IMO, Free Software misses the point. it's open source things like MIT and BSD that actually allows entrepreneurs on HN to start businesses at a fraction of the cost of before. GPL helps not even a little bit. Open source is awesome, and amazingly useful to the community. "Free" software that I can't sell, is of almost no use to me or any other entrepreneur.
Some people might be independently wealthy, the rest of us have to actually charge for our software so we can try to attain that goal. "Free" software doesn't benefit nearly as many people as "open source" software.
The GPL, and the Free Software Foundation, isn't there for the entrepeneurs. It's not there for businesses. It doesn't exclude them, but they are part of a bigger whole. That whole being humankind. And to ensure the software freedom for all humandkind, the FSF tries to persuade programmers to use the GPL.
That sounds horribly pompous, but IMHO that's the bones of it.
GPL doesn't preclude people from making money. It only stops those particular business models that require proprietary restrictions put on software recipients. All other ways of making money are perfectly welcome under GPL.
Given that restricting people is itself negative socially and that it is common for people and institutions to abuse the power they have when they control proprietary software that others use, blocking the proprietary stuff is indeed better than letting it happen in many cases.
In some cases, the derivative could be feasibly free or non-free and the GPL makes it free, i.e. the derivative was going to happen either way, but the developer wasn't necessarily going to release the results freely, so GPL adds net freedom and value to the community.
Actually GPL is more often than not the "we give you the source but we keep the copyright so if you want to use this in commercial purposes you need to re-license with us" - and it also doesn't work really well in the "open sourcing" in that case because people often build "enterprise version only" features on top. Look at Qt or Mono for example. I'd say GPL fails at "free software".
Also GPL leads to a lot of shitty situations - for example - I'm developing a muscle simulation library for my product and my content pipeline is based on Blender. Under Blender GPL license, since I'm not redistributing Blender or any code from it in my product, I don't need to opensource my code.
But if I want to integrate my tool in to Blender and give it away for free (to give back to community since my product isn't about animation) I would have to release it under GPL which I can't do. So in the end I can't give something back because of GPL. I could maybe do stuff like distribute a binary that talks to Blender via IPC but that's just a waste of my time and a suboptimal design solution because of a non-technical license reason, I'm not going to do that.
Also Blender is actually a decent core tool, if they allowed companies to develop commercial plugins on top of it via LGPL or something it would (IMO) make the Blender adoption much faster.
IMO GPL only makes sense if you plan on making a profit from the code you're releasing by re-licencing for commercial use, otherwise it's just a PITA.
>I would have to release it under GPL which I can't do.
You don't have to release it under GPL, just a GPL compatible license, like MIT, BSD etc, what you are talking about is that you won't release the source code at all.
>Also Blender is actually a decent core tool, if they allowed companies to develop commercial plugins on top of it via LGPL or something it would (IMO) make the Blender adoption much faster.
At the cost of becoming more like an open source 'core' for proprietary commercial plugins... I'm convinced Blender thrives mainly due to being free and fully open source, if you want somewhere to sell your proprierary plugins then just target one of the proprietary 3d solutions.
>IMO GPL only makes sense if you plan on making a profit from the code you're releasing by re-licencing for commercial use,
I think there are typically two major reasons for choosing GPL, one is of course to bestow end users with certain rights, which incidentally also favours the original developers since they are given those rights should someone modify and distribute modifications of their code, and secondly there is the one you mention where you can develop a fully free open project but also allow a special proprietary license for monetary compensation, this is quite rare AFAIK (but a smart way of letting the original developers get a piece of the pie), and I can only think of x264/x265 right now which does it.
> Actually GPL is more often than not the "we give you the source but we keep the copyright so if you want to use this in commercial purposes you need to re-license with us"
That requires citations. I suspect that this is actually the tiny minority of GPL software.
Actually that's true, I should have said most GPL software where I actually care about the license is GPL because of their business model - ie. I don't care about kernel or linux userland being GPL because I don't plan on building any commercial extensions to those - even if I make some changes (which I doubt I ever will but still) I don't mind pushing them upstream no matter what's their license. But most programmer facing stuff that's actually intended for commercial use is GPL as sort of a "trial mode" - you see exactly what you get and then if you want to actually use it you need to re-licence.
You can build commercial anything with GPL. GPL isn't anti-commerce. So, you don't need anyone's permission to do commercial things with GPL software.
If a company says, "here's this under GPL, but if you want a commercial license, pay us specially" they are being deceptive. You don't need a special commercial license. GPL allows any commercial activities, period.
You don't need to relicense in order to use the software commercially or to do any other use. The GPL respects freedom 0: freedom to use the software as you wish in whatever way you wish.
When you ask Apple to distribute and sell a program in their store, they require several things from you as a developer.
1: They require you to agree and follow apple's app store policy for developers. The policy include a long list of actions which you can't do as a developer, including using software licensed under GPL.
2: Apple will add during distribution their own app store copyright license to govern the use of the program. Apple requires that the developer provide legal permission for this, and will refuse to distribute if there is license incompatibility or other problems regarding copyright. If a developer sub-license other peoples copyrighted work like code, images, video or content in general, it is the developer that must shoulder any and all responsibility. If the license require that you can not add additional restrictions (See Sublicensing field in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_free_and_open-so...) then the developer is required to seek additional permission since then the license is not compatible with Apple's license.
In general, distributing other peoples work is tricky if you want to add a new license on top. Make sure you got permission, and if uncertain, ask the author explicitly. Judges seems to like when people explicitly seeks permission rather than relying on an interpretation of a license text.
