The GPL is the reason we have Android custom Roms today.
It definitely seems like MIT is favored by big corps but at the end of the day, they’ll use GPL licensed code if it’s the best option. Which makes me wonder why it’s so demonized.
I would be happy to hear from anyone who knows about this subject if what I'm saying is correct.
Because failing to manage their GPL obligations led to a lawsuit for D-Link followed by a compulsion to release a lot more code than they ever planned to share online, to the company's detriment.
You can pretty much look at the stock value before and after they lost the lawsuit. There was, notably, a big value spike immediately after, but the value then settled down to an average of around 15 a share, markedly below their previous 30 a share.
For some companies, the value is in the proprietary content and using GPL would be shooting themselves in the foot.
The tl;dr is that for any GPLv3 software that you ship, you have to also give your users a way to install a modified copy. If you're trying to ship a secured product, that basically means that you have to give code/rootfs signing keys to your customers. This is a non-starter for many kinds of products that need tamper protection (whether for product, legal, or safety reasons).
The Linux kernel remains on GPLv2, and is still used quite heavily. Most GNU software (coreutils, gcc, etc) moved to GPLv3 and then commercial companies abandoned them in favor of permissively-licensed replacements.
Fuck that. If it's my device then I want to have control. If I want to violate part 15 of the FCC rules then I'm going to do it and nobody is going to stop me. This paternalistic rubbish has to stop, I'm sure your company would love to retain ultimate control of the thing you've sold me, but that's not compatible with a free society.
That linux uses GPL is entirely irrelevant to the vast majority of uses of it. What hosting services are customizing their kernels with proprietary code?
Are you arguing that more good things would go upstream if it were licensed non-permissive or are you giving an example were it works well enough?
It's not healthy.
The speculation has merits and makes sense. But is speculative nontheless.
In order to build a custom Rom, you need three things: the kernel tree, the device tree, and the binary blobs.
The binary blobs can be extracted from a running phone.
The kernel tree is GPL-licensed, so almost all phones have kernel trees releases, and if they don't you can ask the manufacturer for it.
The device tree on the other hand, is created from scratch for each phone. As such, there is no pre-existing license, and therefore no legal obligation to release device tree sources, so almost no manufacturer does. The only notable exception is Google with their Nexus and Pixel phones. (But this has stopped since with the Android 16 release)
We can safely assume that the manufacturers that don't release the device trees, wouldn't have released kernel trees if they weren't obliged to.
To go into more details:
The device trees are relatively easy to make. So, their absence doesn't represent a big hurdle. See for example https://xdaforums.com/t/guide-how-to-make-a-device-tree-for-...
But adding support for a device to the Linux Kernel requires _huge_ reverse-engineering efforts. This is why there's still no fully functional Android build for iPhones.
And a license to use the binary blobs for that purpose. Is it a given that doing that is allowed?
Some have "interoperability exceptions" - so if you have been granted a license to something, you can reuse it in different context (so for instance you could run Microsoft Office on WINE even if Microsoft's license forbids it).
Some have restrictions on redistribution (but the builds just using the blobs from the old filesystem are fine).
A lot of that is in the gray area, and for that very reason many builds don't actually redistribute blobs - they extract and reuse them live.
Where can I get the source of the exact kernel running on iOS devices, including all drivers?
How about the Playstation 4 or 5? Where can I get the source of their FreeBSD fork?
Large companies will self-enforce, as they already do with GPL and "open" LLMs that are dual licensed by company size. Small companies don't care either way and are hard to enforce, so that works.
Any pointers to open/closed vendors and projects which use this kind of honor system?
EU CRA has "commercial use" definitions to differentiate OSS contributors and OSS consumers.
All for naught, I fear, while LLMs consume all and regurgitate license-free to vibe-coders everywhere.
You're mixing up freedom and power. See https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/freedom-or-power.en.html for an explanation.
It is no more inflammatory than the coordinated war that was waged against copyleft licenses on tech fora and social media for more than a decade before hackers started to realize en masse that it was all a ploy to extract free labor from them. There are legitimate uses for permissive licenses and I still use them for those. But the big players certainly pushed them well beyond those cases where they made any sense. More than enough evidence has since emerged that prove this to be the case.
It does no one any favors to deny the presence of bad actors and their malintent behind the utter mess we find ourselves in right now. I find it disturbing that whenever people express their frustration regarding this, there are attempts to shoot them down with accusations of inflammatory language, political correctness, etc. But the truth is that the big players have caused far far more damage than any inflammatory citicism they face for it now. What's actually unhealthy for good discussion is the dystopian censorship of criticisms because the truth make some people uncomfortable. Every bit of harsh criticism they receive here is something they willfully and rightfully earned.
There are at least three different groups of people here:
1. Those paid to write permissively licensed software - not free labour.
2. Those who are happy to be free labour. I read a comment by a BSD developer about being very proud and happy to be able to buy a games console that ran on a BSD derived OS.
3. Naive people who are are shocked when someone creates a proprietary fork of their code. It is something that they explicitly gave everyone permission to do, and it is something that has been happening for decades - I can think of Windows using BSD network code in the early 90s, but there are probably much earlier examples. Apple's OSes are very high profile examples since 2001, and Nextstep before that.
The last group have themselves to blame. Did they not take the trouble to understand a legal document? Do they know nothing about the history of their industry? Do they takes steps to stop it - for example by doing releasing updates under a copyleft license?
I agree with you that big players do push licenses that suite themselves, but it relies on either deliberate choice or foolishness by contributors for it to work. I also think copyleft is usually of greater benefit to society.
I think you're missing the point.
