Just like MAGAts and other fascists portraying "woke" or "antifa" as some insidious thing, so have corporate interests (and in this case, their shills) villified anything they can't exploit for profit.
In responding to the post on /c/linuxsucks, may I first point out the irony of dunking on the GPL on a platform running on software licensed under the AGPL, while also advocating for Lemmy to people on Reddit.
To the content of his post.
We’ve dickered over changing the rules to focus on GPL rather than ‘FOSS Advocates’. -But the thing is; it would confuse some and FOSS advocates are really generally GPL cultists. So, disregard this information when it comes to the rules because the rules are in a way that’s understood to most people.
"We"? Who is "we"? On a previous post where he used that particular plural pronoun, I assumed he was intending to post the same post to his Reddit community which does have multiple mods. But neither that one nor this one has been posted there. Now I'm starting to think rather than from ChatGPT or whatever, most of his posts are summarily copied from Reddit posts, and not (only) Reddit posts in /r/linuxsucks101 -- Madthumbs' own subreddit.
- Permissive FOSS (BSD, MIT, Apache)
- Freedom = you can do anything with the code
- Including: make it proprietary...
Well, yeah. If a developer doesn't want, say, a corporation to redistribute their software in a way that denies downstream users the rights they intend for the software to have, that's exactly the point of a copylefted license.
- Copyleft FOSS (GPL)
- Freedom = you must keep derivatives free
- If you distribute a combined work, you must publish your source
- Focus: preserving openness through enforcement
What do they expect? That big corporations are going to just nicely comply with a pleasant request? Yes, the terms of the license require enforcement.
- It’s “freedom via restriction,” which is philosophically contradictory for many people
Tell me you haven't actually thought through any of what you're arguing without telling me you haven't thought through what you're arguing.
Both are legally FOSS.
"Legally"? Where in "law" is this definition of "FOSS" exactly? They don't say, of course.
Permissive licenses give you freedom. GPL gives you obligations.
It's not necessarily true that permissive licenses don't give you obligations. BSD- and MIT-style licenses have requirements regarding preserving certain notices when conveying copies of the software. By the author's logic, FOSS licenses shouldn't exist. All software that isn't intended to be proprietary should be dedicated to the public domain.
The GPL is anti-freedom
War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
it does not allow you to:
- build whatever you want
- integrate with whatever you want
- ship whatever you want
- keep your own code private
Literally none of these are true in the slightest.
GPL culture historically treated:
permissive licenses as “sellouts”
[citation needed]
proprietary extensions as “immoral”
That's not entirely untrue, particularly where the FSF is concerned. But... honestly... aren't they, though?
commercial use as “exploitation”
Well yeah. It is.
You can’t mix GPL with:
- App Store distribution
Huh. They actually have more of a point than I realized. This is the first I'd heard that GPL'd code can't be distributed on Steam, for instance. I have no idea what Steam's thought process would be other than "we want to exploit people and the GPL thing gets in the way of that", really. Maybe they think they can't distribute compiled GPL'd code and include with it the source code or a written offer thereof (that they can make good on). But that's clearly false. They could easily just include the source code in the install directory.
- closed-source drivers
If what he's referring to is that you can't make proprietary Linux drivers, he's (at least in theory) correct. But if that hadn't been the case, we wouldn't have OpenWRT or DDWRT today. (The origin of OpenWRT is that the SFC helped copyright holders to sue Linksys to release many Linux drivers on their WRT54G router. When they did (though I think it was settled out-of-court), a FOSS distribution was built for the WRT54G, and OpenWRT traces its ancestry back to that distribution.)
- proprietary libraries
They're being pretty imprecise here. The position of the FSF is that dynamic linking proprietary code against GPL'd libraries is not any kind of violation of the license, but static linking is. But the way the author of this post is putting it, it sounds like it violates the terms of the license to create a Linux distribution with both proprietary and GPL'd code on it.
- many cloud deployment models
- embedded systems with NDA’d firmware
I have no idea what they're referring to with either of these.
The GPL code becomes isolated, not collaborative.
Still preferable to proprietary code.
The industry overwhelmingly prefers permissive licensing. Look at the last 15 years of major infrastructure:
- Go → BSD
- Rust → MIT/Apache
- Swift → Apache
- TensorFlow → Apache
- React → MIT
- VS Code → MIT
- Kubernetes → Apache
- LLVM → Apache
- WebAssembly → Apache
GPL is essentially absent from modern foundational tech.
Can't argue with that, but I wish it would change.
It’s a relic of a 1990s ideology where “freedom” meant “everyone must share.”
I think they're saying that GPL "forces you to share". It does no such thing. You're perfectly free never to share any GPL code with anyone. You can take anything I've put under the GPL (though I tend toward the AGPL) and make derivative works of it and never distribute those. There's no requirement that you share.
And if you want to keep your source code proprietary, just make your code dynamically link against GPL'd code, not statically.
If software is truly free, why impose usage restrictions?
Simple. To keep it truly free.
By imposing restrictions, you’re admitting the software has value
Huh? Was that something I wasn't supposed to admit?
-but also declaring the original developer isn’t entitled to monetize that value.
This doesn't make sense. Unless it's work-for-hire, it's the original developer putting it under the GPL. Even if they think the GPL doesn't allow for profit (which is not the case), what do they have against the author doing so to themself? Is this author saying that there are companies hiring people to write GPL'd code and insodoing denying them the ability to make money off of it? If that's what they're saying, they're wrong. It's legal to sell GPL'd code whether you own the copyright on it or not. And the developer's clout in the community can also be leveraged into work opportunities.
Yeah, this bit just doesn't make sense to me. I wonder if it make sense to the author.
-this is before LLM rewording (my own words):
Certain software becomes practical to make free, and if it’s really free, why bother limiting its use? -By doing that; you’re saying it holds value, but the original dev isn’t entitled to monetize it directly.
(does it matter?)
Yuck. Whoever posted this originally wherever it was originally posted uses LLMs to write their posts. Let me state now that none of my words in this or any post I've ever made came from an LLM except ones blatantly making fun of LLMs being stupid or evil, and I intend to keep it that way.
Finally, two comments that I thought were worth preserving:
I feel that GPL should be even more Free (“restrictive” in your parlor). That’s why I prefer AGPL.
You try to pass the open source licenses that are permissive as a good thing just because “the industry prefers them”. So what? We now know what corporations do with it, using the code, never giving back, and milking their customers in the process and selling their data. And that permissive license and that code are essentially an accomplice to that.
I mean, look at the BSDs. They used it, few gave back, and the projects are in a state of disarray compared to Linux.
So yeah, A/GPL all the way. In fact, I believe that a more modern GPL, that contains the AGPL points, plus new AI stuff, needs to be released by the FSF. More “restrictive”, not less. Because it’s the only way to ensure that the code is not misused.
- @eugenia@eugenia@lemmy.ml (post removed and user banned from /c/linuxsucks).
I would argue that GPL gives more freedom to the end user than the license so beloved by corporations: MIT.
GPL imposes corporations to not take away freedoms; MIT does not.
Imagine you purchase a device that comes with GPL firmware. You are legally entitled to a copy of the source code, so that you can exercise your freedom to customize it to your needs.
Now imagine you buy the same device, but its firmware is MIT. You have no rights on the software.
Don’t fall victim of the illusion that MIT is more free than (A)GPL just because it has less impositions, it’s a trap! Those impositions are actually privileges for the end user.
- @bruce965@lemmy.ml (not removed and user not banned, but I'd be surprised if that didn't change soon).
(Also, if anyone whose post I preserved here would like their post removed, please let me know and I'll be happy to oblige.)
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