The purpose of GPL and Free Software (which it has actually had resounding success in) is to develop a free commons which will stay free and not be exploited.
It's not for you to exploit to make a buck, and if that excludes your project, that's fine.
There are lots of things I would never consider free-licensing, but I think people badly miss the point of free software because they are stuck thinking only in terms of their own needs and personal benefit.
Again, if you don't want to use or contribute to free software, that is perfectly reasonable. But just bear in mind that the Linux kernel and GCC are incredibly valuable tools which are firmly in the commons and will remain free, and which you have benefited enormously from the use and free availability of.
It's not for you to exploit to make a buck
The GPL is very ideological, and there’s nothing wrong with that but you can see the cost of that right here: where someone pointing out there is a hidden cost is shamed for doing so. Given the chance of contributing code or community to two similar projects, I prefer the one that’s more about building than it is about contracts.
Do you really think it's fine and good for Google to take work explicitly intended by its authors to preserve free computing and work around the licensing to make money without preserving the intent and purpose of its license?
Shaming would be much stronger. I even pointed out that participating in it is totally elective and I personally would not in many cases.
Framing it in terms of your own cost/benefit is missing the point, though, and there is a meaningful and valuable purpose to it outside of maximizing your personal benefit in the moment of choosing a particular library.
That said, do you think it is in fact protecting the user from exploitation, or promoting the health of a free commons, to use "free" software in nonfree products which do not provide their source code to the user nor guarantee the user's ability to study, extend, and modify the software that they are using?
I think the argument for Free Software is at the very least strong and good. There can be other approaches to solving the problems FSF wants to solve, too, but it is a totally valid and non-debatably historically useful position at the very least.
The freedom to deny other people the freedom you are enjoying is not compatible with the notion of freedom. It's hypocrisy.
That's not to say there is no place for MIT/BSD licenses, but it is not with general application software or libraries used to build such.
To me that is just wrong.
Yes, you need to be careful when you integrate GPL and LGPL code into your proprietary code base, and in some cases you just cannot do it. But so what? You are not entitled to use of that code. If you can't use it because of its license, then that's life: move on and find something else that you can use, or write it yourself.
And you also seem to think that if you screw up, and do depend on a GPL library (for example) in a proprietary code base, then you're required to give away the source for your 20 million proprietary lines of code. But that's not the case. There are many different remedies possible. One (common) remedy might be to cease distribution of the infringing code, remove the GPL component, replace it with something else, and re-release.
I think there are very few copyright owners who release their code under the GPL who would immediately push for the remedy to be your company releasing all of their proprietary code under the GPL. At least certainly not at first contact, if the company is capable of acknowledging their mistake and working in good faith to correct it. And even if a copyright owner did decide to push for this, it is ultimately up to a court to decide, and it seems vanishingly unlikely that a court would order that remedy, especially if the company was offering less-extreme, good-faith options.
> It is trying to force my will on other people’s code
I just wanted to call this out specifically, because, again: absurd. Please look at it from the default state: you do not get to use someone else's code at all. That's what copyright law says, in the absence of another agreement. Even if you have the source code to my library (or whatever), you cannot use it in your product unless I have given you a license to do so.
If you are considering using someone else's code in your project, one of the first things you should do is look at the license. If you see GPL, and don't want to abide by the terms of that license, you move on and find something else. That code is not trying to "force its will" on you. You are free to use it and follow its licensing terms, or move on. You are no poorer because that code is there, as you are not entitled to use it without a license anyway.
Unfortunately you've fallen victim to years of anti-GPL propaganda and FUD. A 10-liner GPL Python script is not going to "infect" an org with 20 million lines of closed source code. Suggesting that it's possible, even "in theory", is absurd.
The GPL purposely weaponizes source code in a way that other open source licenses do not, and personally I would rather hope that people decide on their own to release their changes than invite the lawyers into my code. Using code licensed this way is okay for projects that are already 100% GPL or aren't worth owning.
Yeah, apparently people moved on and the GPL is loosing significance.
“You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License”.
That is pretty clear. If you distribute software that contains a GPL component, the whole lot is considered GPL. Whether the GPL is 20 lines or a million is irrelevant.
This is why the GPL and similar licenses are called viral. They infect other people’s code and try to impose license terms on it.
This is also why licenses like LGPL were created, to try to be a little more reasonable. But that seems to have failed almost completely.
I've made lots of money and I publish every piece of code I've ever written to do it.
What you are describing must have been written by someone who does not believe in software freedoms.
Software freedom is an ideology, not a license. If you license part of your software as free software but not other parts of your software, you do not believe in software freedoms for the users of that software.
