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Comment by chrismsimpson | Hacker News Reader

Every bit this. How about the freedom to ship something without having an ideological position on when/how it links against other code.

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The ideological position is the whole point of the GPL, after all. If you're using someone else's labor, it's only fair they're allowed to dictate the terms of how you're allowed to use it.

However, it turns out the ideological position is not the whole point of writing open source software, to a lot of people.

Then don't use GPL code? If you don't agree with the terms, don't use it.

This whole thread came about from a project writing its own non‐GPL code from scratch, and GPL fans subsequently complaining about it.

Plenty of GPL fans try to convince others to choose the same license, almost always implying that the GPL is the only moral/ethical choice (Stallman himself being the most ardent believer of this stance). They often even insist that the GPLv2 is not actually a moral choice anymore, given the evils of TiVoization.

This whole thread is about complaining/supporting this attitude - not about criticizing those who simply chose the GPL as their license.

While some non-copyleft fans cry in public how imoral the corporations are by abusing their work and then try to create anti-big-corp licenses.

What you’re implying is a fault exclusive to “non‐copyleft fans” happens in copyleft‐licensed projects too, like MongoDB, which was AGPL before it decided to switch to an even more restrictive license to counter hosting service companies.

Except the copyleft‐licensed projects have the legal means to prosecute, if they so wish to do so.

They do not - AWS was fully compliant with Mongo's AGPL license, and no one disputed that.

Sure, each side has its own misguided preachers. The point is to make fun of all of them, not to say that one side is better than the other.

A: "This is why I don't use GPL" B: "Yes, you shouldn't have to take an ideological position just to publish some code" C: "But the ideological position is the whole point of GPL" D: "but the ideological position is not the whole point of writing code." C: "Then don't use GPL code?" D: ".... exactly?"

Choosing to use a strong or a weak license is exactly, equally ideological.

> If you're using someone else's labor, it's only fair they're allowed to dictate the terms of how you're allowed to use it.

And they are, that's what choosing a licence is all about. In case of MIT/ISC/BSD/WTFPL licensed software, this someone else just decided to dictate a lot less than he could have.

Except many of them then come out complaining how Amazon (just to pick an example) is leeching their work, while they are perfectly in line with the chosen license.

And that's why whenever I want to contribute to a MIT/ISC/BSD/WTFPL licensed project, instead I just fork it and make my own changes GPLv3 only.

If companies can make proprietary forks, I can make a GPLv3 fork. Best of all, no company can take my changes and make them proprietary. And if the maintainers want to merge my changes, they've got to relicense to GPL.

When you fix a bug in X11, you keep it in your one‐star‐on‐Gitlab personal fork under GPLv3 to prevent it from ever making it into HP‐UX, rather than contribute it to the upstream project, where tens or hundreds of thousands of individuals using X11 under free and open source licensing in free software distributions (not proprietary forks) could have experienced the benefit of your fix?

I mean, you’re free to do that, but taking pride in it sure feels odd to me.

I don't use X11, but I've had a very negative experience trying to contribute back to MIT/BSD/etc licensed projects anyway, as they're usually just one close team of developers publishing something and rejecting any outside PRs or requests.

License choice is a political choice, and it's not a coincidence that corporate-friendly licenses are usually on projects that have a strict vision and reject outside changes.

I've got the features I want, in the way that I want them. If you want to use them, you're free to switch — for some of my projects, tenthousands of people have done so.

> How about the freedom to ship something without having an ideological position on when/how it links against other code.

Is that possible? Choosing to publish something to... oh, let's say to release it into the public domain (that seems like the farthest you can get from copyleft) is still an ideological position.

Firstly, closed source would likely be the antithetical counterpoint to GPL. I refuse to even call it copyleft, because that term is a purity test. I’m a leftist and I BSD/MIT my work so that others may benefit from it. If it’s valuable, they may contribute back. If they don’t, I still haven’t restricted their freedom or choice. An ideological position is usually one that is rigid and uncompromising. GPL/‘copyleft’ is a way of poisoning the commons.

If you release something and expect to retain copyright — that is, you wish to prevent me from decompiling it, redistributing it etc — then you are also taking an ideological position.

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