this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2024
1004 points (88.6% liked)

linuxmemes

21172 readers
1041 users here now

Hint: :q!


Sister communities:


Community rules (click to expand)

1. Follow the site-wide rules

2. Be civil
  • Understand the difference between a joke and an insult.
  • Do not harrass or attack members of the community for any reason.
  • Leave remarks of "peasantry" to the PCMR community. If you dislike an OS/service/application, attack the thing you dislike, not the individuals who use it. Some people may not have a choice.
  • Bigotry will not be tolerated.
  • These rules are somewhat loosened when the subject is a public figure. Still, do not attack their person or incite harrassment.
  • 3. Post Linux-related content
  • Including Unix and BSD.
  • Non-Linux content is acceptable as long as it makes a reference to Linux. For example, the poorly made mockery of sudo in Windows.
  • No porn. Even if you watch it on a Linux machine.
  • 4. No recent reposts
  • Everybody uses Arch btw, can't quit Vim, and wants to interject for a moment. You can stop now.

  • Please report posts and comments that break these rules!

    founded 1 year ago
    MODERATORS
     

    Context:

    Permissive licenses (commonly referred to as "cuck licenses") like the MIT license allow others to modify your software and release it under an unfree license. Copyleft licenses (like the Gnu General Public License) mandate that all derivative works remain free.

    Andrew Tanenbaum developed MINIX, a modular operating system kernel. Intel went ahead and used it to build Management Engine, arguably one of the most widespread and invasive pieces of malware in the world, without even as much as telling him. There's nothing Tanenbaum could do, since the MIT license allows this.

    Erik Andersen is one of the developers of Busybox, a minimal implementation of that's suited for embedded systems. Many companies tried to steal his code and distribute it with their unfree products, but since it's protected under the GPL, Busybox developers were able to sue them and gain some money in the process.

    Interestingly enough, Tanenbaum doesn't seem to mind what intel did. But there are some examples out there of people regretting releasing their work under a permissive license.

    you are viewing a single comment's thread
    view the rest of the comments
    [–] julianh@lemm.ee 65 points 4 months ago (4 children)

    MIT license is useful for a lot of stuff that is traditionally monetized. Game development tools, for example. I don't think a game engine could become very popular if you had to release your game's source code for free.

    [–] bjorney@lemmy.ca 53 points 4 months ago

    Literally every library with any traction in any field is MIT licensed.

    If the scientific python stack was GPL, then industry would have just kept paying for Matlab licenses

    [–] renzev@lemmy.world 16 points 4 months ago (1 children)

    That's a good point! The FSF also developed LGPL for this reason (their particular example was something like OGG that is meant to displace the proprietary (back then) MP3), but you example with game engines is also a good one!

    [–] uis@lemm.ee 2 points 4 months ago

    libvorbis, yes.

    [–] uis@lemm.ee 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)
    [–] woelkchen@lemmy.world 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

    LGPL

    Depending on the provisions of a console's SDK, that may be not an option because you may be able to deduct some of the SDK's working from the released source code and that may violate the NDA.

    [–] uis@lemm.ee 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)
    [–] woelkchen@lemmy.world 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

    Sure but that attitude doesn't help game developers looking to make a living selling console games. Godot with its licensing, helped by Unity messing up big time, is about to become the entry level game engine... The engine universities and self-taught game developers will likely use it as learning tool. Godot got a big influx of donations even though it's under a permissive license. Small indies don't care to modify the core engine anyway. Most GZDoom games on Steam are living proof of that. Game logic in separate scripts isn't covered by the interpreter's license anyway.

    [–] uis@lemm.ee 0 points 4 months ago (1 children)

    Godot got a big influx of donations even though it's under a permissive license.

    Many opensource game engines received donations when Unity tried to rape gamedevs.

    Game logic in separate scripts isn't covered by the interpreter's license anyway.

    That's why I said game engine can be LGPL. Even GPL, if game logic is loaded separately.

    [–] woelkchen@lemmy.world 0 points 4 months ago

    Game engines can't be LGPL because of console SDK NDAs. At best MPL.

    [–] marcos@lemmy.world -4 points 4 months ago (1 children)

    The same way, if the BSD internet stack was GPL, we wouldn't have an internet at all.

    [–] uis@lemm.ee 2 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    Meanwhile nobody uses BSD this day, everyone is on GPLed Linux

    [–] marcos@lemmy.world 1 points 4 months ago

    Yep, different licenses have different consequences.

    [–] Andromxda@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)
    [–] uis@lemm.ee 1 points 4 months ago

    Because companies weren't sharing modifications under network stack that was originally BSD. I think the only advantage *BSD stack has over Linux is kqueue, which notifies also about amount of avaliable bytes in socket, what epoll doesn't do.