Context:
Permissive licenses (commonly referred to as “cuck licenses”) like the MIT license allow others to modify your software and release it under an unfree license. Copyleft licenses (like the Gnu General Public License) mandate that all derivative works remain free.
Andrew Tanenbaum developed MINIX, a modular operating system kernel. Intel went ahead and used it to build Management Engine, arguably one of the most widespread and invasive pieces of malware in the world, without even as much as telling him. There’s nothing Tanenbaum could do, since the MIT license allows this.
Erik Andersen is one of the developers of Busybox, a minimal implementation of that’s suited for embedded systems. Many companies tried to steal his code and distribute it with their unfree products, but since it’s protected under the GPL, Busybox developers were able to sue them and gain some money in the process.
Interestingly enough, Tanenbaum doesn’t seem to mind what intel did. But there are some examples out there of people regretting releasing their work under a permissive license.
this one?
I didn’t know there was a mailman living in my computer screen.
I support MIT because I believe that’s how all software should be
Everyone builds upon each other
I mean, essentially, the GPL just obligates someone borrowing from you to keep doing things “how it should be”.
Yeah but I don’t really care if someone takes it to sell, it creates an endpoint branch but someone else will create a growing branch
One assumes even an endpoint will pass things upstream
I am a consultant who sometimes writes code to do certain useful things as part of larger systems (parts of which may be commercial or GPL) but my clients always try to impose terms in their contracts with me which say that anything I develop immediately becomes theirs, which limits my ability to use it in my next project. I can to some extent circumvent this if I find a way to publish the work, or some essential part of it, under an MIT license. I’m never going to make money off of my code directly; at best it’s middleware, and my competitors don’t use the same stack, so I’m not giving them any real advantage… I don’t see how I’m sabotaging myself in this situation; if anything the MIT license is a way of securing my freedom and it benefits my future customers as well since I don’t have to rebuild from scratch every time.
Can’t you just publish the work under the GPL license? I have no idea of programming, maybe this is a dumb question.
If someone is paying you to write code, they have some say in the contract about how it is licensed. You could be upfront about only doing GPL, and they could be upfront about saying no. But if you try to do it after the fact, that’s a violation of the contract.
The problem is, that would limit my own option to make a version of the software and sell it under a more limited license in the future. Whomever I sell it to then has the right to go ahead and redistribute it, competing with me. Sure, my current, highly niche code already carries that risk, but the MIT license doesn’t stop me from releasing a modified version I may write that is more valuable as software, and then protecting that release with other licensing terms.
that would limit my own option to make a version of the software and sell it under a more limited license in the future
Nope. As the author you’re free to license your stuff however you want. You can use 10 different licenses for 10 clients if you want. You could write a custom version of your application and give a non-free license to a specific client if you want.
Work for hire is a completely different situation. You have to accept the terms of whoever’s paying you to do the work.
This comic is more about someone doing something as a hobby project, or writing their own software not under someone else’s direction, where they have full freedom to choose their own license.
I’m an idiot making a thing, and I need to pick a license. Where’s a good place to talk to people more knowledgeable than myself on the subject?
Not an expert by any means, but it depends.
Are you okay with people potentially making a closed-source fork of your code? If yes, then choose a permissive license like MIT, BSD, or Apache. If you do not want people to make closed-source versions of your code, and want all forks to remain open-source, then go with GPL.
Remember that choosing the GPL means other people, especially businesses, will be less likely to consider your project because that would mean they would have to make their versions open-source, which some people may not want to do.
EDIT: As always, this is not legal advice and I am not a lawyer.
Just a small note that the businesses only have to open source their version if they release it. If they just use it internally then they don’t have to distribute the source code. So it depends on the use case.
Rule of thumb: if your full license text is longer than your actual source code, you’ve probably picked the wrong license.
That is actually a really bad rule, though you probably are only joking.
There are many examples of short, but very valuable code. Just think about anything math or physics related.
A totally new or even just a very efficient implementation of an already existing algorithm can be gigantic if others need to build upon it.
