# Are GNU licenses annoying?



## geek (Feb 8, 2013)

Ok. So, what do you think about viral copyleft licenses, such as GPL or LGPL?

My opinion is, that I don't like them. Currently I'd like it if all interesting software that is licensed with those licenses could be re-licensed or rewritten with a real free license, like BSD, MIT, zlib or WTFPL. The freer, the better 

Right now I would want a real free alternative for, for example, the libavcodec library (and maybe some other software, too). Could I maybe email the copyright holders of (L)GPL stuff and ask them to re-license the stuff and join/fork a new, genuinely free project.


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## h3z (Feb 8, 2013)

geek said:
			
		

> Ok. So, what do you think about viral copyleft licenses, such as GPL or LGPL?
> 
> My opinion is, that I don't like them. Currently I'd like it if all interesting software that is licensed with those licenses could be re-licensed or rewritten with a real free license, like BSD, MIT, zlib or WTFPL. The freer, the better
> 
> Right now I would want a real free alternative for, for example, the libavcodec library (and maybe some other software, too). Could I maybe email the copyright holders of (L)GPL stuff and ask them to re-license the stuff and join/fork a new, genuinely free project.



The more under the free world the better . Some good coders just prefer the other license(s) . I certianly helped linux round up drivers . Grrr in someways .


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## vermaden (Feb 8, 2013)

GNU license is not THAT bad anyway ... its about their FANATICS that are PITA.


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## NewGuy (Feb 8, 2013)

Different licenses are good in different areas. For some projects the GNU GPL (or LGPL) makes sense, in other cases the BSD style of licenses makes sense. Declaring one license better for all cases is being willfully blind to the benefits and drawbacks each license carries. Chances are if you e-mail copyright owners and ask them to switch they will either tell you to write your own or point out the legal/practical reasons why they cannot re-license.

For example, I work on a couple of projects which are licensed under the GPL. They have to be because they rely on libraries or modules which are GPLed. The only way to change the license would be if someone re-wrote those pieces of code (including the libraries) from scratch under a different license. Which would, of course, be a complete waste of time as it has no practical value.


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## Savagedlight (Feb 8, 2013)

I generally dislike GPL, but it has its uses. One example is with third-party tools for games, which have the opportunity to access their user account details. GPL gives you a legal way to enforce any distributed re-use of the code to be made available in full, which theoretically guarantees more transparency.


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## fonz (Feb 8, 2013)

NewGuy said:
			
		

> Declaring one license better for all cases is being willfully blind to the benefits and drawbacks each license carries.


Sounds sensible, but the GPL is hundreds of pages of legalese. Do _you_ know what it *really* all means?


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## geek (Feb 8, 2013)

NewGuy said:
			
		

> Different licenses are good in different areas. For some projects the GNU GPL (or LGPL) makes sense, in other cases the BSD style of licenses makes sense. Declaring one license better for all cases is being willfully blind to the benefits and drawbacks each license carries. Chances are if you e-mail copyright owners and ask them to switch they will either tell you to write your own or point out the legal/practical reasons why they cannot re-license.
> 
> For example, I work on a couple of projects which are licensed under the GPL. They have to be because they rely on libraries or modules which are GPLed. The only way to change the license would be if someone re-wrote those pieces of code (including the libraries) from scratch under a different license. Which would, of course, be a complete waste of time as it has no practical value.



Well, isn't it stupid that, for example, although BSD licensed code can be embedded into GPL projects, the GPL requires "derivative works" to be GPL? What if someone just submits new components to a GPL project with a permissive license?

I think there has to be some limits on what a license can require from the user. If some license, for example, requires the users to drink quicksand and paint their houses with checkerboard patterns, which is definitely not related to the licensed work at all, the license should not be accepted as legally valid. (By the way, are there any lawyers on this forum? I'm not.)


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## fonz (Feb 8, 2013)

geek said:
			
		

> (By the way, are there any lawyers on this forum? I'm not.)


Yikes. I hope not.


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## cpm@ (Feb 9, 2013)

Inside a market's context, FOSS Licenses allows to give a legal coverage to original developers of software (use, study, modify, redistribution...), is a legal recognition of intellectual property (is preferible use terms as Copyright, Patent, and Trademark) but the term implies that these disparate legal issues are taken as based on an analogy of the property rights to tangible objects, whereas software is intangible (law error), although legal structure acknowledges intangible objects as tangible objects. Best is distrust, law can not give correct interpretation after so long time without do it. For this reason should not be a law field whatever not able to interpret.

IMHO is better for them be engaged for knock down theories of pseudo-laws :\


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## NewGuy (Feb 9, 2013)

*Length*



			
				fonz said:
			
		

> Sounds sensible, but the GPL is hundreds of pages of legalese. Do _you_ know what it *really* all means?



Hundreds of pages? It's 339 __lines__, many of those either blank, mailing address or introduction. And, yes, I've read the entire thing and understand what it all means. Most of it isn't legal jargon, it's pretty plain English in fact.


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## NewGuy (Feb 9, 2013)

geek said:
			
		

> I think there has to be some limits on what a license can require from the user. If some license, for example, requires the users to drink quicksand and paint their houses with checkerboard patterns, which is definitely not related to the licensed work at all, the license should not be accepted as legally valid. (By the way, are there any lawyers on this forum? I'm not.)



