989

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
[-] baatliwala@lemmy.world 51 points 1 week ago

Permissive licenses have their place, a reason Godot engine for games has become appealing is MIT.

[-] ReveredOxygen@sh.itjust.works 5 points 1 week ago

It doesn't need to be MIT, just LGPL

[-] baatliwala@lemmy.world 9 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I believe that still compels you to reveal your source code if you modify Godot itself and release games with that, don't quote me on that though. There's a chance studios want to create a custom implementation for in-house use.

[-] uis@lemm.ee 2 points 1 week ago

I believe that still compels you to reveal your source code if you modify Godot itself and release games with that, don't quote me on that though.

Well, they modified game engine itself. Makes sense.

There's a chance studios want to create a custom implementation for in-house use.

If game studios wanted to create custom implementation, they can do it instead of changing existing one.

[-] uis@lemm.ee 0 points 1 week ago

Free software licenses have their place, a reason Blender has become appealing is GPL.

[-] baatliwala@lemmy.world 11 points 1 week ago

Wut, you create animation not software using Blender

this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2024
989 points (88.5% liked)

linuxmemes

19661 readers
973 users here now

I use Arch btw


Sister communities:

Community rules

  1. Follow the site-wide rules and code of conduct
  2. Be civil
  3. Post Linux-related content
  4. No recent reposts

Please report posts and comments that break these rules!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS