[kwlug-disc] Permissive vs copyleft licenses

[Andrew Sullivan Cant]

> On Sat, Dec 19, 2020, at 7:41 PM, Chris Frey wrote:
>> On Sat, Dec 19, 2020 at 03:53:09PM -0500, Paul Nijjar via kwlug-disc wrote:
>>> And if you choose the GPL be prepared to be burned because nobody
>>> wants to use or contribute to your project.
>>
>> Licenses do matter.  Although in practice, it's usually a restrictive
>> license that generates enough motivation to create something new and
>> free.
> 
> No, Paul is right. Chris, your information is out of date. Copyleft is dying. It will survive in the end as a "strategic" licence for businesses who dual licence their code as GPL3/proprietary.

When has this not been true? Copyleft is always going to be harder
because it is specifically not in the interest of corporations. They do
not want lock themselves into copyleft, they want to lock themselves
into a permissive license that they can always opt-out of.


An example of this that I noticed when looking at the LLVM/GCC history.

The LLVM project does not require copyright assignment, and explicitly
acknowledges that because of this they will never be able to change
their permissive license. [1] Which guarantee it will always be able for
Apple and the rest of the FAANG to publish without any software freedoms
for their users.

[1] https://releases.llvm.org/8.0.0/docs/DeveloperPolicy.html#copyright

> Or consider clang vs gcc. Unlike Bitkeeper or the original SSH, I'm
not saying gcc is dead, because it never went proprietary, but clang and
llvm have more developers, superior technology, and more users, due to
their greater emphasis on software freedom. Part of this is the licence:
Apple contributes to LLVM because of its permissive licence (which
allows them to incorporate LLVM in their XCode product).

Of course Apple wants this benefit! Calling Apple a "contributor" to
LLVM is really hiding the ball. Apple hired the entire LLVM team 2 years
after the project was started. [2] Because they wanted to avoid using
GCC and having any part of their tool chain become GPL.

An entirely rational decision of Apple, because they preserved freedom
for themselves. But not for their users. And got the PR benefit of being
"open source".

Is it more free than a proprietary compiler? Sure.
It is more free than GCC? Not for everyone.


Clang/LLVM has all the money they need, from Apple and others, and the
GCC does not. It should be no surprise that LLVM has been successful.

But maybe it should say something that after all these years GCC is not
dead.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LLVM#History



> RMS is not the friend of software freedom that he portrays himself as.
For years, RMS actively worked to prevent the GCC project from turning
their compiler back end into a library, because RMS did not want free
software projects not under his direct control to use the GCC code
generator. When LLVM was released, RMS called it a "terrible setback"
for free software. Like WTF? Is this the statement of somebody who
actually cares about software freedom, or does RMS use the rhetoric of
free software for empire building and self glorification?

RMS may have been wrong about creating a stable plugin architecture for
GCC. But he is certainly not alone in that strategy, considering that
Linux still does not maintain a stable internal ABI for some of the same
reasons. [3]

Painting RMS as a power mad dictator vs freedom loving Apple, seems like
a pretty bad take.

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_kernel#In-kernel_ABI


As with everything I guess, this come down to money, power and PR.

I has already been pointed out that Linux got GPLed before any large
companies cared. And it got big enough, useful enough and popular
enough, that those big companies were willing to hold their noses and
deal with the GPL in order to use and contribute.

But they will not do that if they do not have to.

And so we get the messages that "copyleft is dying" and "developers
don't care about license". We should just choose permissive licenses
because it was be easier, and copyleft is just such a pain. And that it
is less free, actually.

And those permissive licenses, will be very comfortable for big
businesses because they can stop doing it whenever they want.

Andrew



(P.S.: Does anyone know if there is a comprehensive history of GCC
and/or LLVM? I found most of what I vaguely remembered, but nothing
giving me a full timeline of how the projects have developed.)

(P.P.S.: I may have bent peoples ears about this before, when talking
about FLOSS and money, but I do think that getting more copyleft
contribution from government is one of the ways to build those large
projects that companies will have to work with.

The fsfe Public Money? Public Code campaign seems like an example
https://fsfe.org/activities/publiccode/publiccode.en.html

Canadian governments are doing a little of this, but it might be useful
to push all levels over government towards more copyleft solutions.