They’re silly, folks. Intellectual property is a spook.
Under communism all software will be free to share, use, and modify without restriction.
This post inspired by the current Ruby mimemagic gem license drama.
In case you’re not following:
- mimemagic is a Ruby library (gem) used for detecting the MIME types of files, either by their extension or by their content
- it’s widely used and included in Rails
- it was MIT licensed
- it was using an xml file from freedesktop dot org, which is a GPL project
- the GPL license means that every project that uses that software must also be GPL licensed - open-source, freely usable/modifiable/etc
- someone from freedesktop pointed this out to the mimemagic maintainer
- the maintainer republished the gem as GPL and yanked all the MIT licensed gems, breaking builds everywhere, and making rails currently uninstallable
I have a big headache because of ideology.
Ah okay, i read the comment as “MIT is bad for public use”. I usually license my open source stuff as MIT since I don’t care what happens to them.
Pure ideology.
The issue with GPL and living in a capitalist society means that if you have any significant library, tool, or framework, GPL licensing it means that you either effectively kill the framework by making sure that it can only ever be open source.
I’m not talking about applications, like Lemmy or whatever, which yeah if someone forks an open source application that I wrote or maintained it should stay open source if I want it to and not get turned into a new Alphabet product.
But that shouldn’t apply to non-application code. GPL-poisoning a framework like Rails would kill it — companies not using it means that you can’t get a job for knowing it, which sadly in capitalist society means that at best it becomes a niche or hobby tool. Contributions drop significantly.
Open source is great but I’m way more likely to find and patch bugs or add features to libraries and frameworks if I’m using them 40+ hours a week and getting paid for it. I don’t have the energy to do my job after work.
LGPL solves this problem pretty well, but GPL will sharply reduce the number of people contributing to it.
Yes and no, it’s technically possible but can become an absolute nightmare from an ops perspective depending on the language and the framework — interpreted languages in particular become a huge nightmare with this approach. You’d need to basically rewrite entire language ecosystems to use that model in the first place.
This would also be a huge headache for reproducibility on developer machines, and that’s even if your org is lucky enough to have a good package management tool chain (like Nix or maybe Docker) and if you limit developers to one operating system.
I’ve been responsible for build reproducibility for a 50ish member engineering department for several years. We mostly use interpreted languages and the number of hours I’ve spent on obscure DLLs breaking shit in weird ways on certain developer machines and not others is already really silly.
Intellectual property is the no 1 “it so obviously shouldn’t exist but go ahead and try telling that to an American-brained person” issue…like people sometimes nod along if you say “how can you OWN a piece of the earth??” Yet I should be jailed for trying to sell merch with Mickey Mouse on it, or downloading music that the artists barely get paid for anyway.
Of course, the most important right of all is the right to make money, not the right to access resources. So beg for your insulin and penicillin you fucking peasant, and enjoy this deep fake commercial of bob Ross drinking a mtn dew.
IP stands for Imaginary Property
the best solution is to simply ignore licenses
are you sure you don’t want to spend hundreds of dollars a month so you can subscribe to adobe so you can have their newest photoshop that is pretty much the same of the last version with a maybe 2 new features most people would not even be aware of how to use instead of just downloading a pirate version of it for free??
