> get bit by the GPL and have to opensource all our proprietary software
The tone here sounds very angry. You aren't "bit" by the GPL, you choose to participate in the usage of the license and the community of code that comes with it. It's not some unknown, nasty thing you need to constantly defend yourself against (as implied by "being bit" like it's a dog you need to watch out for everywhere).
"We're auditing everything we use for license issues because we activly choose not to participate in the GPL community and would rather abuse and profit from other people's good will" is closer to realitiy
It would be trivially easy for an engineer to add a GPL-licensed dependency to a project without realizing it, perhaps via a transitive dependency, thereby causing the company to be in breach of the GPL.
If you don't audit, you don't know if you are in breach of the GPL or not. Your corporate counsel will want you to audit. You can't reasonably take any action, including open sourcing your project or even posting code snippets on a company engineering blog, until you know which licenses you actually use.
Its about as trivial as for a web developer to accidentally use a proprietary image they found on the web, a game developer that use the unreal engine, or a marketing using someones music in a commercial.
Its quite common to find commercial copyright infringement in all of those (except for the unreal engine, since I don't know publicized case of that), and there are artists who earn a fair income by contacting infringes and demand payment or a cease and desist. I wouldn't however describe that as being bitten by the rightful author, but put the blame on the developer who is using someone else work without permission, especially if they their own business model is based on copyright.
> It would be trivially easy for an engineer to add a GPL-licensed dependency to a project without realizing it, perhaps via a transitive dependency, thereby causing the company to be in breach of the GPL.
Just as easily as it is for a designer to use a copyrighted work. The GPL isn't a boogieman, every project that's under the GPL says so. If a developer isn't mindful enough to realise that they shouldn't randomly copy-paste library dependencies without knowing anything about them isn't a very good developer.
Try running mvn:dependency-tree on any large enterprise Java project, and see what comes out. If you told me you were familiar with every single library in the output, I would not believe you.
> If a developer isn't mindful enough to realise that they shouldn't randomly copy-paste library dependencies without knowing anything about them isn't a very good developer.
That's a logical fallacy called: No true Scotsman. In this case - Good developers can be good at some things but bad at other things, so there's absolutely zero correlation between "good/bad developers" and "people who remember/forget to think about licensing".
If you don't consider the GPL to be boogieman, how do you feel about predatory lenders and loan sharks? All of them are just agreements...right?
In a predatory lending/loan sharking scheme, the lender offers their product (money) to people who need it (borrowers) who must agree to extraordinarily high interest rates.
This seems very similar to the GPL since it's just a software agreement that includes extraordinary clauses for developer who "borrows" the product.
It's not just that corporate counsel will want you to audit. I worked at a company where I found a GPL violation and wanted to comply, but if we started complying with the GPL it would have shown that we knew that we previously hadn't been complying, so I was told to not comply. Ugh. Just for redistributing a couple binaries, there were no libraries involved.
A few days late on the response here, but I'm going for it anyway.
I was using "bit" colloquially, and my tone wasn't angry. We "choose not to participate in the GPL community" because we sell software, and if that software could be requested for free, we couldn't exactly stay in business trying to sell it. I have nothing against the GPL, and I'm pretty certain the management and rest of engineering don't either.
In fact, I/we aren't trying to abuse and profit form other people's good will. That's why we check the licenses of software/libraries we use: to respect the way in which it was licensed. We have to keep our software closed source, so we obey the licenses that could require us to make it open source.
>The tone here sounds very angry. You aren't "bit" by the GPL, you choose to participate in the usage of the license and the community of code that comes with it.
It's not like you had a _choice_ if there's software you want to use and it's only available as GPL.
You'd have only chosen if there were 3-4 license options for the same software, and you went with GPL willingly.
> >The tone here sounds very angry. You aren't "bit" by the GPL, you choose to participate in the usage of the license and the community of code that comes with it.
> It's not like you had a _choice_ if there's software you want to use and it's only available as GPL.
You can either write it yourself, don't implement that feature or comply with the GPL. The GPL would be a pretty bad copyleft license if companies could just ignore it because "we want to keep our stuff proprietary".
The authors of the software wanted to ensure that all users of their code would have perpetual freedom. Complaining about it without recognising their reason for using the GPL is quite a selective argument. They don't want you to use their code if it means that you'll take away your users' freedom.
Except that "perpetual freedom" for one group (users) also equates to "perpetual removal of freedom" for another group (developers).
It doesn't seem fair to mention one without the other, since the latter is the primary reason why many, many developers choose to not use the GPL.
Also, I don't see how the person who said they don't want to get "bit" by the GPL is "Complaining about it without recognizing" anything? To begin with, it seems completely subjective.
I can feel totally "bitten" by the fact that I only have one choice of cable company in my area, even though their monopoly is totally legal...but I didn't agree to any of it. Similarly, no developer really has a choice but to use GPL software if they want to live in the Linux neighborhood. (But they shouldn't complain according to you because they have the "choice" of going off on their own to re-build 20 years worth of core Unix utilities.)
> Except that "perpetual freedom" for one group (users) also equates to "perpetual removal of freedom" for another group (developers).
Only if you redefine the word "freedom". Both developers and users have the same four fundamental freedoms. The only difference is that the developers don't have the "freedom" to enslave their users. But that's like claiming that you don't live in a free society because you can't enslave people -- just because you don't have the "freedom to enslave others" doesn't mean that you don't have freedom.
> Similarly, no developer really has a choice but to use GPL software if they want to live in the Linux neighborhood.
