Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

That's not true at all. Read up on the different licenses. The reason v3 was created was to fight tivoization, where the code is realeased, but the hardware prevents loading updated copies. From the point of view of a company licensing their source, v3 is much more restrictive. It requires a lot more things than a more free license. Linux is famous for rejecting it because of that.

Yes, there's a benefit that you are compatible with other more strict licenses, but that's like saying moving from GPL to proprietary is less restrictive because then you are compatible with the rest of your proprietary code at your company. Being more compatible with less free licenses is not more free.



The statement "GPLv3 only adds more restrictions" is false, because it also removes some restrictions.

Whether you think you should allow Tivoisation or not is a different matter to the plain fact that there are things that GPLv3 allows which GPLv2 does not allow.


This is off-topic to the comment jordigh made. Describing it as "not true at all" is worse than stretching; it's just wrong on its face. Re-read the original comment.


IMO, GPL2 has all the stuff against tivoization already there (preferred form for modification -- if I can't modify it for actual hardware, it's not enough).


then why can you not modify your tivo?

GPL2 hasn't had that problem present when it was written, and so tivo found a way to prevent practical modification, even tho they followed the letter of the license.

In my eyes, most, if not all open source software should use AGPL, and dual license a commercial license offer for those people who want to buy it for modification. You should contribute, or pay up, else the tragedy of the commons will occur.


AGPL is a market failure as I see it. I understand and sympathize with what that license is trying to do, but in practice, it just means that many companies won't touch that software (or will only touch it in a fashion where they don't modify that part of the system), meaning that there are far fewer adopters at all, and of those that adopt, fewer modify the software, meaning that it evolves more slowly than products with more used licenses.


Biggest problem seems to be kind-of unclear rules where it stops, especially when it comes to web applications (templates, linked assets, ...).

There are surprisingly few "trustworthy" comments on that out there, most stuff you find is a bunch of people going "I think XXX, but IANAL" on stack overflow.


Honestly, I'd sooner prefer to see everything licensed under BSD / MIT (Expat, X11) / ISC / etc. "copycenter" / "copyfree" licenses, for the simple reason that very few people in their right mind would use the AGPL at all (let alone in a project that doesn't involve writing network-facing software), and I'd rather see more software be compatible with as many free software licenses as possible. Aside from public domain, such non-copyleft licenses are a dream for writing free software, since the license doesn't get in the way of using such code in, say, Apache'd or GPL'd or MPL'd or whatever-L'd code.

(A)GPL, in other words, should be reserved for things that aren't meant to be reusable by other codebases. For everything that should be reusable, LGPL is about the limit for something being usable (and even that can be difficult to work with).


If GPLv2 were sufficient against Tivoization than Tivo would have been able to be sued for violating it.

It wasn't, and they amended GPLv3 to make sure that if Tivoization ever happened with GPLv3 code, they could sue for that.


Linux had no copyright assignment policy and they didnt put in the GPLv2+ future versions clause--they had so many contributors that they really had no choice but to reject it.


Linus is very anti-GPL3

Quote: "In a very real sense, the GPLv3 asks people to do things that I personally would refuse to do. I put Linux on my kids computers, and I limit their ability to upgrade it. Do I have that legal right (I sure do, I'm their legal guardian), but the point is that this is not about "legality", this is about "morality". The GPLv3 doesn't match what I think is morally where I want to be. I think it is ok to control peoples hardware. I do it myself."

For something quite recent: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaKIZ7gJlRU


I'm not saying he's pro, I'm saying for Linux it didn't matter, because be didn't have a choice. For got he didn't go with GPLv3 so no doubt he is against it.


That's a rather silly argument because it's his hardware...




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: