"Copyleft is less free than permissive licenses because permissive licenses allow you to make proprietary forks of free software" is a worldview that just straight-up makes no sense at all
This is why this doesn't make sense: permissive licenses offer freedom from obligations, and copyleft offers guarantees of rights. Only the latter actually describes freedom as it appears in practice.
Introduce freedom from obligations in a context where power differentials exist and it becomes a form of tyranny. Freedom exists only through the obligation to respect the rights of others. Freedom of speech is guaranteed by limiting the government's right to interfere in it, for example.
The only BSD license apologia that made sense to me was #OpenBSD's attitude of, "We'd rather the corporations use our good code and not give back than come up with their own crappy solutions."
In that view, its a service to the community at large to help the security of commercial software.
Not saying I agree, really, but it has some logic, rather than complaining that the GPL is a one-way street (and somehow commercialism isn't).
@RL_Dane indeed. I don't think that copyleft is the only answer; I see room for permissive licenses and I use them myself for many of my projects. I'm simply refuting the common bad analysis of the "freedom" associated with each.
Just curious why you use permissive licenses, then? I mean, I use MIT, but I'm just spitting out ~100 line shell scripts here and there, puttering around and having fun. If I invested months in a project, I'd probably want it to be strongly copylefted.
@RL_Dane@drewdevault Maybe one very recent example of relevance: systemd added now example code how to use systemd notify w/o using sd_notify by including example code as MIT-0 in the docs.
They discouraged linking to libsystemd for things like sd_notify before, too, but that way they want to actively encourage everyone to simply use UNIX sockets directly.
This is, to me, a great example of using a very permissive license.
@drewdevault In primary school they'd teach us that you can't have absolute freedom, because one person's freedom ends where the next person's begin. Freedom is always limited because of this.
I think folks advocating for copyleft as being "the most free" simply forget that the extra "freedom for the code" results in "less freedom for developers".
@whynothugo@drewdevault Software-using companies are not monolithic decision-makers, they're made of people.
If a build and release person who wants to do the cooperative thing has a Jira ticket tagged "required for license compliance" they're more likely to be able to justify putting in the time on it
(I have done this and we had enough GPL code that it was easier to include otherwise-licensed code in the source release too)
Also applies to students who want to use their own work after they graduate—if your research code looks like a derivative work of a pre-existing copyleft project, the university licensing office has a harder time locking you out of it
@drewdevault I listened to a podcast the other day that talked about the distinction between liberty and freedom, and that we should be using the word liberty. Freedom means freedom from encumbrances. Liberty carries a notion of freedom and responsibility, where you limit freedom to the extent that it allows freedom for all.
@marcc @drewdevault
Huh usually when ppl make a distinction between freedom and liberty its the other way, where liberty is French as in license, liberal, enlightenment era libertine, the ability to do, where freedom is the one from old English and german emphasizing a sort of Marx-like mutual obligation. The positive/negative, individual/collective, freedom from/freedom to dichotomies dont have a well defined etymological basis so I think its either/or, but just interesting to see it the other way. Wonder how they talk about that here
Freedom from obligations when one party holds more power than another just means that the former exploits the latter. Businesses exploit the community, in the case of permissive licenses. Copyleft levels the playing field and guarantees the same rights to everyone, which is what freedom actually is.
@drewdevault But it's not what freedom is. It's equality. Which is why some may wish for something that gives them more freedom than what is given by copyleft equally.
@drewdevault your distinction makes perfect sense, but I think that most people reason about the permissiveness of licenses as sets of things which are allowed/disallowed.
And by that metric the permissive licenses include all the things copyleft ones do, plus more, therefore "more free".
Freedom is the right to do whatever you want. Power is the right to force others to do what you want. Thus power is restricting others freedoms.
Copyleft gives you freedom but no power.
Permissive licenses give you freedom and power, allowing you to restrict the freedoms of others.
That’s why powerful people (and those dreaming of being powerful) don’t like copyleft. When you are accustomed to the privilege of power, freedom of others sounds like oppression.
@drewdevault@Conan_Kudo
I thought that as a society we decided that freedom for companies was more important than freedom for people (see: Citizens United, Hobby Lobby, etc)
If something is copyleft, it means that I can’t use it at work. Which is totally fair if the creator wants it that way, but it does mean the use is more restricted.
@drewdevault I’m by no means an expert, so don’t hold me to this: but as I understand it, copyleft will require licensing changes to most commercial products. So, at least from a practical standpoint, it makes it difficult or impossible for me to use anything copyleft at work.
@andyb this is a very basic (and incorrect) understanding of copyleft and in practice depends quite a lot on the license in use.
You probably already use a lot of copyleft works - say, the Linux kernel, or bash - and you don't necessarily have to re-license any of your commercial products as a result.
@ghisvail
> "if project goes proprietary, a fork can happen"
But past community contributions remain with the project (including non-artifacts like QA by production use). @drewdevault
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