With GPL, you're programming Freedom. With MIT, you're programming for free.

The MIT license guarantees freedom for developers. The GPL guarantees freedom for end users.

People seem to think that those who choose permissive licences don't know what they're doing. Software can be a gift to the world with no strings attached. A company "taking" your code is never taking it away from you, you still have all the code you wrote. Some people want this. MIT is not an incomplete GPL, it has its own reasons.

For example, OpenBSD has as a project goal: "We want to make available source code that anyone can use for ANY PURPOSE, with no restrictions. We strive to make our software robust and secure, and encourage companies to use whichever pieces they want to."

Permissive licenses (commonly referred to as "cuck licenses")

That's where I stopped reading. 👎

I published some packages under MIT a couple of years ago. It is difficult to understand at first, I was happy with the license because anyone could use it like they want.

Today, I understand that I want to use GPL. With GPL everyone can use the code like they want and I can use their code like I want.

If I choose MIT it's because I don't care if people "steal" the code. This meme is stupid and condescending, if he didn't mind that Intel used it's code it's because he didn't mind, that why he chose MIT. Why is Intel beating him in the meme? It makes no sense. You are proyecting your thoughts onto him as if that's how he felt, but then you show that he didn't feel the same way you do. Why?

When I see a GPL license I don't see freedom. I only see forced openness, which makes me immediately avoid that library, since I can't statically link to it.

Freedom means that everyone can use your code. Yes, that means for-profit corporations. For free, without restrictions.

If I want to make a piece of software to improve people's lives and I don't care to do it for free, I'll choose MIT. If it gets "stolen" by a for-profit corporation it only makes it better, because now my software has reached more people, thus (theoretically) improving their lives.

There’s nothing Tanenbaum could do

Tanenbaum doesn’t seem to mind

Today OP was very dumb and showed his ignorance of the concept "I do whatever I fucking want." Don't be like OP.

people regretting releasing their work under a permissive license

They're free to change the licence of future versions. OP also failed at understanding the concept of licences. He's such a silly moron!

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.

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

Are we really going to start this pointless discussion again? They are two licenses with different use cases and different considerations. GPL has a lot more mental overhead to using it, MIT is hands off, both of these aren't inherently invalid.

Also Tanenbaum in your own link mentions that Intel probably would have just written their own microkernel if need be.

AI tools have turned them all into MIT licenses

I could imagine MIT might be interesting for Software released by public institutions, that are meant to be used by the industry in any way they want. Sometimes earning money with your product might even be impossible due to restrictions. So, not really Software released with the FOSS philosophy.

Otherwise I also never really understood why anyone would use the MIT license.

The two licenses have distinct use cases, and only overlap for some definitions of "free" software. I also think both the comic artist and OP set up a fallacious argument. I'll add that in no way do I support Intel's shenanigans here.

The comic author takes one specific case of an MIT licensed product being used in a commercial product, and pits it against another GPL product. This ignores situations where MIT is the right answer, where GPL is the wrong one, situations where legal action on GPL violations has failed, and all cases where the author's intent is considered (Tanenbaum doesn't mind). From that I conclude that this falls under The Cherry Picking Fallacy. While humorous, it's a really bad argument.

But don't take it from me, learn from the master of logic himself.

commonly referred to as “cuck licenses”

This sentiment makes the enclosing sentence an Ad-hominem fallacy, by attacking the would-be MIT license party as having poor morals and/or low social standing. Permissive licenses absolutely do allow others to modify code without limit, but that is suggested to be a bad thing on moral grounds alone. That said, I'd love to see a citation here because that's the first I've heard of this pejorative used to describe software licensing.

I can't afford a lawyer so I have no wishy washy ideals of taking a corporation to court for stealing my work ☺️

Controversial opinion: Copyleft is actually more free than permissive licenses.

Because the way the GPL works is how the world would be if there were no licenses and no copyright at all. Because then anything made public is free to use. And if I were to reverse-engineer a binary then I could still add that code to my software.

But since we live in a world where we play make-believe that you can make something public and still "own it" at the same time (e.g. copyright) and where using reverse-engineered code can still get you into legal trouble, the GPL is using their own silly logic against them (like fighting fire with fire) to create a bubble of software that acts like a world without any licenses.