It's sort of like a factory that only uses slave labor for one step of production. Does that factory operator believe in human rights if their line is 90% respectful of the dignity of mankind?
What you are describing must have been written by someone who does not believe in software freedoms.
I've made lots of money and I publish every piece of code I've ever written to do it.
It is not that simple. The GPL "takes away" some rights of the distributor of the software (their ability to restrict redistribution for example), but grants rights to the end user (the ability to modify and redistribute) of the software.
It's all perspective. As the developer the GPL may feel limiting, but as a user it is liberating.
I'm not saying that's a bad trade off to make, but it is absolutely a fact that the GPL takes away some rights. Or, since it is a copyright license, where the default in copyright is you get no rights, you might instead say it does not give all possible rights. I think it's important to recognize that sometimes "the greater good" comes at a price.
I'm curious to know what your personal method is. Consulting, paid support, proprietary dual-licensing maybe? There are indeed many ways to make money and still publish code as FOSS; the tricky thing, as always, is to work out which way is the right one for you.
GPL's freedom is not about you as a dev, it's about me as a user.
This is not true. What is harmed (and has effectively been destroyed) is the market to make money from selling libraries.
Many might be too young to remember, but it used to be that one could make a nice living selling libraries to companies.
In 1990 (just to pick a year) when BigCo Inc was developing a software project and needed library foo, they generally had two choices: build it internally or purchase one for money from a third party. This meant there was a nice market for small software houses to sell all kinds of libraries to BigCo.
Imagine for a moment a world where all open source is GPL. BigCo wouldn't touch the GPL libraries so they still either build or buy and we (developers) can continue to make money from our work.
Unfortunately it is no longer possible to make money from libraries because anything BigCo wants can be had for free in a BSD/MIT license so they get to take all the volunteer work, profit from it and give nothing back.
While that's certainly capitalism at its finest, I don't think that's a good outcome for the user base as a whole, or of the community.
This is true for you, now. But that's not to say it does not increase freedom over time, over a couple of generations of software enhancements.
This is why I do both. I copyleft some projects. Others, I don't. It all depends on the balance of needs.
Although, for me, the issue isn't releasing source code at all. That's orthogonal to the issue of whether or not to use an open source license. I have yet to release software, open source or otherwise, where I haven't made the source available. For my non-OSS projects, that source is only available to people who have purchased the software, though.
To put it another way, as a software developer I would personally like to make a living analogously to how a successful book’s author makes a living. Such an author can make a living primarily or even exclusively from writing each book, not from giving away the book for free and making custom versions of that book for individual readers, or by offering and charging for live, public readings of the book, or by asking for voluntary donations from those that download the book, or by selling merchandise related to the book.
I personally want to make a living making software products, not services. GPL doesn’t seem to offer me a way to do this.
It's exactly the opposite!
If you want to make a living making software, you make it GPL. Any corporation that wants it will need to pay you for a commercially licensed version they can use (it's your code, you can license it in as many ways as you want). The hobbyists can use the free GPL version and the companies can pay you for your work. Win-win.
If you make your software BSD/MIT licenses you can't make any money, every corporation that wants it just takes it for free so you can't make a living out of it. You could try selling support but if your library is great and easy to use, not much money in that.
Unfortunately for you (and me) even if you make a really awesome library and license it as described above, you still can't make a living because there are other similar libraries with MIT/BSD license and the corporations will use those (even if they are inferior to yours) to avoid paying you. Thus, the market for selling software like this has been eliminated and we're stuck selling subscription services.
If you don't feel right for open sourcing software you wrote for someone else, you could always offer your client a discount to let you open source the software. There are quite a few companies that now make their money supporting open source software, even when they aren't writing it themselves. I've done this myself, and I think it's a lucrative business model that still gives everyone involved freedom.
These two things are pretty unrelated.
For Android apps, a common model to have a paid version in the play store and still publish the source code on github with GPL. Here the GPL actively protects you against somebody coming, doing some minor modifications and then pushing their own paid-for version to the app store while not publishing the source code (which they could easily do with other licenses).
This creates an interesting and important second-order effect that allows it to accomplish its goals without needing to boil the ocean by ensuring every user has the same ability to develop the same software, blurring and reducing the line between user and developer, creator and consumer. Practical considerations often prevent the expression of this effect but the opportunity doesn’t even exist in most other situations, particularly when you get to web services.
I didn’t reply to the important issue of money, the fundamental developer problem, because I’ve never been in a situation to sell my own code: my own projects have zero to do with my rent work.