Android 16 QPR1 rolled out in binary-only form to phones that are blessed by Google over two months ago, and it's only just now that they bothered to actually release the source of their open-source operating system.
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And it is very important to remember: being able to do this is the reason why companies have brainwashed the Internet into choosing the MIT license for everything.
With GPL-only code, the world would be much nicer for all of us.
Nobody needed to "brainwash" me into choosing the MIT license for my projects. I choose it because I disagree with the philosophy of the GPL, and think that true freedom requires the freedom for others to make their own licensing choices. You are quite welcome to disagree with that stance, but please cut out the inflammatory language. It's not charitable towards others and it isn't healthy for good discussion.
If the Linux Kernel was licensed permissively, none of the phone manufacturers would've released the source code of their kernel trees.
The GPL is the reason we have Android custom Roms today.
This is probably the biggest and most successful example of utilizing non-permissive open source licensing for the public good - I’m curious why so many places I’ve worked have insisted on avoiding using libraries with GPL licenses in favor of MIT licensed projects, while at the same time hosting all of their services on different flavors of Linux.
It definitely seems like MIT is favored by big corps but at the end of the day, they’ll use GPL licensed code if it’s the best option. Which makes me wonder why it’s so demonized.
See also, FreeBSD: Plenty of commercial offerings around it, no source for most of them, because the license doesn't require it. For example, there's no source for the Playstation kernels/userlands released by Sony. They only upstream some bug fixes that would be too onerous to keep in their private fork.
That's entirely speculative.
The speculation has merits and makes sense. But is speculative nontheless.
It's the tolerance against intolerance paradox, basically. The freedom to take away freedom. I'm leaning towards not giving that freedom, but it's complicated.
A good example of that is Apple moving from bash to zsh, because bash moved to GPL 3 which prevents locking down devives. It was very specifically because they wanted the freedom to take away their users' freedom.
I will say here something I have said and has proved unpopular before. The complexity is mainly something of scale. I would propose more permissive MIT style licensing for small companies, and something stricter for larger companies. It is hard to enforce (which was the main complaint I got), but it's not impossible and I think it is better than the current state of affairs.
Despite anyone's personal views, it's undeniable that corps favour a Free they can use as they wish. It's also fairly evident that they make this favour known through their culture. Brainwashing may be a bit far, but only just.
All for naught, I fear, while LLMs consume all and regurgitate license-free to vibe-coders everywhere.
Then you care about a different kind of freedom than GPL proponents: licensing freedom, rather than user freedom, basically. There is no 'true freedom', as it comes down to the point of view; no licence will give you both at the same time.
User freedom isn't really that though. It's corporate goodwill. If a company uses GPL code and doesn't release it what is the enforcement mechanism? A lengthy court proceeding that can go either way and will likely bankrupt the less wealthy party. Or if they are in another country they can tell you to piss off and you have no way of getting the code. We see this all the time with China. In essence, they are the same but one allows you ask nicely and hope that the corporation is feeling generous.
> true freedom requires the freedom for others to make their own licensing choices
You're mixing up freedom and power. See https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/freedom-or-power.en.html for an explanation.
Like tolerance, he irony of freedom is that you cant give others the freedom to limit anyone elses freedom. Thats actually the way to maximize freedom
So what's your rationale for denying recipients true freedom and choosing to shackle them under the terms of the MIT License?
This is an example of a "When did you stop beating your wife" question. It assumes only "true freedom" can stem from a license other than the MIT one without any attempt to arrive at the conclusion that the MIT license doesn't reflect "true freedom."
You may disagree with the overly-derogatory term "brainwash", but I think it is true that corporations have been spreading FUD around coopyleft licenses for a while now, and the balance has tilted toward permissive licenses for new projects.
> You are quite welcome to disagree with that stance, but please cut out the inflammatory language. It's not charitable towards others and it isn't healthy for good discussion.