And many licenses are verbose not because they are complicated in intent, but merely because they need extensive legalese prose to cover against many possible avenues of attack.
That is actually a really bad rule, though you probably are only joking.
No, I wasn’t.
There are many examples of short, but very valuable code. Just think about anything math or physics related.
A rule of thumb is not a strict law. I never disputed that there are certain edge cases. What has to be considered but is not on the radar of most people: Threshold of originality. A “valuable” 3 LOC bash script is likely not being able to be copyrighted in the first place. In cases where the work is tedious but not creative, the work may also not be able to be copyrighted (depending on jurisdiction). See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow whether a certain jurisdiction protects tedious work or not.
Very simple guide with in depth examples if you want further clarification.
I’ll throw my opinions in here.
If you’re publishing a standard or a reference application, a permissive license makes sense. What better way to guarantee compatibility than being able to use the reference code in your product. This is what happened with the TCP/IP stack, and it was used in its original form in Windows for years.
If you’re making something that you want to build a community around, something more akin to the GPL may be more aligned with your goals. The nice part is, you can include MIT licensed projects as part of your GPL project. This means there is nothing stopping you from building your standard with a MIT license while building your community-driven application using GPL, maximizing the reach of your standard while reducing the risk to your community.
Note that either option opens you to EEE (Embrace, Extend, Extinguish), the GPL option just takes an extra step (clean room implementation of a published standard).
You sound like someone i know xD
But I think gpl isn’t limited to software, or is it ? Anyhow, you have different varaites of Create Commons, depending on much limits you put, from 0(nothing) to 4(no commercial use, no remix etc.) they have license chooser on website here
Sometimes you just wanna get fucked. --MIT
Sometimes you want to start a beautiful family that makes the world a better place. --GPL
Just don’t, you know, pick the former and mistake it for the latter.
My personal philosophy:
- Is this trivially small? Doesn’t bother licensing. People will just copy and paste regardless of what I do and I don’t care. But it gives you the option to change your mind later. Licenses are irrevocable.
- Is it a small part of a whole that people need to use? LGPL. But that this with a grain of salt.
- Otherwise, AGPL. If there was a more strict but also commonly used license I’d use it instead.
Doesn’t bother licensing
That’s usually not what you want. The default if you don’t provide a license is essentially “all rights reserved”, and you’re not granting anyone else permission to use it in any way. Everyone that wants to use it has to get explicit permission.
If you really want “no license” then you probably actually want to release it as public domain.
For truly small random pieces of code I’m putting online, yes, that is what I generally want. (Also, that’s sort of presumptuous to believe you know what I want better than myself.) I’m not going to hunt down people who are infringing on projects like this: https://github.com/JacksonBailey/julian
I made that because I was bored and thought I could easily solve a problem my wife described having at work. If someone copies and pastes it into their own project do I care? I mean, sort of? Not really. It’s just too small to worry about. Specifically leaving it unlicensed gives me.the freedom and flexibility to license it as I choose in the future and also pursue people using it if they refused to stop. (Although this example is particularly trivial. I probably wouldn’t do that. But that’s my whole point, I’m only choosing to do this with trivial code.) Applying a license doesn’t give me that flexibility though.
(Apologies for typos, I just woke.uo.and don’t have my glasses on either.)
I’m not going to hunt down people who are infringing on projects like this:
It’s more that people won’t use the code at all if there’s no license attached. For someone that’s looking for a snippet of code to reuse, it’s much easier to instead find a permissively licensed piece of code that performs a similar function, instead of contacting the author of the unlicensed code and trying to figure out what to do.
Also, that’s sort of presumptuous to believe you know what I want better than myself
Sorry - I meant to address it to readers of your comment rather than you. I edited the comment to make it clearer.
Wish someone would reply to this guy. I am also, a fellow idiot making a thing.
Some did, check the replies.
Intel went ahead and used it to build Management Engine, arguably one of the most widespread and invasive pieces of malware in the world, without even as much as telling him.
