With GPL, you're programming Freedom. With MIT, you're programming for free.

The MIT license guarantees that businesses will use it because it's free and they don't have to think about releasing code or hiding their copyright infringement. The developers I've seen using that license, or at least those who put some thought into it, did do because they want companies to use it and therefore boost their credibility through use and bug reports, etc. They knowingly did free work for a bunch of companies as a way to build their CV, basically. Like your very own self-imposed unpaid internship.

The GPL license is also good for developers, as they know they can work on a substantial project and have some protections against others creating closed derived works off of it. It's just a bit more difficult to get enterprise buy-in, which is not a bad thing for many projects.

This is the best way I've heard it said.

The MIT license guarantees freedom for developers proprietary software conglomerates to use FOSS code in their proprietary products. The GPL guarantees freedom for end users the entire FOSS community, both for users and developers.

I want to develop plugin for former MIT-licensed software. Now I can't.

Nah, it's called the cuck license for a reason.

I don't get the whole MIT vs GPL rivalry. They both have their uses. If you want to use GPL, go for it. And if you want something like MIT that works too.

Thankfully both exist because I think we definitely need both.

The GPL also makes code available for ANY PURPOSE. It just requires people who modify the code to do the same, which is fair.

People seem to think that those who choose permissive licences don't know what they're doing.

Most of them don't. Lots of people say they use MIT because they want "no restrictions", or call GPL terms "restrictive". That's an instant giveaway that they don't understand what they're talking about.

Indeed, I think it's just two philosophies that don't necessarily need to be at odds. Permissive licenses help speed the adoption of languages and libraries, which ultimately feeds into the slowly building momentum of the copyleft projects that use them.

I mean, it’s funny for a couple of reasons

Yeah I don't think I've ever heard that term before in my life and I've been doing this for a while.

And I don't think I ever wanna hear it again.

Memes are srs bidness.

For writing an application GPL is fine if you don't want anyone to profit from your work and if they make changes, contribute back.

Things are a little bit more complex if you are writing a library or code that is meant to be included in another application.

If you use GPL you might get rejected even by other open source applications, as GPL might be understandable as it will change license off the application or be outright incompatible.

This was the case with cursor library after author changed license everyone stopped using it: https://github.com/GijsTimmers/cursor/commit/885156333ac9ca335a587b1dd08964074313f026

The most ironic thing is that he created package from stack overflow answer:

https://github.com/GijsTimmers/cursor/blob/master/cursor/cursor.py

The original author never said they are releasing copyright or are making it public domain.

If I want to make a piece of software to improve people's lives

If that is your intention, GPL would make more sense, as every improvement and development would be forced to be made available to those people, thus helping them further.

I doubt that your code helps anyone who needs/deserves to be helped, after beeing processed by big corpo.

You could think about your definition of freedom. For me: My freedom ends, where it restricts others people freedom - I shouldn't be free to rob people and call it restriction if someone forbids this.

Freedom means that everyone can use your code. Yes, that means for-profit corporations. For free, without restrictions. If I want to make a piece of software to improve people's lives and I don't care to do it for free, I'll choose MIT.

Why not put the code in public domain then? Why MIT?

When I see a GPL license I don't see freedom. I only see forced openness, which makes me immediately avoid that library, since I can't statically link to it.

One of the arguments in favor of GPL and other "forced openness" licenses is that users should have the right to understand what their own device is doing. You paid for your computer. You own it. You should dictate how it operates. You should at least have the option of understanding what is being done with your machine and modifying it to fit your needs. Closed source software may provide utility, but it doesn't really further collective knowledge since you're explicitly refusing to publicly release the code, and it provides obscurity for developers to hide undesirable functionality like data collection or more directly malicious activity.

I'm not personally sure how I feel about that argument myself, but I can at least readily acknowledge it as a valid one whether I agree with the decision to force openness or not.

Intel Management Engine improve no one's life.

It is very sad how you don't see that "forced openness" is good for everyone.

If it gets “stolen” by a for-profit corporation it only makes it better, because now my software has reached more people, thus (theoretically) improving their lives.

well that's a very idealistic, and capitalistic way of looking at this (i.e. for-profit corporation is making a profit only because it's making people's lives better). which just isn't the case in real life.

realistically, when you release something in a permissive license, you are more likely to improve someone's bottom line, than to improve people's lives in general.

I don't care if people make money to use my code. I just want my name attached to it somehow, even if you make it closed sourced which is MIT and OpenBSD. I hope you do use my code and even if you heavily reference it to make something new, carry that forward so more can learn and benefit.