The GPL does not prevent you in any way from distributing an iOS application and charging money for it (provided that you make the source code available for that part of the app that is a derivative of the GPL'd work), it is just that in practice Apple will censor applications that contain GPL'd code from their App Store.
That is entirely Apple's decision to make; they reportedly also censor apps that display nudity etc. and I would not be convinced by an argument that nobody can make money with pictures of nude people.
I never said nobody couldn't make money off GPL, I said a lot of the times GPL/AGPL will mean in practice you cant use them comercially and the author expects this and offers you a custom license - which both fails the FS ideology and is the only rational use case for the license IMNSHO.
Well, the GPL allows the publication of iOS apps. Apple is the one who doesn't allow GPL to be included in the app store.
You might as well see a restaurant that refuses to serve people who wear headscarves or something and then say that headscarves restrict your dining options. It's completely backward attribution of the problem.
You can use GPL alongside any other license at all, including proprietary. You have zero obligations under GPL for whatever you want to do with software privately. The only obligations relate to keeping the terms for others when you distribute the software to them.
You are misinformed, the GPL does not prevent you from selling your software. The GPL only requires that whoever you sell it to can do with it whatever they want, more or less. That might limit some business models, but neither does it make GPL software useless for entrepreneurs nor does it prevent you from making money by selling software based on it.
Actually it does. I'm primarily and iOS developer, and the GPL does prevent me from selling my software.
Even if it weren't for Apple, the clones are bad enough without just having to give my code away to anyone who wants to use and sell the exact same app competing with me.
FWIW, I would have no problem with something that forces open sourcing improvements to the open sourced software. What I don't like is not being able to use it as a tiny piece to a larger project without making the whole project GPL. That's the part that makes it not useful in many many cases.
You have it backwards, what is preventing you from selling your software is Apple, not the GPL. Also, you might want to think about what the fact that Apple's software on your customers' devices can prevent you from selling GPLed software to your customers has to do with the freedoms that the FSF is advocating for.
And yeah, as I wrote, the GPL limits some business models, but that's a long way from "software that I can't sell". Locking in your customers is not an option, and that is essentially the whole point of Free Software, rather than missing the point, while being free of cost is not even a goal of RMS/the FSF.
As I'm thinking about this more, I think it almost makes my point even more. The only thing about Linux that is useful for an entrepreneur is that it is "free as in beer". How many startups are looking at the source code for Linux, ever?
Certainly thankful for cheaper servers, but that could be accomplished with MIT or BSD, or even closed source.
How many startups are looking at the source code for Linux, ever?
Many or most. They benefit for being able recompile the kernel or compile in support for a device or service. Or to be able to make use of tools provided by others who've done just that.
Which is to say, pretty much every startup I've worked at over the past 15 years.
Rather boggled we're even still fielding this level of ignorance and/or FUD.
And yet, in a competitive marketplace for servers, the BSDs and closed source operating systems have not succeeded to nearly the same degree as Linux, despite predating Linux by many years.
Why do you think that is?
(I'm not trying to be a jerk and ask rhetorical questions; I'm actually pretty jazzed that you're thinking about this critically.)
I think it beats windows because it's free... It beats the others because it is the best free option. I don't know WHY it is the best version honestly. I don't see why gpl Linux would lead to a better OS than bsd, other than Linus is good at making an OS?
Because apple don't have to contribute OSx stuff back to the BSDs (nor did Microsoft when they used a BSD networking stack in windows 95) but e.g. google do have to contribute android kernel stuff back.
You've still totally missed the point. Free software is not about helping you make money. It is about user freedom and improving the lot of the whole of humanity. (NB Free software does not mind if you make money - it is just not there to help you do so.)
yeah… except that all sorts of developers and users get to adapt and run the GNU/Linux OS and related software and do all sorts of valuable work. It's tools that they use not only at low cost, they also adapt them. The ability to set up your OS how you like is a direct result of the freedom the community has to build things and adapt them as we wish. It isn't just about the Linux kernel.
i've used linux plenty during my life, and yet i see very few people using it personally. i find Mac and Windows to be better in almost every way, and I doubt I ever use Linux again.
i will give you servers though, they are certainly useful, and obviously key to many businesses. I'm not sure them being "free" is any better than it being "open source" though. It wouldn't change the equation at all, except that we might have a better version of linux that someone could also sell....
Free software creates a competitive free market in providing support and development services for the software, whereas proprietary software relies on government granted monopolies to exclude competition.
If you are unable to make money with free software, that says more about your lack of business skills than it does about any perceived "anti-business" attitude on the behalf of the authors of free software.
Here's John Gilmore, co-founder of Cygnus, a company that made money with free software (in particular, the GNU toolchain) that was sold for $1 billion:
"Years ago I thought about how to make a living in a post-scarcity economy, then debugged my ideas in real life. In 1989 I cofounded a company that wrote free software, gave the software away for free copying under the
GNU General Public License, and sold live human support for it, to the small fraction of users who wanted support. What others called piracy, we called distribution! We also quipped that we made free software affordable. Every big company we cold-called to sell support to WAS ALREADY USING OUR SOFTWARE. Many of them depended deeply on it and were happy to hire us to make it do exactly what they wanted it
to. We saved Sony a year in developing the PlayStation, for example."
What about dual licensed software like GPL + commercial? QT gets used by a lot of free software but the developers still make money by offering a commercial license.
How does that help me as an entrepreneur? The GPL provides me nothing, and the commercial is normal commercial I can buy. How does this change anything I said?
Some people might be independently wealthy, the rest of us have to actually charge for our software so we can try to attain that goal. "Free" software doesn't benefit nearly as many people as "open source" software.