[kwlug-disc] Permissive vs copyleft licenses

[Doug Moen]

On Wed, Dec 9, 2020, at 1:50 PM, Mikalai Birukou via kwlug-disc wrote:
> Can I connect this to Monday's talk about voting?
> 
> "If you don't pay attention to politics, time comes when politics comes 
> after you."
> 
> Choice of licensing is a political choice. You set the policy around 
> your software.
> 
> In my talk I've referenced Belarus. I think it is possible to find 
> RMS-like figure in Belarus politics. Someone saying right things for 
> decades, scorned for sticking to principles. Now population is waking up 
> to a nightmare they've helped create. Ironic? Is it the right word?

Personally, I have already made a political commitment to the FOSS movement. I use FOSS software, I contribute to FOSS projects, and I run my own FOSS project.

I don't think that the choice of FOSS licence is as important as people are claiming here. I am disappointed at the level of sectarianism and polarization within the FOSS community about the choice of licence. I call bullshit on claims of hellfire, damnation and apocalypse if I don't use the GPL and choose a more permissive licence instead. The comparison of using a permissive licence with the terrible situation in Belarus is very extreme and also inaccurate.

The GPL doesn't have the magic powers that people attribute to it. MongoDB and Redis have both discovered that the AGPL 3 does not, in fact, protect them from competition from cloud providers who steal their code and use it to compete against them. As a result, MongoDB and Redis have both relicensed their code under non-FOSS licences. Those are two famous examples, but the same story is playing out with other companies as well, who are taking their code proprietary in the face of competition from cloud providers. [Eg, see this recent post: https://joemorrison.medium.com/death-of-an-open-source-business-model-62bc227a7e9b]

Just as the GPL is less effective than claimed at protecting you from bad actors stealing your code and competing against you, the GPL is also less effective than claimed at "forcing" companies to contribute source code back to the community. The reality is that modifications to GPL'ed code that you extract from a company by threat of lawsuit over licence violation don't have a lot of value. The situations where actual value is created is where the company *wants* to contribute back to the FOSS community, because now they are actively working with open source teams, and often also employing team members, contributing changes back in a form that the open source team can use. And in the situations where companies do that, the software is more likely to have a permissive licence than not. Of course I know a lot of people are paid by their companies to work on the Linux kernel, which is GPL'ed. But my previous employer employed one of the FreeBSD developers to speed up the TCP/IP network stack, contributing those changes back to FreeBSD. The reason for choosing FreeBSD was the permissive licence: my employer wanted to use this code in their own proprietary kernel. I've derived much benefit from the LLVM project, which Apple has poured a ton of money into. Again, Apple only did this because of LLVM's permissive licence. Apple would not have funded the GCC team for similar work.

So the GPL is just another FOSS licence. There is no evidence-based moral reason for choosing it over another FOSS licence, it's a personal preference. By and large, corporations contribute to the FOSS community not because they are forced to by the GPL, but because they are founded by and employ engineers who have made the same political commitment to FOSS that I have. Projects with permissive licences are more likely to get corporate support and contributions, and may get more contributions from the developer community due to the perceived downsides of GPL code (ie, I'm contributing to this project but I can't use it at work).

The GPL is important because it inspires religious zeal in people, due to its powerful narrative about making people free from the power of evil corporations. Important software has been built by people inspired by this ideology. Permissive licences are also important to the health of the FOSS community; they are more attractive to libertarians and people who are skeptical of religious narratives. And permissive licences are responsible for a lot of money being pumped into FOSS software development by corporations, which gives us more choice of FOSS software and higher quality FOSS software to choose from. It takes all types of people to make a healthy FOSS community, so let's try to be tolerant.