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?
No, most drivers are closed source and you can just extract binary blobs for them. They run as daemons that communicate through the binder ipc - Android basically turned the Linux kernel into a microkernel.
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.