Is that arguable because it’s complete bunk? You may as well say the same about IPMI.
IPMI isn’t required to boot regular desktop
Permissive licenses (commonly referred to as “cuck licenses”)
That’s where I stopped reading. 👎
I mean, it’s funny for a couple of reasons
I guess they take things seriously even in a linuxmemes community
The joke in the OP stops at the beginning of the joke explanation. If you just share your honest opinion like that in a shitposting community, you can’t expect everyone to “play along” with your “joke”.
Memes are srs bidness.
Yeah I don’t think I’ve ever heard that term before in my life and I’ve been doing this for a while.
And I don’t think I ever wanna hear it again.
It’s a term Trump cultists use.
There’s nothing Tanenbaum could do
Tanenbaum doesn’t seem to mind
Today OP was very dumb and showed his ignorance of the concept “I do whatever I fucking want.” Don’t be like OP.
people regretting releasing their work under a permissive license
They’re free to change the licence of future versions. OP also failed at understanding the concept of licences. He’s such a silly moron!
They’re free to change the licence of future versions.
Why do you act like I don’t know that? The issue here is that once you realize that the license you chose does not reflect your intentions, the damage has likely already been done. From the article I linked:
I didn’t have the foresight to see this coming. I didn’t think people so lacked in the spirit of open source. I wanted to promote community contributions, not to have them monetized by other people who don’t even provide the source to their modifications. I wanted to grow the tools as a community, not have closed source forks of them overtake my own open source versions.
They’re free to change the licence of future versions.
Only if they are still the only contributor. Once you have more contributors, it gets far tougher to change the licence.
Pretty sure that with a permissive license you can just change the license of future versions as you want. Ex. v1 MIT license with thousanda.of contributors, v2 Commercial license with contributions from anyone who agrees to contribute to the new version and license. (Anyone can fork v1 and start their own licensed project)
How does it work with contributors? Does absolutely everyone have to consent to having the license changed? If one of the contributors doesn’t consent, can the maintainer “cut out” their contributions into a separate program and redistribute it as a plugin with the original license?
Does absolutely everyone have to consent to having the license changed?
Very minor changes (like fixing typos in comments) aren’t copyrightable, so these changes don’t require approval. When LibreOffice was relicensed, IIRC they they had some cutoff regarding lines of code.
You can keep all the lines of those who didn’t accept to the change with the original license, it will end up as a bad mix, but it’s doable if the licenses are compatible
We are at risk
of losing many developers who would otherwise choose a license like the GPL. Fortunately, I’m glad to be surrounded by people, just like you, who care about licenses like GPL. By uploading this type of content and engaging with it, be show our commitment to it. I wish to suggest how we can deal with this threat.
We will lose developers who choose GPL if we use words that suggest GPL is “restrictive”. Sure, the word “restrictive” was avoided in this meme by using the word “copyleft”, but the cognitive jump from “permissive” to “restrictive” is minimal: just add an “opposite” and you’ve got “permissive is the opposite to restrictive”. It really is that simple. That’s how brain works (check out Relational Frame Theory to see how that works).
So what can we do about it?
Well, we can approach this with science. There is a historical global trend towards people being more meta-cognitive. That means that people are becoming more aware of how our thoughts interpret everyday reality and how to be intentional with our relationship with our thoughts so that we live better lives. We know this trend is happening to virtually everyone everywhere because of the work of brilliant sociologists like Anthony Giddens and Christian Welzel. Heck, even the history of psychology —going from noticing and changing behaviors (behaviorism) to noticing and changing behaviors and thoughts (cognitive-behaviorism), to noticing and changing the context and function of behaviors, thoughts, and emotions (functional contextualism)— reflects this trend.
We can use meta-cognition in our favor; we can use the meta-cognitive tool of framing to change how we think about GPL and MIT licenses. Effective communicators like influencers, political campaign experts, and influential activists use framing all the time. For example, instead of using the dangerous framing that suggests GPL is ‘restrictive’, we can use another one that truly displays the virtues of the license.
