Linux magically solves this problem how? GPL isn't magic. It doesn't compel contributing upstream. And half of modern driver stacks live in userspace anyways.
There are also so many G.P.L. violations and nothing is done about it.
I think a big issue is also that it's hard to show actual damages with this kind of copyright violation. It's obviously copyright violation but what damages are there really? Also, there are so many dubious cases where it's not clear whether it is a violation or not.
Software Freedom Conservancy have been doing GPL compliance actions for a long time, especially if you consider their staff's previous lawsuit that resulted in OpenWRT existing. Also the more recent Vizio lawsuit is kinda interesting, it aims to enable any recipient of GPLed binaries to sue for GPL compliance.
> And half of modern driver stacks live in userspace anyways
??? I haven't touched hardware whose driver lives in userspace since 2017 and it was a DMX512 controller of a shitty brand
Whether MIT-type licences give more freedom than copyleft is very disputable, since they make it extremely easy to lose. But you are right that terms like ‘free’ or ‘libre’ are in no way restricted to copyleft.
I think they're saying that "Libre" typically implies Copyleft, with a GPL or AGPL or MPL License. Something that (in some cases) forces you to make your changes available.
LibreOffice, for example, is Mozilla Public Licensed, which is a weak copyleft, like LGPL (I think).
You should have licensed it under AGPL; Anthropic then would have reached you to negotiate a commercial license or contribute back to the project, since AGPL forces server-side code disclosures when deployed. Without that, they can legally use, modify, and profit from it without sharing improvements or compensating you
OP mentioned he took over an existing project. He would then have to track all the people who contributed in order to be able to relicense to AGPL. Even then, Anthropic would probably then write their own.
[A]GPL is like kryptonite to corporations. Very few will take the risk of having to open their own code if someone made a mistake in isolating the GPLed code properly, so most ban the use of GPL for their products and services.
Anthropic would have found a different library or rolled their own, rather than taking that risk. If the library was fundamental, maybe they'd go for a commercial license, but that's usually an option of last resort.
what's to stop them from <prompt>Recreate this library so that I can use it in my project without fear of copyright violation.</prompt> in their very own claude code?
For small enough codebases, that seems like an inevitable reality, eventually.
If you have nearly limitless compute to throw at an issue and a good enough model, then it should be able to create enough test cases to cover most aspects of the codebase (iterating thousands of times until it gets it right) and then eventually write a new implementation in a new language or a slightly different tech stack that passes all of the original tests, alongside a few more hundreds of iterations of refactoring.
I give it a decade until large orgs are doing that to avoid licensing restrictions and other liabilities.
It might even be a boon for security that many organizations have independent implementations of core code projects, even possibly the OS. In such a hypothetical world, security issues that are implementation dependent would not affect such large swaths of the installed software.
If you feed it the library to recreate then this seems like it would necessarily be a derivative work and thus copyright infringement. Proving that they did it may be a challenge...
> You can also find a thriving ecosystem of low-cost derivatives like the Ender series. In many cases, if not most cases, these clones and derivatives contribute basically nothing back to the original project and, at the surface, appear to add dubious value to the ecosystem as a whole.
What an unnecessary jab at the Enders. This person needs a serious financial privilege check.
In the third world the only printers that are affordable are the clones and the Enders, the "good" stuff is usually marked to 2x the price on top of 2x import tariffs because Prusa and Bambu Labs don't have official channels here.
Why would they care about a lower regional pricing for third world countries when they are selling as fast as they can produce? Screw poor people.
How could someone reporting in the industry be so blind about this.
GPL 3 isn't great for either. From a commercial perspective, you can only use it if you lock your stuff up in a datacenter, but not if you ship it on a device that customers own. In practice, that means GPL 3 is not only supporting surveillance capitalism, but is also banning use in commercial systems that do not spy on their users. (The US CLOUD Act says that you have to provide the government with access to all machines you have access to, even if they are overseas. In practice, that means that any commercial GPL 3 stuff that has a footprint in the US is globally subject to US-style dragnet surveillance.)
Granted, bash is now GPL 3 (which is why Apple has to ship an obsolete version, and now defaults to zsh), so you can't use Amber on machines where GPL 3 won't fly (unless it can also compile to posix shell, zsh, etc).
Anyway, if you're interested in freedom for your users, I'd suggest AGPL 3, since it prevents people from locking it up inside the cloud or shipping with proprietary operating systems. At least that way, you're not stripping users' right to privacy like GPL 3 (inadvertently?) does.
These days, Apache and BSD-style licenses are looking better than ever to me, at least when I'm at work.
[edit: You can sell machines with Coreboot (and maybe a proprietary BIOS) + bash. However, you can't ship things that use a secure boot mechanism.
From reading the FSF documentation, it's not clear to me if it's OK to ship a GPL 3 userland on a machine with secure boot enabled, even if it can be disabled later. Apple apparently decided that it is not.]
