisher for 50$+5$VAT, and the refurbisher sells it on for 75$+7.5$ VAT, they will only owe the government 2.5$ VAT.

Oh, I think this explains why I was being lied to: "There is VAT on second-hand goods if the seller is VAT registered. Generally, businesses are required to register for VAT with HMRC once their taxable turnover reaches a certain threshold, which for the tax year 2021/2022 is £85,000"

So normal people don't have to pay VAT when selling used things, but larger entities do.

Yeah this is not a "no license" freedom situation. People routinely get this wrong.

well, you have to admit its a little confusing. its so free, that by accepting it, I can constraint your future behavior (making it less free really), so that other people have the same freedom with respect to your contributions (being constrained) as you did

I have to admit, that I have higher expectations of people understanding licensing subtleties when they create software for distribution.

Because freedom is defined for the thing being licensed, it's not a human centric freedom of "I can do what I want with it."

It's from the perspective of, for example, the Software saying "I'm always free and never beholden to someone else's whims."

The philosophical stance of GPL is freedom at the individual human level - the only thing that actually matters if you are part of mankind. Yes, a society where you cannot "choose" to be enslaved is semantically less free than one where you can, but hopefully everyone agrees that for definitions of "freedom" which matter for human beings, the first society is a better choice.

Additionally, history has shown that such “choices” are often not exactly choices in practice

>In this same way, the GPL and like licenses are the most permissive licenses from the perspective of every eventual user

No, take for example the real world use case of distributing ZFS on Linux in binary form. Users are unable to distribute it due to conflicting copyleft licenses. Copyleft licenses limits people by creating their own exclusive ecosystems which can't be mixed.

> Users are unable to distribute

You're talking about distributors.

Going with the GPL, a user can be a distributor too and are ofte encouraged to distribute libre software.

“You’re free to use this however you like! And by however you like, I mean a very specific set of things”

Ubuntu supports ZFS since 20.04.

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