Comments on: You got GPL in my peanut butter

By: Eric Marden

Eric Marden — Sat, 05 May 2012 21:49:12 +0000

That’s a strawman argument and you know it.

By: hakre

hakre — Sat, 07 Apr 2012 09:04:59 +0000

Actually BSD/MIT does not give me all freedoms, like taking over authorship for example. If you talk about real freedom, I would expect as well to have the freedom to claim the authorship. Sadly, it doesn’t offer that. So not really free :/

By: Eric Marden

Eric Marden — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 16:22:00 +0000

Indeed. Its quite hard to perform code publicly, and while it could be likened to the program execution, all software licenses agree on one thing: you’re allowed to run the program (even if some licenses require certain conditions be met before you can run them).

By: Eric Marden

Eric Marden — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 15:19:12 +0000

For works I want to release commercially, I retain copyright or use a non-ShareAlike version of the Creative Commons, for everything else I default to the ShareAlike licenses. Most of the music I listen to is rooted in a long and storied ‘remix culture’and much of my music comes incorporates found sounds and other sampling techniques. Some of those elements are fair use and others aren’t and my thinking around these types of works are a bit different than software, given that pulling elements out of a piece of music is not the same as mixing in code from other sources – there’s almost an implicit amount of creative effort required to pull it off, something that’s not quite true for software development where whole passages can be lifted without changing a thing. This thinking can and does break down under heavy scrutiny but this is how I think about it at least.

By: Eric Marden

Eric Marden — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 22:03:03 +0000

Demetris,

Matt didn’t insinuate that Mark’s article was about why savvy users should seek out GPL software – that was clearly Matt’s own opinion.

Mark’s article did however specifically call out the GPL (with no specific mention of any other licenses) and even spends two paragraphs detailing why and how the GPL specifically protects user’s freedom due to its insistence on variants, forks, and derivatives of the original software must bear the same license.

You are correct that an open source license can change if all of the copyright holders can come to an agreement to change the license, but given the sheer number of contributors to most large GPL code bases, it becomes a matter of impracticality: finding all of the contributors to sign off on such a change would be a monumental task and I can think of only one piece of software that did it, which is squeak (there may be others, but this is the only one I know of).

Regardless, WP is not going to change licenses anytime soon, and Matt’s personal decision tree for license choice is a matter of preference and not universal law.

By: Andy Beard

Andy Beard — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 19:53:35 +0000

My understanding of CC licenses is that they have a different purpose, and that there are some things that cover public performance which aren’t the same as GPL.

By: Ryan Price

Ryan Price — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 12:23:59 +0000

As a musician, what do you have to say about the “Share-Alike” variant of the Creative Commons? Are your feelings the same when it comes to other creative media?

By: Demetris

Demetris — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 13:58:21 +0000

Eric,

Read carefully what Matt says.

First he compares the MIT license with the GPL license to explain why he prefers the latter for substantial works.

(The comparison, by the way, says something inaccurate: That an MIT license can change any day, while the GPL prevents that. That is not true: Any license can change any day as long as the copyright owners agree to change it.)

Then he goes on to cite Mark Pilgrim’s article as a cautionary tale of why “savvy” users should have the same preference.

Now go and read carefully what Mark Pilgrim writes.

Mark Pilgrim would have written the same article if WordPress was licensed under another FREE license. The four freedoms Pilgrim cares about (freedoms 0, 1, 2 and 3) are all guaranteed by ANY free license, of which, as I said, there are many: MIT/X11, Apache, BSD, GPL — the list is long. (See the link I gave above.)

Mark Pilgrim’s article is about FREE licenses and about the pitfalls of non-free licenses. It is not about which license prevents restrictive relicensing (the problem with MT is that its license was restrictive BEFORE the relicensing), it is not about the GPL, it is not about WordPress and the GPL, and it certainly is not about why the GPL license is better or worse than the MIT license, or about why “savvy” users should choose the one or the other.

By: Eric Marden

Eric Marden — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 13:13:10 +0000

While that is true, Demetris, the article specifically calls out WordPress and the GPL. Matt linked to the article as an example of another personal account of someone’s relationship to the GPL. Thanks for you comment.

By: Demetris

Demetris — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 07:24:17 +0000

@Matt

Freedom 0 is a great article and, in my mind, one of the most important milestones in the history of WordPress.

But the “freedom 0” it talks about (“The freedom to run the program, for any purpose”) is not a unique feature of the GPL. It is a feature of ALL free licenses, of which there are many[1] (including the MIT license and several other well-known and widely-used licenses).

For this reason, it is misleading to present the Freedom 0 article as an argument for the GPL exclusively or explicitly. The Freedom 0 article is an argument for ALL free licenses.

[1] List of free and non-free open-source licenses according to the GNU project: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html