What would this other frame look like? I may not have a perfect answer, but here are some
ways of framing (thinking about) the relationship between licenses like GPL and MIT:
(ironically!!!, these were ‘suggested’ by an LLM; I wonder if these frames already existed)
- “Investment-Protecting Licenses” vs. “Investment-Risking Licenses” (as in developers invest by working on projects that they could (not) lose the ability to contribute to)
- “Community-Resource-Guarding Licenses” vs. “Exploitation-Vulnerable Licenses”
- “Give-and-Take Licenses” vs. “Take-and-Keep Licenses” ⭐
- “Freedom-Ensuring Licenses” vs. “Freedom-Risking Licenses” ⭐
- “Contribution-Rewarding Licenses” vs. “Contribution-Exploiting Licenses”
- “Open-Source-Preserving Licenses” vs. “Closed-Source-Enabling Licenses”
I’d be happy to hear what you think, including suggestions!
There’s a fair bit of bias in those terms, which make GPL seem like a ‘better’ choice than an unrestricted license like MIT.
The truth is, GPL is restrictive to developers. Copying just one line from a gpl-licensed project will automatically restrict you to using only gpl-compatible licenses. I’d prefer to advocate for LGPL and similar licenses, as they seem to offer a better tradeoff between user and developer freedom.There’s a fair bit of bias in the terms “restrictive” and “permissive”, which make MIT seem like a ‘better’ choice than a give-and-take license like GPL.
The truth is, MIT is risky for developers. Using just one line from an MIT-licensed project will automatically allow others to exploit your work without giving back. I’d prefer to advocate for balanced licenses that protect both user and developer interests.
GPLs “restrictions” are freedom preserving though. It only restricts developers from keeping dirivitive code proprietary. In order to violate the GPL you’d have to choose to use GPL code and then choose not to release your modified versions of it under a similar copyleft license. It may seem counterintuitive, but having those restrictions results in more software freedom overall - similar to the paradox of intolerance.
I’m not saying MIT or so called permissive licenses are bad, but the permissive/restrictive language is just as loaded as the OPs suggestions. Both styles are needed, but copyleft licenses are better at promoting software freedom.
Edit: I do agree with you that LGPL serves an important role in promoting free/libre software where it would otherwise would never be used.
People seem to think that those who choose permissive licences don’t know what they’re doing. Software can be a gift to the world with no strings attached. A company “taking” your code is never taking it away from you, you still have all the code you wrote. Some people want this. MIT is not an incomplete GPL, it has its own reasons.
I don’t get the whole MIT vs GPL rivalry. They both have their uses. If you want to use GPL, go for it. And if you want something like MIT that works too.
Thankfully both exist because I think we definitely need both.
I don’t get people with cuckold fetishes, so here we are again.
Here we are again, in a big circle jerk over GPL. Is that like cucking for other licenses but without sex?
To use the above example, how is it cucky that a license allows something like OpenSSH to gain broad use?
Hey, asshole. Stop insulting cuckold. I can explain even that to a practical sense that isn’t literally evil.
People seem to think that those who choose permissive licences don’t know what they’re doing.
Most of them don’t. Lots of people say they use MIT because they want “no restrictions”, or call GPL terms “restrictive”. That’s an instant giveaway that they don’t understand what they’re talking about.
The GPL also makes code available for ANY PURPOSE. It just requires people who modify the code to do the same, which is fair.
It’s fair, but different people have different ideas about what they want, and in the end it’s the authors right to decide what is fair for their code. An unconditional gift is also fair.
Indeed, I think it’s just two philosophies that don’t necessarily need to be at odds. Permissive licenses help speed the adoption of languages and libraries, which ultimately feeds into the slowly building momentum of the copyleft projects that use them.
I’ve taken up saying “temporarily free/libre” and “permanently free/libre” instead of the permissive/copyleft, since imo “permissive” has a suggestive positive connotation. Especially to ppl who do not know much about the free software movement
Temporarily free gives the idea that the code will stop being free at some point and may cause misunderstandings. It would be better to use nonreciprocal.
