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Comment by nequo | Hacker News Reader

This is based largely on an essay from 18 to 20 years ago.[1]

The claim that GPL benefits large companies that want to maintain monopolistic market power is not supported by several developments in the years up till today. Intel’s stealth computer that runs inside of yours called the Intel Management Engine is running Minix, a non-GPL OS. Apple’s macOS/iOS/iPadOS is non-GPL. Sun’s Solaris was open sourced under CDDL, not GPL. Microsoft’s VS Code is not under GPL either.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20080201042548/http://alumni.cse...

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> The claim that GPL benefits large companies that want to maintain monopolistic market power is not supported by several developments in the years up till today.

It's also blatantly the exact opposite of what companies have always done, back to the early days of BSD Unix, which is use software licensed under simple, permissive terms to base proprietary codebases off of. Them making that claim must be in bad faith, given how absolutely contrary it is to reality how it directly attacks a reason people don't use those kinds of licenses.

I could bring up how proprietary software companies go out of their way to insult the GPL by calling it "viral" but the breathtaking dishonesty of that argument alone makes my case for me.

> I could bring up how proprietary software companies go out of their way to insult the GPL by calling it "viral" but the breathtaking dishonesty of that argument alone makes my case for me.

I'm willing to say it -- the reason this narrative has so much purchase is that the FSF wants the GPL to be "viral" via its "interpretations" of its own license. If you don't want people to think you're part of the loony fringes, stop hanging out at the loony fringes.

As to whether the GPL actually is legally "viral", I have my doubts. I think the reason you actually don't see the FSF, SFLC, SFC in court is they think they've already lost at the fringes. The last several years of copyright law has been very, very hostile to any of the legal arguments they might make, say, re: dynamically linking modules. Credibility-wise they'd be wiped out. So, they keep soldiering on, pretending to man the battlements day after day.

You're telling lies:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Software_Foundation,_Inc....

> Free Software Foundation, Inc. v. Cisco Systems, Inc. was a lawsuit initiated by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) against Cisco Systems on December 11, 2008 in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.[1] The FSF claimed that various products sold by Cisco under the Linksys brand had violated the licensing terms of many programs on which FSF held copyright, including GCC, GNU Binutils, and the GNU C Library. Most of these programs were licensed under the GNU General Public License, and a few under the GNU Lesser General Public License.

[snip]

> On May 20, 2009 the parties announced a settlement that included Cisco appointing a director to ensure Linksys products comply with free-software licenses, and Cisco making an undisclosed financial contribution to the FSF.[9][10]

Cisco wouldn't settle if it could win.

Even more:

https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/11452/have-th...

> You're telling lies:

Yikes.

> Cisco wouldn't settle if it could win.

Of course you're right. No company would ever settle a suit it could win, after spending hundreds of thousands on attorneys fees, and going through discovery. /s

Note: I think Cisco was clearly in the wrong here. I think the GPL was enforceable in this instance. I just think don't the more loony claims (a dynamically linked module automatically creates a derivative work) at the fringes make much sense re: copyright law.

> Yikes.

If you're telling the truth, back up your assertions. I've backed up mine.

> it could win after spending hundreds of thousands on attorneys fees.

You don't think Cisco has attorneys on retainer?

If the BSD zealots have to resort to dishonesty, people shouldn't trust them.

Also, I can't respond anymore, for some reason. I don't appreciate your trying to obfuscate what we were talking about (the enforceability of the GPL) or making it seem like settling isn't a victory.

> If you're telling the truth, back up your assertions. I've backed up mine.

You'll have to tell me what we are we arguing about? Dynamic linking? The viral-ity of a license? Whether the GPL is enforceable? You're kinda all over the map.

> You don't think Cisco has attorneys on retainer?

Sure, but a retainer doesn't cover all your legal bills. You may pay a modest retainer for the availability of a certain firm/attorney, but it never covers the bulk of litigation, which is extremely expensive.

> If the BSD zealots have to resort to dishonesty, people shouldn't trust them.

Absolutely not a BSD zealot. More of an MPL2 man for my personal projects. Usually happy to contribute to any OSI approved licensed project though!

> I could bring up how proprietary software companies go out of their way to insult the GPL by calling it "viral" but the breathtaking dishonesty of that argument alone makes my case for me.

Eh?

For a lot of my projects I don't care who uses it; I wrote it for my own reasons and if it's useful for anyone else, including corporations, that's fine with me. Other people can make different decisions on that, but this is mine. Integrating GPL, however, makes it a "GPL project" and makes it harder to use in some contexts because derivative software will have to be GPL as well, which why I'd rather not integrate GPL for these projects.

So it certainly "spreads" to other pieces of the software if integrated; i.e. it's "viral" (although I don't really like that term as it comes off as rather dismissive). All of this is kind of the very purpose of copyleft.

> Sun’s Solaris was open sourced under CDDL, not GPL.

CDDL is a similarly copyleft license, though.

That is true. But it is weaker than GPL in that it permits mixing CDDL code with non-CDDL code.

The argument that the essay appears to be making is that large companies want to establish themselves as monopolies by requiring that competing forks publish their changes, incorporating the good changes, and outgunning them on overall development effort. My reading is that the CDDL would not force forks to publish the source code for changes that are made to non-CDDL source files.

The backstory of the CDDL is that Solaris used some code written by contractors over the decades, and Sun didn't have the rights to relicense them and didn't want to spend the effort rewriting all of it either. Since then, illumos has rewritten all those components.

It was a pragmatic and useful decision at the time that's become rather frustrating with ugly workarounds of dubious legality ("GPL condom"). I wish Sun had written in a GPL-compatibility clause similar to the copyleft EUPL.

> Since then, illumos has rewritten all those components

But apparently kept the same license?

>> Most of the existing code is licensed under the CDDL and we expect new code will generally be under this license as well.[0]

[0] https://github.com/illumos/illumos-gate

They can't just relicense it without approval of all the authors/copyright holders, Oracle being chief among them. And we all know how Oracle treated OpenSolaris...

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