:) it is less free in a sense that unlike MIT GNU ensures continuation of free software. for me if someone really cares about free software then choosing MIT is like being a hippy handing out flowers hoping that the world is nice
>for me if someone really cares about free software then choosing MIT is like being a hippy handing out flowers hoping that the world is nice.
I like that, and i like free flovers. What i don't like are lawyers and stuff like the GPLv3, AGPL and all the licenses who try to put some political view on me.
Look it's like that. If you fork and close down a BSD/MIT code base, you loose all those devs (no free flowers from hippies anymore), instead you have to pay your own dev's, juniper can sing a song about that problem. So without any pressure, just with the logic of economy you try to stay as near as possible to the free codes base with your product (and integrate your changes), netflix can sing a song about that too.
Continuation has nothing todo with the license but with interest of developers see -> Hurd
what the FSF hopes for is that if there is enough GPL-type licensed critical software which self-perpetuates free software then free software will become by far the most dominant paradigm. in this sense it is really not hard to see why the license change in the rust rewrite of GNU coreutils is going to become the most dominant issue for FSF. screaming about technical merrits makes no sense
>Continuation has nothing todo with the license but with interest of developers see -> Hurd
i think developer interest has far more to do with technical viablity of a project than license choice. besides, as in all software some projects fail, some succeed, and some are just beginning
>why the license change in the rust rewrite of GNU coreutils is going to become the most dominant issue for FSF
Why is that a problem? There was already toybox (BSD), muslc (MIT), llvm (UIUC (BSD-style)). The dominant issue the FSF has is that they are no technically interested anymore but politically, and so no one need's them, no one wants them.
And listening to Stallman is really boring, the last time he was kind of self-aware was with the Religion of Emacs, since then just repetition and being rude to interviewers and trying to trick devs (Linus and the GPLv3)
BTW: I am NOT talking about the GNU project, just the FSF
simple. imagine: you value free software; you invest a lot of effort to make a really important critical piece of software; you license it under MIT; some company uses your software as a critical component, develops a lot of software on top of it, keeps the source closed, makes massive profit for itself, dominates the market and becomes a monopoly, all thanks to your critical component.
now the question is: are you pissed off? if you are not, choose MIT. if you are pissed off choose a self-perpetuating copyleft license
sure. i know hedgefunds and banks that critically relly on a lot of permissive-licensed software and develop heavily on that code base. conversely, they wouldn't touch copyleft software with a 10 ft pole
one of the other posters also mentioned CUDA's reliance on LLVM. i think that is a very good example also
take the example of nvidia and their use of llvm in nvcc[0]. if llvm used a copyleft license, nvidia would either need to invest into an effort to replace llvm (a huge undertaking), or have cuda released under a free license. given the importance of cuda in parallel data computation, as well as nvidia's monopoly in the machine learning community, i think a copyleft license would have made a world of difference
anyway at this point everything becomes hypothetical. however what is certain is that copyleft licenses could make life much more difficult for monopoly companies than permissive licenses, and i am ok with that, just as i am ok with FSF being agressive about matters pertaining to software freedom. could they have a better and more effective approach, i dont know. maybe. i am not involved in any shape or form with them, but i guess that right now they have my support