It is no more inflammatory than the coordinated war that was waged against copyleft licenses on tech fora and social media for more than a decade before hackers started to realize en masse that it was all a ploy to extract free labor from them. There are legitimate uses for permissive licenses and I still use them for those. But the big players certainly pushed them well beyond those cases where they made any sense. More than enough evidence has since emerged that prove this to be the case.
It does no one any favors to deny the presence of bad actors and their malintent behind the utter mess we find ourselves in right now. I find it disturbing that whenever people express their frustration regarding this, there are attempts to shoot them down with accusations of inflammatory language, political correctness, etc. But the truth is that the big players have caused far far more damage than any inflammatory citicism they face for it now. What's actually unhealthy for good discussion is the dystopian censorship of criticisms because the truth make some people uncomfortable. Every bit of harsh criticism they receive here is something they willfully and rightfully earned.
> hackers started to realize en masse that it was all a ploy to extract free labor from them.
There are at least three different groups of people here:
1. Those paid to write permissively licensed software - not free labour.
2. Those who are happy to be free labour. I read a comment by a BSD developer about being very proud and happy to be able to buy a games console that ran on a BSD derived OS.
3. Naive people who are are shocked when someone creates a proprietary fork of their code. It is something that they explicitly gave everyone permission to do, and it is something that has been happening for decades - I can think of Windows using BSD network code in the early 90s, but there are probably much earlier examples. Apple's OSes are very high profile examples since 2001, and Nextstep before that.
The last group have themselves to blame. Did they not take the trouble to understand a legal document? Do they know nothing about the history of their industry? Do they takes steps to stop it - for example by doing releasing updates under a copyleft license?
I agree with you that big players do push licenses that suite themselves, but it relies on either deliberate choice or foolishness by contributors for it to work. I also think copyleft is usually of greater benefit to society.
> What's actually unhealthy for good discussion is the dystopian censorship of criticisms because the truth make some people uncomfortable
I think you're missing the point.
There are developers who prefer MIT not because they're a "big player" or "because truth make people uncomfortable", people simply have different preference for what the ideal license is for their project.
If you cannot deal with that, that sounds like a you problem, but judging by your comments, you're not exactly gonna re-evaluate with a different perspective, since you seem unable to understand others have different ideas and opinions than you.
Agree 100%. I gave up on the GPL before I even knew what exactly it was about because of the zealotry of many of its proponents. I would even go as far as saying that without the FSF, GPL-like licenses would be much more common.
If I zealously advocated for you continue breathing, would you strangle yourself to spite me?
ideally -- without a legal system using force to stop people using knowledge (IP laws), -- i would be on your position. in fact, i used to agree with you.
but in the current reality around us, i believe it's a more nuanced issue.
Some of the reason why the MIT license etc. is more popular surely has to do with the license text itself. I can understand the MIT license, and my corp lawyer can easily understand all the consequences of using something under MIT license. With the GPL, not so much. It's verbose and complex and has different versions.
Would it really be impossible to have a license with similar brevity as MIT but similar consequences as GPL?
Brevity maybe, but ease of understanding no. Copyleft licenses interact with copyright law in ways that permissive licences just don't need to. The closest you can get is probably MPL-2.0.
The GPL is particularly bad here as it pretends to define what is or isn't a derivative work, which is outside the scope of a licence but within the scope of a court. The EUPL was created partly because EU directives bound the viral clause in ways the FSF won't admit to, although that one isn't simple either (I'm not a fan of its compatibility clause).
No, the MIT license is short exactly because it has so little restrictions. You simply can't encode the desired result of GPL into 160 words like MIT can.
> I can understand the MIT license, and my corp lawyer can easily understand all the consequences of using something under MIT license.
Sounds like you need a better lawyer.
The consequences of the GPL are not all that complicated. In most cases it boils down to offering the source if you distribute the code outside your organisation.
> In most cases
Therein lies the problem. When dealing with the law, you don't want to be relatively sure that you won't go to prison or won't get sued for $1M, you want to be completely sure.
Something like the GPL is complex and non-standard as far as its interactions with the legal system go, because it is essentially a sort of hack of copyright law. If it goes before a court, you have no idea what might potentially happen. So rather than deal with that kind of complexity and uncertainty, you'd use something under MIT or Apache License that is just much better understood.
