Hardware and software licencing

This is politics rather than tech, but here we go. I felt like taking licencing out of the Libreboot thread. Mods, feel free to move this to /r/ for being politics. >>507 It may be easy to read, but it's not short. Interestingly enough, both hardware licences I've read were more like the GPL than the MIT licence. I know the GPL isn't short since I've read it multiple times. The GPL is not short enough to put at the top of every file you write, unlike most copyfree licences.

>>523 I don't think that the freedom to take away freedoms can make a thing "freer" in any sense. All BSD does is give you an "open core" to develop on and get all the proprietary perks of being able to control your users and not be held accountable for your soykafty code. That's power, not freedom. You can choose to take it or not I guess but that's only a "freedom" in the trivial sense that you can choose to be anti-freedom or not. MIT is like BSD in terms of freedoms so all that applies to MIT too. There's an urgency to going as GPL/AGPL as possible over MIT/BSD. With MIT/BSD proprietary developers can make products to compete with free software and never give back their source. For a community project, MIT/BSD will just lead to the community's work being exploited for profit by companies that don't want to help the community that helped them. Majority of cases, free project will get eaten by nonfree project without deliberate effort, or the free project will only be an underfunded platform that bigger moneymakers build off. There's literally no benefit to licensing a community project with MIT/BSD over GPL/AGPL unless your goal is to make existing proprietary applications less soykafty (e.g. OpenSSH). They're mostly just useful for making walled garden ecosystems more attractive; build a platform on MIT/BSD, proprietary developers will want to build on it because they get all the support to develop their soykafty apps on the cheap with none of the obligations. The urgency is that walled garden bullsoykaf is beloved by every corporation selling you almost everything you own that has a computer in it. IoT is a prime example, but your PC, your car, etc. Everyone knows this. BSD/MIT give companies the "freedom" to take control away from the owner of the device, owner of the account, etc. You get a prosthetic arm, BSD/MIT will not stop the company who made it from suing you for modding your arm under the DMCA. You patch the firmware on your arm because the company that made it is gone and you don't get support, be prepared to be sued to death by copyright trolls. If you lose your biological arm, whatever you get, you will never own. Extend it to Neuralink under BSD/MIT, now there are parts of your brain on someone's server somewhere and you don't necessarily own them, even if you could download them maybe you can't re-host them, if you tamper with your head to disable the Neuralink prepare to be sued. Don't expect to ever be able to see your brain, maybe it's tampered with or monitored for marketing or spying. Just accept how it thinks and move on with your life. You sure do feel like a soykaf right now, don't you? Why do we want free projects to help nonfree competitors? You make a bad decision and go with a nonfree service once, you could be locked in. Especially with users' bodies, identities, brains on the line, that's unacceptable.

>>526 >being able to control your users With a MIT licence, you can't control your users, since your users can use and fork your code in any way they desire if they disagree with you. The MIT licence makes it easy for users to use your code. It is impossible to control users of MIT-licenced software.

It's not politics, it's philosophy actually. And that thing gets really complex if you put the freewill discussion on table and economic models. Why people are always so reductionist there days?

>529 I'm not saying that some don't. Its a far less frequent occurrence then with BSD licensed stuff. To add, the talk about licenses doesn't take into account code quality. I don't see the linux network stack handling multiple saturated 100gig NICs (see netflix and freebsd).

>>528 With a permissive license the expected outcome is some big company taking the code and improving it with the money and resources they can invest in it to pay programmers, etc. Then they maximize their profits/recoup their investment by making it proprietary and exploiting their users. From here it becomes popular with the average user which cares not about freedom. Next thing you know they become industry standard and everyone else is forced to use it. (Hard to convince your boss to use the ethical/free version if it has less capability). That's unacceptable.

My wish is to one day make proprietary software development fringe exceptions. Therefore I am on the GPL side.

>>541 >My wish is to one day make proprietary software development fringe exceptions. I have the same wish, but I don't think licensing can solve that issue. I think one would have to destroy capitalism to destroy closed-source. Has anyone else also seen that open-source and market economies are at conflict with each other?

>>538 You realize that is not how it works in the real world right? No company wants to employ extra engineers to help maintain a 100 000 line diff that breaks every time upstream pushes a new version. They would rather keep the same number of engineers and push whatever they don't deem as secret upstream so that they don't have as hard of a time applying it during the next release. If you don't think that this is what happens you are delusion and should try following FreeBSD development for a while. Netflix for example follows head, and they push changes that make it so that their stuff doesn't break and so that it is easier to maintain in the future.

Public Domain is the best license, if you can call a lack of license such. The best code is in the public domain, it doesn't restrict you in any way, it's a gift to the world. Public domain is like mathematics: you don't claim it's yours, you do it for what matters: knowledge itself, and you dont hold zeal over your project. When your project grows big and complex you get attached to it, to it's bugs and it's flaws. You have to patch it, you can't just throw it away and remake it from scratch, it owns you like a spook! And so you believe that you own it by applying restrictions on it. Only the Public Domain can save you from this nightmare. By holding any other license, you are binding yourself to the affairs of this world, you are Taking Things Too Seriously™. You can never be free through attachment to things that are essentially ephimeral. Let me quote the Daodejing for a moment: "Therefore the sage manages affairs without doing anything, and conveys his instructions without the use of speech. All things spring up, and there is not one which declines to show itself; they grow, and there is no claim made for their ownership; they go through their processes, and there is no expectation (of a reward for the results). The work is accomplished, and there is no resting in it (as an achievement)." So embrace the Public Domain, write your code like you don't care, only then will you realize, it really doesn't matter.