Nobody has actually explained why this is a bad thing. Is it because "developers don't want their users to have freedom"? Many companies exist that sell GPL software, so it's not a monetary thing. And your cable company analogy is flawed because the GPL doesn't force you into a monopoly.
And, by the way, not all software in the "Linux neighbourhood" is under the GPL. So that's an unfair exaggeration (although I do honestly wish more of it was).
> But they shouldn't complain according to you because they have the "choice" of going off on their own to re-build 20 years worth of core Unix utilities.
If they don't want to contribute to a community that values user freedom, then they won't be welcome in that community. I don't understand why someone would be surprised by this.
No. The GPL removes my freedom to sell something that I've created.
> The only difference is that the developers don't have the "freedom" to enslave their users.
This is where I think your entire argument falls apart: Offering users the choice to buy my software is not enslaving them. If it is, then so is the GPL because it's a choice that users can buy into or not...just like the choice that the GPL offers to developers.
You can't have it both ways. If commercial software "enslaves" users by simply offering the users a choice to buy the software, then the GPL must also be enslaving developers by simply offering them a predatory contract.
> No. The GPL removes my freedom to sell something that I've created.
That's patently false. Many companies (SUSE and RedHat come to mind) sell free software. The only difference is that you can't create a monopoly of experts in the software you wrote. The business model of free software works through selling support (such as L2, L3 and developer support that can implement features and fix bugs much faster than upstream would).
> This is where I think your entire argument falls apart: Offering users the choice to buy my software is not enslaving them.
The GPL allows you to sell software. That's not how free software works. I believe you may be confused by the word "free". In this context, it refers to freedom, not price. There are quite a few companies that sell free software, and it's disingenuous to claim that they don't exist.
> If commercial software "enslaves" users by simply offering the users a choice to buy the software
Proprietary software, and the choice to "buy software" has nothing to do with the free software movement. Again, free refers to freedom. There are several commercial free software companies.
Proprietary software enslaves users by making them helpless against a developer that may mistreat the user (and the user can't do anything about it).
> Proprietary software enslaves users by making them helpless against a developer that may mistreat the user (and the user can't do anything about it).
I find your propensity for double standards amazing. These so called "enslaved users" made a choice to buy into the developers proprietary software. It's the same exact thing as developers buying into the GPL.
So, if proprietary software is enslaving users, then the GPL is most definitely enslaving developers.
You can argue semantics all day long....but you'd still be wrong. But anyway, I'm glad that next to nobody releases new software under GPL anymore and that the vast majority of developers prefer a license like MIT that doesn't enslave developers at all.
"The GPL removes my freedom to sell something that I've created."
No it does not. You can still sell the first copy, technically and practically. You can still technically sell licenses - it is just practically made difficult because those you sell the work to can share it.
> It's not like you had a _choice_ if there's software you want to use and it's only available as GPL.
Sure you do; if you don't want to accept the GPL license terms, you can write your own software that fulfills whatever function you wanted the GPL code for.
Have you considered why the original authors chose the GPL? It's so people who use their code will never take away the freedom of users of the code. If you're complaining about not being able to take their code and make it proprietary, you're missing the point that THAT'S WHY THEY CHOSE THE GPL.
That's orthogonal to whether the prospective user of the package has an actual choice or not (besides using as GPL it or going without).
WHATEVER THE ORIGINAL AUTHORS' REASONS FOR CHOOSING THE GPL (sic), it doesn't change the situation that one might not be happy for a project they want to use being in GPL -- including people who don't intend to make it proprietary, but who prefer BSD licenses nevertheless.
> That's orthogonal to whether the prospective user of the package has an actual choice or not (besides using as GPL it or going without).
You've just outlined the choice that the person has. Admittedly, I wouldn't use the GPL for libraries, I've started using the MPLv2 for stuff like that. I don't really agree with the common reading of the combined work clause in the GPL wrt libraries (a work that uses a library's API shouldn't be bound by the copyleft of the GPL IMO -- but as Oracle has proven, APIs appear to be copyrightable).
> WHATEVER THE ORIGINAL AUTHORS' REASONS FOR CHOOSING THE GPL (sic), it doesn't change the situation that one might not be happy for a project they want to use being in GPL -- including people who don't intend to make it proprietary, but who prefer BSD licenses nevertheless.
BSD licenses allow distributors of the software to make it proprietary. That was clearly a more important problem to the author and community of the software than allowing GPL-incompatible projects to use the code. It's a fundamentally ethical decision, which you may disagree with if you follow the open source (as opposed to free software) philosophy.
You're missing the point. He's saying that there's technically a choice, yes. You agree on that.
The part you seem to avoid agreeing with is that it can often be a really annoying choice to have to make. Isn't everybody entitled to be annoyed when they only have one so-called choice? (Like having to move or use slower alternatives in order to get away from Comcast as your ISP.)
Continually pointing out that there is technically a choice doesn't really help anyone who feels bitten by their lack of choices.
You don't get the right to be annoyed when you have to comply with the license terms of something that you haven't had to spend time working on (and usually get without paying for it).
The tone here sounds very angry. You aren't "bit" by the GPL, you choose to participate in the usage of the license and the community of code that comes with it. It's not some unknown, nasty thing you need to constantly defend yourself against (as implied by "being bit" like it's a dog you need to watch out for everywhere).
"We're auditing everything we use for license issues because we activly choose not to participate in the GPL community and would rather abuse and profit from other people's good will" is closer to realitiy