There are whole industries built around the notion that “License: MIT” is everything that is required to meet the notification requirements in the license. So I wouldn't say that the MIT license is easy to understand.
> I can understand the MIT license, and my corp lawyer can easily understand all the consequences of using something under MIT license. With the GPL, not so much.
Any IP lawyer who hasn't come across the GPL yet is probably not worth listening to.
I mean, would you listen to a bridge engineer who hasn't yet heard of a calculator? Sure, they may understand their shit, but if they haven't heard of calculators yet they are clearly not in the industry.
Any IP lawyer who hasn't yet read the GPL and formed a professional opinion on it isn't equipped to handle IP matters at all.
Right, I think people misunderstand "free" when they are dominating versus "free" when they are the smaller player. One is a tool for domination and capture, the other is a tool for freedom ESPECIALLY against a bigger player.
Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by laziness.
Personally, I MIT/BSD my stuff because, well... it means I don't have to think about it ever again. If I do GPL, I have to make sure that I'm following the rules set out in that license and making sure others who have based their code on my project have done the same.
And that's, like, work, man, especially if you don't have a foundation and legal eagles on your side to double-check that everything's kosher.
Linux is an exception, not a rule, in how GPL is usually handled in FLOSS projects.
>If I do GPL, I have to make sure that I'm following the rules set out in that license
If its all your own stuff you don't really have to care about the license. Otherwise the rules are pretty simple, include a GPL license and if requested by a user supply the source code (which you can even charge some money for).
>and making sure others who have based their code on my project have done the same.
If you don't care what others do with it, you don't have to enforce it.
As the sole copyright holder (A)GPL only gives you more options.
> and making sure others who have based their code on my project have done the same.
I do not believe the GPL requires that you make sure others who fork your code follow the GPL's rules.
It places restrictions on those others, but does not require you verify that those others follow the restrictions.
Why it seems that MPL is left out of the discussion? I find its clauses a reasonable middle ground.
This is absurd.
Most of, if not all, code that was released today was written by Google. Then can release it, or not release it, regardless of license.
Android was never a community project with outside contributions. The license does not limit the original authors.
I'm not saying Google shouldn't have released them immediately. But GPL vs Apache vs MIT has absolutely nothing to do with it.
I mostly agree, unless the new release modifies GPL code submitted by other entities than Google - their licensing of that code under GPL would force Google to release the rest too.
Except Google also violates the GPL so that's not the only relevant factor.
> it's only just now that they bothered to actually release the source of their open-source operating system.
Do you really need to have snark for an open source project?
Open-source projects maintained by individual developers working for free absolutely deserve more respect than that, but ones maintained by the most profitable company in the world [1] do not, especially when they go out of their way to change from doing the right thing to doing the wrong thing [2].
> ..., especially when they go out of their way to change from doing the right thing to doing the wrong thing.
And let's not forget this part. Android is a member of the mobile platform duopoly. Another similar project - Chrome - is almost a monopoly among web platforms. Both these projects exploit the open source label and most people's false belief that open source somehow equates to respect and protection of user rights. (Philosophically, it's only free software that cares about user rights. Both projects are textbook examples of non-free open source software.) This actually protects these projects to some extend from criticisms and penalties against the dark patterns that they employ to corrupt and exploit both the mobile and the web ecosystems. They absolutely don't deserve the same considerations as the passionate and underpaid small teams or individual maintainers.
I thought we were talking about the Android project? /sarcasm
It's Google, I think they've sucked up enough of our digital lives and economy to handle a bit of snark.
So why do you so badly want to use their operating system to care what they do and how they license it?
It's their work, their OS and we have others.
Yes. Precisely because it's "open source", not "free".
A project which uses and depends on a lot of other third-party OSS? Maybe.
Yes, open source requires snark just as much as tone policing
Have they been in breach of GPL terms during the intervening two months?
Most of Android isn't GPL, so I would guess not.