Picking a license

[Patrick Maupin]

On May 8, 3:37 am, Steven D'Aprano <st... at REMOVE-THIS-
cybersource.com.au> wrote:
> On Fri, 07 May 2010 23:40:22 -0700, Patrick Maupin wrote:
> > Personally, I believe that if anything is false and misleading, it is
> > the attempt to try to completely change the discussion from MIT vs. GPL
> > to GPL vs. no license (and thus very few rights for the software users),
> > after first trying to imply that people who distribute software under
> > permissive licenses (that give the user *more* rights than the GPL) are
> > somehow creating a some sort of moral hazard that might adversely affect
> > their users
>
> If encouraging third parties to take open source code and lock it up
> behind proprietary, closed licences *isn't* a moral hazard, then I don't
> know what one is.

For a start, there is a difference between "encouraging" and
"allowing".  But in point of fact, you have it exactly backwards.
Putting the code out there and making it a tort to republish it under
a closed license creates a moral hazard -- a trap that many companies
including Linksys/Cisco have fallen into.  If I expect nothing in
return, if it's a gift, then the likelihood of moral hazard is
significantly reduced.  Unless you are somehow suggesting that I owe
my user's customers anything (which suggestion, btw, is frequently
made in veiled terms, and always pisses me off), there is no other
moral hazard produced by me choosing a permissive license for my code.

> > So which is it?  GPL good because a user can do more with the software
> > than if he had no license, or MIT bad because a user can do more with
> > the software than if it were licensed under GPL?
>
> Good or bad isn't just a matter of which gives you more freedoms, they're
> also a matter of *what* freedoms they give. Weaponized ebola would allow
> you to kill hundreds of millions of people in a matter of a few weeks,
> but it takes a very special sort of mind to consider that the freedom to
> bring about the extinction of the human race a "good".

You're missing the context where Mr. Finney keeps changing what he's
arguing about.  I agree completely that different licenses are valid
for different expectations, and said as much in my first post on this
subject.  But it's extremely silly to compare weaponized ebola to
publishing free software, unless you want to give ammunition to those
amoral profiteers who claim that it is so dangerous for hackers to
give out source code at all that doing so should be criminalized.

> I consider the freedom granted by the MIT licence for my users to take my
> source code and lock it up behind restrictive licences (and therefore
> *not* grant equivalent freedoms to their users in turn) to be a bad, not
> a good. But in some cases it is a cost worth paying, primarily because
> not all people who use MIT-licenced software go on to re-publish it under
> a restrictive licence, but nevertheless won't consider the GPL (possibly
> due to misunderstandings, confusion or political interference).

"Political interference" is certainly the main reason that I won't use
the GPL, but it is probably not the same politics you are thinking
of.  When I seriously consider investing in learning a piece of
software so that I can make it part of my "toolbox," a major
consideration is how well it plays with the other tools in my toolbox,
and exactly which construction jobs I can use it on.  RMS has managed
to create a scenario where the GPL not only doesn't play nicely with
some other licenses, but now doesn't even always play nicely with
itself -- some people who liked GPL v2 but weren't willing to cede
control of their future licensing terms to the FSF now have GPL v2
code that can't be linked to GPL v3 code.

So, when a package is GPL licensed, for me it can create more
contemplation about whether the package is worth dealing with or not.
If the package is large, well-maintained, and standalone, and I'm just
planning on being a user, the fact that it's GPL-licensed is not at
all a negative.  If I'm looking at two roughly equivalent programming
toolkits, I will take the BSD/MIT one any day, because I know that
when I learn it, I "own" it to the extent that I can use it on
anything I want in any fashion in the future.

Regards,
Pat