I also don't understand "better for the end user" arguments either. I have a library that people want to be included in another project, but that project is GPL. They won't merge my code unless I change my code to be GPL. So everyone who wants them merged is out of luck. I can't merge their code either with mine. What is supposed to happen is I freely give up my name to the code and restrict it to only being GPL and for GPL projects. Essentially, assimilate and join with the Borg. No, thanks.

And while that's from my experience, I've also seen good projects get traction, have excitement over it, and fall off the earth because they end up making it GPL. Everyone interested in adopting it, personal or business, just disappear. Then something with less restrictions comes along and gets adopted.

End-users move to what's better for them, and if you have a library that is only for GPL, you can end up limiting your options with a wasteful purity test. If you want it to be free you'd give freely with no restrictions. And if you think, "You can contact me to discuss licensing" that doesn't happen. It's still a restriction and almost nobody actually bothers.

Implying you can't profit with open code.

If I want to make a piece of software to improve people’s lives and I don’t care to do it for free, I’ll choose MIT. If it gets “stolen” by a for-profit corporation it only makes it better, because now my software has reached more people, thus (theoretically) improving their lives.

I'm not completely sure about this.

Suppose you write a library that a company like Facebook finds useful. Suppose that they incorporate it into their website. I'm sure I can skip the portion of this post where I extol the harms that Facebook has wrought on society. Do you think your software has improved people's lives by enabling Facebook to do those sorts of things? They would not have been able to do them if you had used AGPL instead.

And I don't want to make it seem like we should never do anything because someone might use the product of our work in a sinister way (because that would quickly devolve into nihilism). If 99 people use it for good and 1 for evil, that's still a heavy net positive. But at the same time, I would be lying if I didn't acknowledge that the 1 person using it for evil still would make me feel bad.

If it gets "stolen" by a for-profit corporation it only makes it better, because now my software has reached more people, thus (theoretically) improving their lives.

Or it could be "stolen" by Raytheon, and helping ruin lives better.

And I'm not poopoo'ing, what you're saying, I just want you to consider all consequences, because it kinda seems like you haven't.

They’re free to change the licence of future versions.

Only if they are still the only contributor. Once you have more contributors, it gets far tougher to change the licence.

They’re free to change the licence of future versions.

Why do you act like I don't know that? The issue here is that once you realize that the license you chose does not reflect your intentions, the damage has likely already been done. From the article I linked:

I didn't have the foresight to see this coming. I didn't think people so lacked in the spirit of open source. I wanted to promote community contributions, not to have them monetized by other people who don't even provide the source to their modifications. I wanted to grow the tools as a community, not have closed source forks of them overtake my own open source versions.

Literally every library with any traction in any field is MIT licensed.

If the scientific python stack was GPL, then industry would have just kept paying for Matlab licenses

That's a good point! The FSF also developed LGPL for this reason (their particular example was something like OGG that is meant to displace the proprietary (back then) MP3), but you example with game engines is also a good one!

LGPL

The same way, if the BSD internet stack was GPL, we wouldn't have an internet at all.

It doesn't need to be MIT, just LGPL

Free software licenses have their place, a reason Blender has become appealing is GPL.

I agree that permissive licenses have their place for smaller projects (I personally use CC0 from small programs). The FSF suggests Apache license for programs with less than 300 lines (approximately) in order to avoid the overhead that you mentioned. The LGPL was also created in cases where allowing your free code to be used in nonfree contexts can help advance free software as a movement (e.g. writing a free replacement for a proprietary codec). But I also believe that if you really want to support free software, you have a moral duty to release anything "big" that you make under a copyleft license.

AI scrapers don't obey any license. They strip copyright information from all the code they take.

Worse, public domain license, except you need to modify them a lot.

Since they're being trained on GPL (and possibly leaked proprietary) codes, I have banned them from my codebases. I also banned AI art from asset usage on similar + ethical grounds.

I do exactly this: Write code/frameworks that are used in academic research, which is useful to industry. Once we publish an article, we publish our models open-source under the MIT license. That is because companies that want to use it can then embed our models into their proprietary software, with essentially no strings attached. This gives them an incentive to support our research in terms of collaborative projects, because they see that our research results in stuff they can use.

If we had used the GPL, our main collaborators would probably not have been interested.