Permissive licenses don't do that, they allow your open software to just get repurposed under a non-free paradigm which could never occur in a world with no licenses. And so ironically permissive licensing in a world that is (artifically) non-permissive by default does not reflect a world with no licenses, and is thus less free than Copyleft.

I am a consultant who sometimes writes code to do certain useful things as part of larger systems (parts of which may be commercial or GPL) but my clients always try to impose terms in their contracts with me which say that anything I develop immediately becomes theirs, which limits my ability to use it in my next project. I can to some extent circumvent this if I find a way to publish the work, or some essential part of it, under an MIT license. I'm never going to make money off of my code directly; at best it's middleware, and my competitors don't use the same stack, so I'm not giving them any real advantage... I don't see how I'm sabotaging myself in this situation; if anything the MIT license is a way of securing my freedom and it benefits my future customers as well since I don't have to rebuild from scratch every time.

The MIT is still a free software license. It is completely valid to use it from a Foss perspective.

this one?

I'm an idiot making a thing, and I need to pick a license. Where's a good place to talk to people more knowledgeable than myself on the subject?

EDIT: so my thing isn't software, i probably should have mentioned that. I am making a ruleset and setting for something similar to but not exactly a tabletop rpg. The ORC license sounds promising, but the legalese makes my brain gray out. ChatGPT tells me to use a version of the Creative Commons license, but ChatGPT isn't exactly reliable.

Interestingly enough, Tanenbaum doesn’t seem to mind what intel did.

Yeah, duh. Intelligent people read licenses before they pick one.

But there are some examples out there of people regretting releasing their work under a permissive license.

That's like signing a contract before reading it and then complaining that it contains provisions that surprise you when they are enacted. I'm baffled on a regular basis by how many people understand FOSS licenses only on the basis for hearsay, for example when people insist that GPLed source code must be made available free of charge for everyone. The GNU project has a FAQ about the GPL that spells it out that this is not the case and yet hardly anyone discussing FOSS licenses has even read the FAQ.

My project is MIT because the upstream project is MIT, could I slap a GPL on there? How would I do that? What would that change?

Someone please SUE ANYCUBIC AND CREALITY FOR STEALING KLIPPER !!!!!!! Make them give back to the community that created their business !!

Permissive licenses are truer to the spirit of free software but copyleft, while kind of a copout, seems more pragmatic due to corporations. I wouldn't avoid copyleft licensing on principle or anything but it feels incongruous to want to make something freely available to all but then nitpick over how they use it.

I find MIT to be good for libraries as you can get companies using it and working on it. However, apps and binaries should be copyleft to not get fucked over.

Busybox was quickly replaced by BSD-licensed Toybox everywhere for that exact reason.

Copyleft licenses (like the Gnu General Public License) mandate that all derivative works remain free.

This is false. It's perfectly legal to take GPL-licensed work, modify it, and sell it. As long as the work itself does not reach the general public, you don't need to release it's source code to the public (e.g. your work for the military, you take money for your work, and provide source code to them, but not release it publicly).

When I think of Copyleft licenses, I just think of it as "Use this program as you see fit, but if you share/redistribute it, you may not add any restrictions to it."

I don't understand why there are communities that hate GPL so much. It is such a powerful license that practically guarantees that the program will be free for any who wants it, it just won't allow someone to add restrictions to it.

I've heard arguments against the GPL like: "It's too restrictive!" Only if you want your program to be muddled with any kind of program that doesn't respect freedom. Saying the GPL is too restrictive to developers is like saying the 13th amendment of the US Constitution is too restrictive to slave owners.

Tannenbaum is fucking asshole. Isn't he the idiot that told Torvalds "you certainly would have failed my class if you submitted your OS as a final project?"

The guy deserves no respect.

Really?...

Just about every FOSS and Source-Available license that I've seen is perfectly valid. As a software developer, one has the option to choose how they wish to license their software. This can be based upon one's personal philosophical view or what seems most appropriate for the piece of software.

Not everyone is motivated by profit. Most software that I develop personally is permissively licensed because IDGAF as long as I have enough to get by. If I write some code that makes someone else's life better or easier, that's more than enough for me.

