Hello,
I have followed the thread because I very interested in the topic of
licencing, and I have read the mailing list archives for licencing
disputes in the past.
The point of selling code is not copyright infringement has already
been made, however I will summarise for completeness. It doesn't matter
whether it is permissive or copyleft, it can be sold either way
(copyleft requires source code to be distributed with it, and permissive
requires attribution). If they remove or modify the licence, then its
copyright infringement because there is no explicit permission that
they can use your code, but the point is you got to prove it is your
code, which is difficult to do.
On the topic of this licencing copilot has likely infringed many
peoples copyright because it never appeared to check whether the
project was freely usable or not, I can push code to github right now
and if I do not include a licence, I reserve all the rights, its source
available, you don't have permission to use it.
However, do not confuse economic system with (F)OSS. Being capitalistic
does not mean you can't believe in open source too, its the fsf/gnu
which believe that capitalism and companies are incompatible with FOSS
software, and that corporate open source is detrimental as they take an
all or nothing approach, they don't want SOME of the code being open
source, they want it ALL to be, personally I see it as a stepping stone
and hopefully more will come.
As Hansteen pointed out, the whole idea of permissive licences is the
freedom to do anything you want, as long as you do not claim you wrote
the code. If you want to incorporate it into a proprietary platform and
sell it, its fully legal to do so (don't forget the attribution for the
code though :P), and ideally, the company would give back some of the
code to help upstream, or provide funding for upstream.
A lot of the emails in this mailing list seem to come off as the
complete opposite of what permissive developers stand for, complaining
about the idea of selling code. I remember reading about OpenSSH, and
why it was important for it to be permissive. You will find OpenSSH
running on almost anything network attached, cisco has made potentially
billions from OpenSSH. Making OpenSSH permissive allowed a rock solid,
secure sshd to be used on any platform and within any product... by
anyone (as long as they don't forget the attribution).
Say if OpenSSH was licenced under (A)GPL, companies would likely not
use it because they wouldn't be able to incorporate it into their IP,
they would then try to code a shoddy implementation, and have numerous
security bugs which would affect the end user. In other words, you are
just shooting yourself in the foot.
(That was my take on it, I apologise if I have misunderstood the
reasons for OpenSSH being permissive)
The majority of permissive developers stand for full freedom, for
anyone, copyleft developers stand for freedom for ONLY the end users,
developers get no such freedom (its also because permissive is simpler
as well). If a developer makes a patch to a permissive codebase which
is proprietary, has the codebase been made proprietary? no. THEIR code
is proprietary, their small change, and it is theirs, and therefore
they should have the choice whether to give it back to upstream or to
keep it to themselves (hopefully they pick the former). Copyleft
opposes this idea, the developer MUST give this back, they have no
freedom to licence THEIR code under a non-compliant licence, I don't
think holding a gun to a developers head and demanding them to give
over their changes could be considered "freedom".
And anyone who has read the archives knows full well just how sharing
GPL developers are with the BSD community. The restrictive nature of
GPL bites developers, OpenZFS is not GPL compatible (despite being
FOSS), and thus can't be included in the Linux source tree, however
FreeBSD and NetBSD ship with OpenZFS support. I will be shocked if
gpl violations will even read your email, let alone reply with any
useful advice, they will simply see it as flaw with permissive licences
and you should licence under AGPLv3. (like copyleft is a silver bullet?)
There will always be bad actors, regardless of economic system,
regardless of political system used, what matters is what you do.
Blaming capitalism as the cause for this is incorrect. There seems to
be too much focus on the selling of the code and whether the developer
has included proprietary code with it... instead of the one thing
permissive developers care about, has the attribution clause been
violated or not?
If you believe that proprietary forks which are sold (with the
attribution given) is wrong (and want to proactively stop it), you are
using the wrong licence. Otherwise, I wish you luck with trying to prove
that they have not given attribution when they have used/sold your
code, and I hope you get the recognition you legally deserve for your
work :)
(Also its much more a GNU/GPL thing to sue people for infringement see
[1] as an example. At the end of the day, the only people who win
lawsuits are the lawyers representing the winning party)
Take care,
--
Polarian
GPG signature: 0770E5312238C760
Jabber/XMPP: polarian@icebound.dev
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BusyBox#GPL_lawsuits
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