It will stop being free the second a corporation gets it’s hands on it, makes improvements and put’s those under a proprietary license
Yes, but the originally free/libre licensed source code is still out there.
makes improvements and put’s those under a proprietary license
You could also make improvements and release them under a GPL license.
Temporarily free gives the idea that the code will stop being free at some point
Because it absolutely can and most of the times does.
The original code never stops being free, but the code incorporated into a new project will be, so it’s a misleading term to people unfamiliar with open source licensing, that may think the license somehow expires. Even the fsf doesn’t use such terminology. They use reciprocal and nonreciprocal, because it translates the idea that gpl-like licenses create a relationship of reciprocity, and bsd-like ones create a relationship of non reciprocity.
I published some packages under MIT a couple of years ago. It is difficult to understand at first, I was happy with the license because anyone could use it like they want.
Today, I understand that I want to use GPL. With GPL can everyone use the code like they want and I can use their code like I want.
For writing an application GPL is fine if you don’t want anyone to profit from your work and if they make changes, contribute back.
Things are a little bit more complex if you are writing a library or code that is meant to be included in another application.
If you use GPL you might get rejected even by other open source applications, as GPL might be understandable as it will change license off the application or be outright incompatible.
This was the case with cursor library after author changed license everyone stopped using it: https://github.com/GijsTimmers/cursor/commit/885156333ac9ca335a587b1dd08964074313f026
The most ironic thing is that he created package from stack overflow answer:
https://github.com/GijsTimmers/cursor/blob/master/cursor/cursor.py
The original author never said they are releasing copyright or are making it public domain.
if you don’t want anyone to profit from your work
Technically you can. There are two popular models: Lua model and RedHat model. In first you are paid to develop requeated features, in second for support.
Isn’t this why LGPL exists?
It is
Tannenbaum is fucking asshole. Isn’t he the idiot that told Torvalds “you certainly would have failed my class if you submitted your OS as a final project?”
The guy deserves no respect.
When I think of Copyleft licenses, I just think of it as “Use this program as you see fit, but if you share/redistribute it, you may not add any restrictions to it.”
I don’t understand why there are communities that hate GPL so much. It is such a powerful license that practically guarantees that the program will be free for any who wants it, it just won’t allow someone to add restrictions to it.
I’ve heard arguments against the GPL like: “It’s too restrictive!” Only if you want your program to be muddled with any kind of program that doesn’t respect freedom. Saying the GPL is too restrictive to developers is like saying the 13th amendment of the US Constitution is too restrictive to slave owners.
Interestingly enough, Tanenbaum doesn’t seem to mind what intel did.
Yeah, duh. Intelligent people read licenses before they pick one.
But there are some examples out there of people regretting releasing their work under a permissive license.
That’s like signing a contract before reading it and then complaining that it contains provisions that surprise you when they are enacted. I’m baffled on a regular basis by how many people understand FOSS licenses only on the basis for hearsay, for example when people insist that GPLed source code must be made available free of charge for everyone. The GNU project has a FAQ about the GPL that spells it out that this is not the case and yet hardly anyone discussing FOSS licenses has even read the FAQ.
Are we really going to start this pointless discussion again? They are two licenses with different use cases and different considerations. GPL has a lot more mental overhead to using it, MIT is hands off, both of these aren’t inherently invalid.
Also Tanenbaum in your own link mentions that Intel probably would have just written their own microkernel if need be.
I agree that permissive licenses have their place for smaller projects (I personally use CC0 from small programs). The FSF suggests Apache license for programs with less than 300 lines (approximately) in order to avoid the overhead that you mentioned. The LGPL was also created in cases where allowing your free code to be used in nonfree contexts can help advance free software as a movement (e.g. writing a free replacement for a proprietary codec). But I also believe that if you really want to support free software, you have a moral duty to release anything “big” that you make under a copyleft license.