Wait. What am I saying? This is the Internet and, according to the rules of corpo social media, we're all supposed to be dicks to each other to further "engagement". WHICH ONE OF YOU SAVAGES IS USING TAB INDENTATION INSTEAD OF BLOCKS IN YOUR LICENSE FILES?!?;?!!!!111one

Permissive License promoters are corporate trolls

Apache and GPL should replace MIT

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.

Is that arguable because it's complete bunk? You may as well say the same about IPMI.

Public domain or GTFO!

I've seen busybox in a lot of software that's not free. One notable example is VMware. It runs on top of esxi as a package to provide command line functions to VMware hosts.

I'm pretty sure (IDK, I don't do development for vmw) that it's running on top of VMware's kernel, and they have binaries that you execute from busybox that interface with the vmkernel to accomplish things.

I don't have all the details and I'm far from an operating system guru/developer/whatever. I think that's permissible under copyleft, since they're not running things that you paid for on top of busybox, but I have no idea. I'm also not a lawyer, but they've been doing it forever, as far as I know.

Does anyone know more about it? I'm just surprised that smaller fish have fried for infringement, but someone like VMware is shipping busybox without reprocussions.

Maybe it's not busybox? Maybe it's something that just looks and acts like busybox? Idk.

TIL openssh, xorg, apache, nginx, all of *bsds are cuck-licensed.

While GPL-licensed linux, used by every corp out there, is not.

but since it’s protected under the GPL, Busybox developers were able to sue them and gain some money in the process.

Don't need to steal anything. Lots of today's usage doesn't involve giving a binary to the customer. Thus Google, FB and who else don't have to share any of their internal changes to Linux.

I've taken up saying "temporarily free/libre" and "permanently free/libre" instead of the permissive/copyleft, since imo "permissive" has a suggestive positive connotation. Especially to ppl who do not know much about the free software movement

Permanently Deleted

I support MIT because I believe that’s how all software should be

Everyone builds upon each other

We are at risk

of losing many developers who would otherwise choose a license like the GPL. Fortunately, I'm glad to be surrounded by people, just like you, who care about licenses like GPL. By uploading this type of content and engaging with it, be show our commitment to it. I wish to suggest how we can deal with this threat.

We will lose developers who choose GPL if we use words that suggest GPL is "restrictive". Sure, the word "restrictive" was avoided in this meme by using the word "copyleft", but the cognitive jump from "permissive" to "restrictive" is minimal: just add an "opposite" and you've got "permissive is the opposite to restrictive". It really is that simple. That's how brain works (check out Relational Frame Theory to see how that works).

So what can we do about it?

Well, we can approach this with science. There is a historical global trend towards people being more meta-cognitive. That means that people are becoming more aware of how our thoughts interpret everyday reality and how to be intentional with our relationship with our thoughts so that we live better lives. We know this trend is happening to virtually everyone everywhere because of the work of brilliant sociologists like Anthony Giddens and Christian Welzel. Heck, even the history of psychology —going from noticing and changing behaviors (behaviorism) to noticing and changing behaviors and thoughts (cognitive-behaviorism), to noticing and changing the context and function of behaviors, thoughts, and emotions (functional contextualism)— reflects this trend.

We can use meta-cognition in our favor; we can use the meta-cognitive tool of framing to change how we think about GPL and MIT licenses. Effective communicators like influencers, political campaign experts, and influential activists use framing all the time. For example, instead of using the dangerous framing that suggests GPL is 'restrictive', we can use another one that truly displays the virtues of the license.

What would this other frame look like? I may not have a perfect answer, but here are some

ways of framing (thinking about) the relationship between licenses like GPL and MIT:

(ironically!!!, these were 'suggested' by an LLM; I wonder if these frames already existed)

• "Investment-Protecting Licenses" vs. "Investment-Risking Licenses" (as in developers invest by working on projects that they could (not) lose the ability to contribute to)
• "Community-Resource-Guarding Licenses" vs. "Exploitation-Vulnerable Licenses"
• "Give-and-Take Licenses" vs. "Take-and-Keep Licenses" ⭐
• "Freedom-Ensuring Licenses" vs. "Freedom-Risking Licenses" ⭐
• "Contribution-Rewarding Licenses" vs. "Contribution-Exploiting Licenses"
• "Open-Source-Preserving Licenses" vs. "Closed-Source-Enabling Licenses"

I'd be happy to hear what you think, including suggestions!

Copyleft = pro-capital confirmed.