You're confusing end user license agreements with copyright license. The GPL is a copyright license not an end user license. The GPL does not cover usage of software, nor can it put any restrictions or requirements on the user. It only takes effect when you redistribute the work.

If a copyright license required any of the silly things you mentioned then people simply wouldn't use it.


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## Lorem-Ipsum (Feb 9, 2013)

I'm perfectly happy to use either GPL or BSD software. I prefer to license my own work under the BSD license but if I'm submitting work to an existing project that uses the GPL I'm okay with that.

It's just down to ethics in the end. In my opinion no license is necessarily "better" than another as it's entirely down to the preferences and prejudices of the individual.


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## fonz (Feb 9, 2013)

NewGuy said:
			
		

> Hundreds of pages? It's 339 __lines__, many of those either blank, mailing address or introduction. And, yes, I've read the entire thing and understand what it all means. Most of it isn't legal jargon, it's pretty plain English in fact.


https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.txt

That's 674 lines (admittedly, hundreds of _pages_ was a bit of an exaggeration) of definitions and other legal mumbo jumbo. In my book that's not a license, it's a joke.


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## Pushrod (Feb 9, 2013)

I don't see the value of the GPL. If I can't use the source code as I see fit, then what is the point in having it?

If developers want to be compensated for their efforts, charge money for it. Enough said.


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## NewGuy (Feb 9, 2013)

fonz said:
			
		

> https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.txt
> 
> That's 674 lines (admittedly, hundreds of _pages_ was a bit of an exaggeration) of definitions and other legal mumbo jumbo. In my book that's not a license, it's a joke.



I was referencing the GPLv2, which is quite a bit more common. Frankly, if a software developer can't be bothered to read a few pages to figure out what rules regulate distribution then they are the joke, not the license.


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## kpedersen (Feb 9, 2013)

Pushrod said:
			
		

> If developers want to be compensated for their efforts, charge money for it. Enough said.



Yes but then that usually means that they simply keep their work closed source, which is a pretty useless outcome 

This is where GPL is a decent compromise.

One situation where GPL is also quite cool is if a new developer (student?) wants to get noticed for a decent code project and yet doesn't just want all their work "taken" and used in a way that they cannot themselves benefit and improve from.

I am not too religious about licenses unless I am utilizing the code within my own projects. In which case it is then mostly a problem for my clients / employers 

When trying to get CDE open sourced, I was happy with *any* license. Even the Microsoft research license would have been good enough for me haha.


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## fonz (Feb 9, 2013)

NewGuy said:
			
		

> I was referencing the GPLv2, which is quite a bit more common. Frankly, if a software developer can't be bothered to read a few pages to figure out what rules regulate distribution then they are the joke, not the license.


The GPLv2 is still well in excess of 300 lines. To be equally frank, if a software developer's idea of a license is several pages of legal jibber jabber I think they're in the wrong business. What I think they should have studied instead of programming is a question I'll gladly leave as an exercise to the reader.


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## cpm@ (Feb 9, 2013)

*@fonz*

Totally agree with your assertion, if a lawyer charges for defend lies, they benefit of legal laws stupidity, is a job which contradicts the interests that supposedly should defend, demonstrating that bad laws are a pure contradiction. Unfortunately, today Law has become in another tax to be paid.


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## fonz (Feb 9, 2013)

Some may find this old thread interesting.


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## cpm@ (Feb 10, 2013)

fonz said:
			
		

> Some may find this old thread interesting.



Thanks mate, all diverse opinions always will need unification joint to get one right conclusion. 







A short conclusion:

The GPL License's alternatives was necessary for innovation (mainly to try correct misunderstandings of previous clauses or include new contents). The availability of various licensing schemes, may affect both the motivation of initial developers to make their work available to others (at cost, or in exchange for the fulfillment of other conditions), as well as the ability and motivation of later developers to innovate, to the extent that they are required to license existing sotware components that are necessary for their later motivation


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## throAU (Feb 11, 2013)

GNU license is hardware manufacturer hostile.


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## phoenix (Feb 12, 2013)

Nice to see a civil conversation about licenses, instead of a devolution into heated flame-war that goes nowhere.    Let's keep it that way.  

Personally, I like to take a "layered" approach to licensing:

protocol stacks
libraries
applications

Anything in the first two layers should have the most permissive license possible (BSD, for example).  That way, the code gets out there, picked up, re-used, and available everywhere.

For example, TCP/IP stacks.  If those were GPLv2 to begin with, a lot of duplication of effort would have happened in OS/2, MS-DOS, MS-Windows, Netware, UNIX, Unix-like, Linux, etc.  Thankfully, they were licensed under BSD, and were picked up by all of the above to get everyone online.

Same with libraries.  They should be permissibly licensed so that everyone can benefit from them.  So what if they get picked up by commercial companies; at least you know they're products will be compatible.  Things like GUI frameworks, spell check engines, compression engines, networking libs, etc should be available to everyone.

When you move up the stack to full applications, though, then you can start tightening up the licensing and even going closed-source.  The GPL (and similar licenses) makes sense for full end-user applications like OpenOffice, KDE apps, Firefox, etc.

I can't stand the push to making everything, including low-level libraries, GPL-only, though, as that really hampers the development and innovation that can occur above them.


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