There are developers who prefer MIT not because they're a "big player" or "because truth make people uncomfortable", people simply have different preference for what the ideal license is for their project.
If you cannot deal with that, that sounds like a you problem, but judging by your comments, you're not exactly gonna re-evaluate with a different perspective, since you seem unable to understand others have different ideas and opinions than you.
So "to each their own" only goes so far.
One can very well accept that other devs/teams have different ideas and opinions && that they can (by law) have such ideas and opinions, but also think that they have them for the wrong reasons, and that they shouldn't have them, and that we'd all be better off if they didn't.
> There are legitimate uses for permissive licenses and I still use them for those.
The parent didn't talk about forcing developers to choose copyleft. And you ignored the stated legitimate reasons for choosing copyleft in most cases if you care about the society.
> There are developers who prefer MIT not because they're a "big player" or "because truth make people uncomfortable", people simply have different preference for what the ideal license is for their project.
Did you miss this part in my comment?:
> There are legitimate uses for permissive licenses and I still use them for those.
Or this part from GP's comment?:
> being able to do this is the reason why companies have brainwashed the Internet into ...
Or this part?:
> ... choosing the MIT license for everything
(emphasis mine) All of these imply that the companies did a mass campaign and not individual brainwashing. They also imply that the MIT license is not suitable for everything and by corollary that there are instances where they do apply. All of it are aimed at the companies that resorted to these underhanded tactics. Where does any of these imply that every single use of the MIT license is due to brainwashing? I can't understand how anyone concludes instead that it's all a personal attack on MIT license users (that includes me too).
> If you cannot deal with that, that sounds like a you problem, but judging by your comments, you're not exactly gonna re-evaluate with a different perspective, since you seem unable to understand others have different ideas and opinions than you.
Not only does one have to deal with people reinterpreting others' comments according to their convenience, they also have to withstand guilt tripping based on it. And the irony is that you cite my complaint about the same issue for it!
but in the current reality around us, i believe it's a more nuanced issue.
Would it really be impossible to have a license with similar brevity as MIT but similar consequences as GPL?
The GPL is particularly bad here as it pretends to define what is or isn't a derivative work, which is outside the scope of a licence but within the scope of a court. The EUPL was created partly because EU directives bound the viral clause in ways the FSF won't admit to, although that one isn't simple either (I'm not a fan of its compatibility clause).
Sounds like you need a better lawyer.
The consequences of the GPL are not all that complicated. In most cases it boils down to offering the source if you distribute the code outside your organisation.
Therein lies the problem. When dealing with the law, you don't want to be relatively sure that you won't go to prison or won't get sued for $1M, you want to be completely sure.
Something like the GPL is complex and non-standard as far as its interactions with the legal system go, because it is essentially a sort of hack of copyright law. If it goes before a court, you have no idea what might potentially happen. So rather than deal with that kind of complexity and uncertainty, you'd use something under MIT or Apache License that is just much better understood.
Not really. Unless you are redistributing it does not affect you at all.
> Something like the GPL is complex and non-standard as far as its interactions with the legal system go
it is widely used, and most people are running some copyleft software anyway, most commonly GPL or a variant such as LGPL. Linux servers, Android phones, routers, web browsers....
Any IP lawyer who hasn't come across the GPL yet is probably not worth listening to.
I mean, would you listen to a bridge engineer who hasn't yet heard of a calculator? Sure, they may understand their shit, but if they haven't heard of calculators yet they are clearly not in the industry.
Any IP lawyer who hasn't yet read the GPL and formed a professional opinion on it isn't equipped to handle IP matters at all.
Personally, I MIT/BSD my stuff because, well... it means I don't have to think about it ever again. If I do GPL, I have to make sure that I'm following the rules set out in that license and making sure others who have based their code on my project have done the same.
And that's, like, work, man, especially if you don't have a foundation and legal eagles on your side to double-check that everything's kosher.
Linux is an exception, not a rule, in how GPL is usually handled in FLOSS projects.
If its all your own stuff you don't really have to care about the license. Otherwise the rules are pretty simple, include a GPL license and if requested by a user supply the source code (which you can even charge some money for).
>and making sure others who have based their code on my project have done the same.
If you don't care what others do with it, you don't have to enforce it.
As the sole copyright holder (A)GPL only gives you more options.
I do not believe the GPL requires that you make sure others who fork your code follow the GPL's rules.
It places restrictions on those others, but does not require you verify that those others follow the restrictions.
The GPL is a statement you're making about the rights that other people are granted when it comes to your code. It's not a personal pledge. Exactly like every other license btw; they aren't oaths. You're also not required to police or sue people who break your license. It's your code.
Very simplified differences:
GPL: you shared the code with others, those others, if they modify your code, must continue to share their changes with others
MIT: you shared the code with others, those others can do as they please, including not sharing any changes they make to the code with anyone
It doesn't force you to go after them.
With MIT, you Google would have no obligation at all to provide anything.
That's just it, though. If it doesn't carry any sort of possibility of being enforced, well... why bother? I could just go with the easier-to-understand license, like someone upthread mentioned.
If we're going to see the promised tech ecosystem that GPL's authors aimed to provide, we're going to need more people to take it seriously. Most people don't want to take it seriously, and if that's the case, we're better off if they just went with MIT/BSD.
Most of, if not all, code that was released today was written by Google. Then can release it, or not release it, regardless of license.
Android was never a community project with outside contributions. The license does not limit the original authors.
I'm not saying Google shouldn't have released them immediately. But GPL vs Apache vs MIT has absolutely nothing to do with it.
According to the GPL, the only thing they would have to do is provide source code to the users of their software upon their request.
With GPL-only code, the world would be much nicer for all of us.