Possibly a company that discloses a tiny part of their proprietary code

I think the rub here is that most developers aren't developing/publishing their own software, but honing their skills on writing proprietary code while also putting food on the table. To that end, a permissively licensed library is better because the company will actually use it and the developer will gain experience with it that they can then use outside of the proprietary environment to contribute to FOSS projects (some of which may well use GPL). If a GPL end user product gets popular enough, it will eventually be able to use all of that gained experience to compete with the propriety alternatives, so I do think the two can work in tandem.

I was surprised that comment this got so many upvotes, so I'll respond by saying that, with all due respect, I think your argument is much more fallacious than the one you are trying to debunk.

The comic author takes one specific case of an MIT licensed product being used in a commercial product, and pits it against another GPL product.

Yes, this is called an example. In this case, the author is using a particularly egregious case to make a broader conclusion: namely that if you release software under a "do whatever you want" license, it may come back to bite you in the future when it's used in a product that you don't like.

This comic is a warning to developers that choosing MIT/BSD without understanding this fact is a bad choice.

This ignores situations where MIT is the right answer, where GPL is the wrong one

It does not ignore those situations. All situations are multifaceted and need to take multiple considerations into account. The author is trying to argue that people should take care not to overlook the particular one to which he is trying to draw attention.

situations where legal action on GPL violations has failed

Just because legal efforts have failed does not mean that they are not worthwhile. There may be many cases where people avoided misappropriating GPL software because they did not want to deal with the license - there may be cases where people were less hesitant about doing so with MIT/BSD because they knew this risk was not there.

From that I conclude that this falls under The Cherry Picking Fallacy. While humorous, it’s a really bad argument.

Just because the author used a single example does not preclude the existence of others. That is a much more fallacious assumption that invalidates much of your argument.

and all cases where the author’s intent is considered (Tanenbaum doesn’t mind).

Just because Tanenbaum didn't mind does not mean that other developers who mistakenly use MIT/BSD will not either. Also, it honestly shouldn't matter what Tanenbaum thinks because we don't know what his rationale is. Maybe he thinks malware is a good thing or that IME is not a serious issue - if that's the case, do we still consider his sentiments relevant?

commonly referred to as “cuck licenses”

This sentiment makes the enclosing sentence an Ad-hominem fallacy

It does not, in fact. Just because the author used a slang/slanderous term to describe the licenses he doesn't like does not mean that his logical arguments are invalid. Ad-hominem fallacies are when you say "the person who argued that is $X, therefore his logic is invalid", not when he uses a term that may be considered in poor taste.

by attacking the would-be MIT license party as having poor morals and/or low social standing.

Misrepresentation. The author is not arguing that they have poor morals, he is arguing that they are short-sighted and possibly naive with regards to the implications of choosing MIT/BSD.

My conclusion: I appreciate the author for making this post. People should be more aware of the fact that your software could be used for nefarious purposes.

So unless you really don't care about enabling evil people, you should be defaulting to using GPL. If people really want to use your copyleft software in a proprietary way, then it is easily within their means (and resources) to get an exemption from you. The fact that there is so much non-GPL software out there makes the GPL itself weaker and makes it easier for nefarious interests to operate freely.

(Not that I would ever release software under GPL myself. I think software licenses are stupid. But no license basically has the same non-derivative limitation as GPL so it doesn't matter as far as I'm aware.)

and all cases where the author's intent is considered (Tanenbaum doesn't mind).

I think you're ignoring that most people wouldn't want their code used like that. Just because the author doesn't mind doesn't make that typical. Look at Mongo and Elastic. They felt the need to use an arguably non-free license for their code because of perceived abuses. AppGet is another example of something similar.

Dude are you a bot?

And if I were to reverse-engineer a binary then I could still add that code to my software.

That's actually an important factor for ancient software whose source code was lost. A developer could, for example, declare all their old Atari 2600 games to be under GPL by just announcing it in their news blog. Collectors could then hunt for the binary files and decompile them. Decompiled software is still a derivative work, so that source code would still be under GPL. Sadly I'm just aware of one case from years ago where I can't even remember the specifics who and which software it was but he was like "I found some floppy disks from the 1980s, I lost the source code but binaries under GPL, so have fun".

Well you've convinced me. I always thought copyleft sounded cool, but never thought of it in this way of more/less free

Work for hire is a completely different situation. You have to accept the terms of whoever's paying you to do the work.

This comic is more about someone doing something as a hobby project, or writing their own software not under someone else's direction, where they have full freedom to choose their own license.

Can't you just publish the work under the GPL license? I have no idea of programming, maybe this is a dumb question.

