The fall of GPL and the rise of permissive open-source licenses | Hacker News Reader

The fall of GPL and the rise of permissive open-source licenses

zdnet.com

18 pointstanglesome13 comments

"That's a big mistake. If you don't have a license, you're leaving the door open for people to fool with your code."

Given modern copyright law the real problem is actually kind of the opposite, which is that by declaring no licence you are making it legally impossible for people to use your code at all.

For some reason he also mentions this later in the article, somehow contradicting his first statement.

> Yes, without any license, your code defaults to falling under copyright law.

> In that case, legally speaking no one can reproduce, distribute, or create

> derivative works from your work. You may or may not want that. In any case,

> that's only the theory. In practice you'd find defending your rights to be

> difficult.

I am sure defending your rights in this case is no problem, assuming you have enough money. If you don't have enough power to enforce them, the same thing could probably be said about using licenses as well.

Yeah the article is kind of disjointed with this message.

I can get behind the core idea though, which is you should always pick some license. It isn't that hard to do these days, anyone using github should easily be able to understand the basics of at least the GPL, LGPL, MIT and BSD licenses if not from reading them directly then from the very many summaries of them easily available on the web.

At the very least, publicly declare your code is in the public domain. I realize there is much debate on whether public domain even legally exists as a concept anymore in many countries, but at least such a declaration acts as a strong signal you are okay with me using your code.

There may be something interesting in this if the phenomenon is actually occuring. But this is such a horribly thought-out and mis-informed article, that I don't trust anything in it.

In a sense this is just the result of competition. As a chooser of software to integrate given two equivalent options one being GPL and the other Apache/BSD/MIT only the GPL idealist goes with GPL.

GPL works well for the creators of projects, but not so well for programmers-as-consumers. As a result any open source software project looking to gain traction with the developer community will gain an advantage from a more permissive license.

You used a argument grounded in a certain view of economics.

The GPL argument is that economics is the wrong starting point. The GPL is meant as a form of social good, for the people-as-users of software to be in control of what they have. Using an economics argument means you start with the premise that the GPL rejects, so of course you'll consider the GPL to be on the wrong footing.

You might consider the GPL more in line with Right to Repair bill in Massachusetts, which requires automobile manufacturers to provide the same information to independent repair shops as they do for dealer shops.

(Obviously 86% of the state who supported the initiative were idealists. :)

Typical content-free FUD and link bait from ZDNet (who still reads that crap anyway?), stopped reading soon when I encountered the utter BS:

> If you don't have a license, you're leaving the door open for people to fool with your code.

IANAL, but the author has apparently never even heard of the existence of copyright law. Nothing this guy writes about licenses should be taken seriously.

Towards the end of the article he discusses how a project falls under copyright law if no license is provided. Furthermore, he points out that by making a project public it will fall under the hosting site's terms of service; in particular he notes that GitHub allows forking of public projects, which wouldn't normally be the case under default copyright.

That still shouldn't give the forker any other permissions not already granted by copyright law.

Forking is copying, and by making a project public on a platform where the ToS mean that includes permitting forkng, there is a good argument that there us an implied-in-fact license; the question then becomes what the bound are of that license. One of the reasons you probably want an explicit license is to avoid that issue. There are lots of things you can do without an explicit license that can give rise to implied license.

Calling it the 'fall of GPL' is a bit link baity but what is certainly true is that programmers these days actually know a lot more about licenses than they did in the past, thanks to egregious behavior on the part of people like Oracle suing Google and Yahoo!'s Flikr behavior.

I wonder if 85% of the projects used to be unlicensed, and now only 50% are, when that 35% joined if they chose randomly among the top 5 you would get the same sort of trends.

Perhaps a better headline might be "People who don't really care about the license their code is under are as likely to pick non-GPL licenses as they are GPL ones."

Deleted comment

Sure, but I do think that's a special case; the average author of a BSD- or MIT-licensed library probably cares less than the average author of a GPLed library.

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