On May 9, 1:03 pm, Steven D'Aprano <st...@remove-this- cybersource.com.au> wrote: > On Sat, 08 May 2010 13:05:21 -0700, Patrick Maupin wrote: > > [...] > > > certainly the > > risk of discovery if you just use a small portion of GPL code and don't > > distribute your source must be very small. There are certainly fewer > > companies getting away with MIT license violations, simply because the > > license is so much harder to violate. > > Do you really think it is harder for copyright infringers to copy and > paste a small portion of MIT-licenced code and incorporate it into their > code than it is for them to do the same to GPL code?
No, but there is less incentive for them to hide their tracks. > > If I produce something under the MIT license, it's because I > > want to give it away with no strings. > > A reasonable position to take. But no strings means that others can add > strings back again. You're giving people the freedom to actively work > against the freedoms you grant. Only on modified versions. The internet is a wonderful thing. A smart user can certainly find my original package if he is interested. A dumb user -- well, maybe I don't want to support them anyway. > This is very similar to (e.g.) the question of tolerance and free speech. > In the West, society is very tolerate of differing viewpoints. Does this > mean that we should tolerate intolerant and bigoted viewpoints? Does > tolerance for other points of view imply that we should just accept it > when the intolerant tell us to change our behaviour? Perhaps some people > think that tolerance implies that we should quietly acquiesce whenever > the intolerant, racist, sexist and bigoted demand we give up our > tolerance and free speech in the name of tolerating their hateful > beliefs. I prefer David Brin's philosophy: > > "We have to go forth and crush every world view that doesn't believe in > tolerance and free speech." Okaaaaay, but I think, given most current fair use interpretations, most software licensing doesn't implicate free speech concerns. In any case, GWB's attempt to impose tolerance and free speech on the rest of the world shows that going forth and crushing may not, in some cases, be the best policy, especially when the crushing involves trampling the very rights you are trying to promulgate. > If you value tolerance, then tolerating the intolerant is self-defeating. Possibly, but you need a measured response. We don't patrol the roads to make sure that nobody driving down them is a KKK member. We deal with KKK members according to their words and/or actions. If you value personal responsibility, you let people make bad choices and then suffer the consequences of their own actions. (Like letting me license my stuff under MIT :-) > And if you value freedom, then giving others the freedom to take freedoms > away is also self-defeating. As I wrote in an earlier post in this thread, a lot of the discussion gets down to the age old question about whether someone is really free if he is not allowed to sell himself into slavery. This is a very interesting philosophical question that has had many words written about it. I personally don't think the answer is black-and-white, but then I'm not much of a religious fanatic about anything. > In the long term, a free society may come to > regret the existence of MIT-style licences -- to use a rather old- > fashioned phrase, these licences give comfort and support to the enemy > (those who would deny freedoms to everyone but themselves). Or in the long term, a free society may come to realize that the license incompatibilities pioneered by the FSF and embodied in the GPL set free software development back by two decades by making an incremental approach difficult. Or it may be that the way things are going is the normal chaotic market approach that actually speeds things up and is actually the optimum way to get there from here. The future is very difficult to predict, and even, in a few years, with 20-20 hindsight, it will be difficult to accurately speculate on what might have been. > But in the short term, as I have said, one can't fight every battle all > the time, and MIT-style licences have their place. It's certainly true > that an MIT licence will allow you to maximise the number of people who > will use your software, but maximising the number of users is not the > only motive for writing software. I think we're in violent agreement that both permissive and GPL licensing have their place. Certainly, the GPL is a more comforting license to some people, and any license that encourages more good free software to be written is a great thing. A developer ought to be able to license his creation under a license of his choosing, and from my perspective the whole purpose of the debate in this thread is to make points for and against various licensing schemes to help the OP and others in their decisions. > > If I'm > > going to use any prebuilt components, those *can't* be licensed under > > the GPL if I want to deliver the final package under the MIT license. > > An over generalisation. It depends on the nature of the linkage between > components. For instance, you can easily distribute a GPLed Python module > with your application without the rest of your application being GPLed. I agree that's probably true. However, if you read and parse Stallman and Moglen very carefully, they don't *want* it to be true and in some cases deny that it's true. The fact that a lot of people who use the GPL take their word for this and also believe it means that it may be morally wrong to make this sort of software combination even in some cases where it is legally permissible, so in general I assume that if someone distributes something under the GPL (as opposed to the LGPL) then their intention is that any system that uses their software as a component is also GPL. > > To me, the clear implication of the blanket statement that you have to > > use the GPL if you care at all about users is that anybody who doesn't > > use the GPL is uncaring. I think that's a silly attitude, and will > > always use any tool at hand, including sarcasm, to point out when other > > people try to impose their own narrow sense of morality on others by > > painting what I perceive to be perfectly normal, moral, decent, and > > legal behavior as somehow detrimental to the well-being of the species > > (honestly -- ebola???) > > In context, you were implying that "freedoms" are always a good, and that > more freedom always equals better. I provided a counter-example of where > more freedom can be a bad. What's so difficult to understand about this? Well, for one thing, it was not my intention to imply that more freedom is always good. I was answering the phrase "Unless you place such a low value the freedom of your users" which is, IMHO, somewhat inflammatory language, with equally inflammatory language. Obviously, the truth is somewhere in the middle. Regards, Pat -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
