But in the long run freedom could be impacted. Imagine this becoming popular. Then some proprietary fork happens, by some tech giant, which adds some feature that is great. Then lots of people, who did not care for GPL in the first place switch to that proprietary version, because ir is oh so much more convenient. Suddenly distros get pressure to use the new thing. Or people switch to whatever has the proprietary replacement. At some point the majority of the people could be using that, instead of libre software. Perhaps your next employer obligates you to use the proprietary thing, because it is popular and they don't want to deal with people using less common OS.
Whatever the masses do can always have impact on what you can do, or are forced to do. For example quitting your job, because you want to use the libre tool, when your employer tries to force you to use the proprietary tool. "Why can't you be a good employee like eeeeveryone else?"
Most distros won't allow proprietary software. When mongodb switched license, most distros stopped providing it. Now that redis also became non-free, distros are pushing the free forks.
> Your freedom is not the least impacted by the MIT or BSD licences. The software distributed is and remains free and open source.
Only the original as delivered by the original dev-team. The derivatives can be, and often are, closed off. That's the opposite of "free and open source".
Xbox, Nintendo's various consoles, and Sony's are all DRM'd to hell and back. If BSD wasn't available under terms Sony liked, they'd be using QNX or something more obscure and just as inaccessible to their users. For better or worse, all the big console manufacturers see their ability to lock down their platform as vital to their development and business strategies. Vital to their ability to charge $60 for a few gigabytes of 1s and 0s.
The Playdate console seems a lot friendlier to developers and end users alike, but that's precisely because they're a smaller player in the market and need that advantage. Same dynamic played out with drivers for SCSI controllers, and GPUs under Linux, where the biggest players were the last to provide quality open source support. Seems to have a lot more to do with market position than with licenses, to me.
> If BSD wasn't available under terms Sony liked, they'd be using QNX or something more obscure and just as inaccessible to their users.
That's the point: if they don't want to contribute their changes back, they should spend their own money writing their own software.
Right now, they'd take thousands of hours of effort from the community, add a few hundred of their own and then close off the product from the very community that they so willingly took this charity from. Yay BSD license!
If they had to use QNX or similar, they'd pay to do it. If they had to use GPL, they'd pay to close off their changes, which would be great for funding more free software.
> For better or worse, all the big console manufacturers see their ability to lock down their platform as vital to their development and business strategies. Vital to their ability to charge $60 for a few gigabytes of 1s and 0s.
Well that's why I divided the licenses into "pro-user" and "pro-corporate". The BSDs are pro-corporate.
> If they had to use QNX or similar, they'd pay to do it. If they had to use GPL, they'd pay to close off their changes, which would be great for funding more free software.
It sounds like you're advocating for wiping them all from history and outlawing everything but GPL licensed code, which just isn't possible, nor desirable. Sorry?
> It sounds like you're advocating for wiping them all from history and outlawing everything but GPL licensed code, which just isn't possible, nor desirable.
That's a strawman: Nothing I said implied any sort of genocide.
I'm pointing out that the pro-user license has more benefits than the pro-corporate licenses.
Is there another reading of "If they had to use" that I'm not aware of? Seems to imply force either through legal or practical means.
> the pro-user license has more benefits than the pro-corporate licenses
I'm a user and a developer and neither of those descriptions seem to apply to the licenses being discussed. I benefit from both, as do you, as does the whole world.
I bet proprietary software vendors get a real chuckle out of this sort of infighting.
> Is there another reading of "If they had to use" that I'm not aware of?
Well, yes.
You started your argument with "If BSD wasn't available they'd be using QNX".
So I followed on from that with "If they had to use QNX... If they had to use GPL..."
I was just following the logical outcome of your "If BSD wasn't available" argument, not advocating that BSD must not be available.
> I'm a user and a developer and neither of those descriptions seem to apply to the licenses being discussed.
I don't know how you can think that "pro-user" doesn't apply to the GPL - it's the singular goal of the GPL to protect user freedoms. This has never been ambiguous.
GPL == freedom for the user. It's always been this way. This is nothing new. You cannot, with a straight face and at this point in the conversation, claim that you didn't know the goal of the GPL.
As far as the pro-corporate aspect of BSD, that's pretty clear to me, because of how extensively corporations were able to mine BSD code for shareholder benefit.
So, yeah, with BSD, you might argue differently (for example, argue that corporate mining of BSD code is a side-effect), but there is no way to argue that GPL isn't pro-user.
> GPL == freedom for the user. It's always been this way. This is nothing new. You cannot, with a straight face and at this point in the conversation, claim that you didn't know the goal of the GPL
Your words. My words indicate that I see both licenses and being pro-everyone.
> As far as the pro-corporate aspect of BSD, that's pretty clear to me, because of how extensively corporations were able to mine BSD code for shareholder benefit.
Mining is an ecologically destructive activity which bears no resemblance to using software under the terms which it was licensed.
i mean that is ok but i do not want them using open source commons without any contribution. it is not a logic thing. i just hate oss being basically abused in that way
I think it's a mistake to see it as abuse. They are using the software under the terms it was licensed to them by the developers. So no abuse has happened. Doubtless they have made contributions to that software in the process as well.
Would I prefer every computer be open to general purpose computing, and infinitely hackable by it's owner? Sure. But I also respect that they have reasons not to take that route. And as consoles and PCs converge, there are fewer and fewer reasons for me to be upset about one manufacturer's choices. I voted with my dollars and bought a Steam Deck. I think the preservation of culture is a much stronger argument for breaking console DRM and emulation.
I get it. I am really excited about the current state of open source FPGA tooling, along with newly inexpensive and capable FPGAs as well as new low cost foundry shuttle services. Also the massive productivity boost LLMs provide. Feels like I have the world's most capable army of software development interns for $20/mo.
Projects like MiSTer are very inspiring. Risc-V as well. Sam Zeloof's garage chip fab work too. And we even have reasonable platforms for developing open source phone stacks like Pinephone - I remember the bad old days of OpenMoko.
I think proprietary chips and boards are about to go the way of proprietary *nix. It'll take a decade or more, and lots of work. But the future's never looked brighter for open systems.
There will always be a premium on latest node fabs. Nothing to be done about that without billions of dollars to invest, which comes with it's own strings. In time sub-10nm fabs will be older and less expensive as newer nodes come online.
I don't need the fastest or lowest power devices though. I'd happily trade some of each for a more flexible future-proof machine. I just need an FPGA big enough to hold a linux-capable core or two, with graphics and audio and networking at an affordable price. Bonus points if it has some extra space for developing new peripherals.
I think it'd be pretty easy to design something to conform to the raspberry pi compute module interface, for example, which would make it a drop-in replacement for lots of useful systems like laptops, NUCs, and other such stuff. Gotta love defacto standard interfaces.