I didn't know there was a mailman living in my computer screen.

That is true

https://choosealicense.com/

Very simple guide with in depth examples if you want further clarification.

Not an expert by any means, but it depends.

Are you okay with people potentially making a closed-source fork of your code? If yes, then choose a permissive license like MIT, BSD, or Apache. If you do not want people to make closed-source versions of your code, and want all forks to remain open-source, then go with GPL.

Remember that choosing the GPL means other people, especially businesses, will be less likely to consider your project because that would mean they would have to make their versions open-source, which some people may not want to do.

EDIT: As always, this is not legal advice and I am not a lawyer.

My personal philosophy:

1. Is this trivially small? Don't bother licensing. People will just copy and paste regardless of what I do and I don't care. But it gives you the option to change your mind later. Licenses are irrevocable. (I specifically mean not applying a license and maintaining all rights.)
2. Is it a small part of a whole that people need to use? LGPL. But take this with a grain of salt. FSF says to prefer GPL.
3. Otherwise, AGPL. If there was a more strict but also commonly used license I'd use it instead.

I'll throw my opinions in here.

If you're publishing a standard or a reference application, a permissive license makes sense. What better way to guarantee compatibility than being able to use the reference code in your product. This is what happened with the TCP/IP stack, and it was used in its original form in Windows for years.

If you're making something that you want to build a community around, something more akin to the GPL may be more aligned with your goals. The nice part is, you can include MIT licensed projects as part of your GPL project. This means there is nothing stopping you from building your standard with a MIT license while building your community-driven application using GPL, maximizing the reach of your standard while reducing the risk to your community.

Note that either option opens you to EEE (Embrace, Extend, Extinguish), the GPL option just takes an extra step (clean room implementation of a published standard).

Wish someone would reply to this guy. I am also, a fellow idiot making a thing.

Rule of thumb: if your full license text is longer than your actual source code, you've probably picked the wrong license.

You sound like someone i know xD

But I think gpl isn't limited to software, or is it ? Anyhow, you have different varaites of Create Commons, depending on much limits you put, from 0(nothing) to 4(no commercial use, no remix etc.) they have license chooser on website here

Sometimes you just wanna get fucked. --MIT

Sometimes you want to start a beautiful family that makes the world a better place. --GPL

Match your license with your feelings about the project.

Just don't, you know, pick the former and mistake it for the latter because your ego gets stroked. If you pick MIT, you increase your chances of collaborating, but get in and get out.

Yes you can. You just change the license that lives with the code.

What it changes depends on the project, how it's used, who uses it, etc. It's really a social question of how people might interact with your project differently.

You can use the gpl license in newer versions of your software, but keep in mind, in order to avoid future misunderstandings, that you can only do that because the upstream project uses the mit license. If the project used a reciprocal license like the gpl, you'd need to stick to it or use a compatible one. You can't, for example, take a upstream gpl project and use a mit license

I don't know much of anything about Anycubic, but isn't pretty much everything Creality releases open? How are they withholding from the community?

Permissive licenses are truer to the spirit of free software

Yeah, which is why the person who popularized the concept of Free Software invented copyleft -- oh wait.

"The spirit of Free Software" is freedom for the end user; as such, copyleft is much more truer to it. Remember, the whole thing started with the notion that Xerox shouldn't be able to stop you from fixing your fucking printer by withholding the source code to it.

This is what LGPL is for.

You can still use a library like a library freely, without restriction, but you are keeping your IP protected from being copied cloned and modified elsewhere.

I'm going to guess because of the tools that don't use LGPL.

Which makes them quite limiting and kind of controversial since you have to adopt their license from my understanding, even if used as a library.

I try and use LGPL on all my projects since it allows others to use the Library as a library, and anyone that wants to modify or use the source has to copy left.

Interesting point for the military: If you build a rocket that contains GPL software, and shoot the rocket towards your enemy, you are obliged to send another rocket containing the source code.

Busybox is very much widely used though?

And how is it false that the GPL makes software remain free? Read the free software definition, it's about the freedom of users, not the freedom of people who aren't users (that doesn't really make sense). Free software isn't "source code available to general public even if they aren't users".

I like your idea about using permissive licenses as long as it helps people. But as you said, “if … that makes someone else’s life better or easier …”, what would you do if someone used it to hurt people instead? I’d personally feel like shit if my software were used for that, and as others said in this post, they’d prefer to have entities request an exemption rather than have their code used in ways they don’t approve of. So what say you?