Context:

Permissive licenses (commonly referred to as “cuck licenses”) like the MIT license allow others to modify your software and release it under an unfree license. Copyleft licenses (like the Gnu General Public License) mandate that all derivative works remain free.

Andrew Tanenbaum developed MINIX, a modular operating system kernel. 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. There’s nothing Tanenbaum could do, since the MIT license allows this.

Erik Andersen is one of the developers of Busybox, a minimal implementation of that’s suited for embedded systems. Many companies tried to steal his code and distribute it with their unfree products, but since it’s protected under the GPL, Busybox developers were able to sue them and gain some money in the process.

Interestingly enough, Tanenbaum doesn’t seem to mind what intel did. But there are some examples out there of people regretting releasing their work under a permissive license.

  • JackbyDevEnglish
    6•5 months ago

    My personal philosophy:

    1. Is this trivially small? Don’t bother licensing. People will just copy and paste regardless of what I do and I don’t care. But it gives you the option to change your mind later. Licenses are irrevocable. (I specifically mean not applying a license and maintaining all rights.)
    2. Is it a small part of a whole that people need to use? LGPL. But take this with a grain of salt. FSF says to prefer GPL.
    3. Otherwise, AGPL. If there was a more strict but also commonly used license I’d use it instead.
    • @dan@upvote.au
      3•5 months ago

      Doesn’t bother licensing

      That’s usually not what someone would want to do. The default if you don’t provide a license is essentially “all rights reserved”, and you’re not granting anyone else permission to use it in any way. Everyone that wants to use it has to get explicit permission.

      If you really want “no license” then you probably actually want to release it as public domain.

      • JackbyDevEnglish
        2•5 months ago

        For truly small random pieces of code I’m putting online, yes, that is what I generally want. (Also, that’s sort of presumptuous to believe you know what I want better than myself.) I’m not going to hunt down people who are infringing on projects like this: https://github.com/JacksonBailey/julian

        I made that because I was bored and thought I could easily solve a problem my wife described having at work. If someone copies and pastes it into their own project do I care? I mean, sort of? Not really. It’s just too small to worry about. Specifically leaving it unlicensed gives me.the freedom and flexibility to license it as I choose in the future and also pursue people using it if they refused to stop. (Although this example is particularly trivial. I probably wouldn’t do that. But that’s my whole point, I’m only choosing to do this with trivial code.) Applying a license doesn’t give me that flexibility though.

        (Apologies for typos, I just woke.uo.and don’t have my glasses on either.)

        • @dan@upvote.au
          1•5 months ago

          I’m not going to hunt down people who are infringing on projects like this:

          It’s more that people won’t use the code at all if there’s no license attached. For someone that’s looking for a snippet of code to reuse, it’s much easier to instead find a permissively licensed piece of code that performs a similar function, instead of contacting the author of the unlicensed code and trying to figure out what to do.

          Also, that’s sort of presumptuous to believe you know what I want better than myself

          Sorry - I meant to address it to readers of your comment rather than you. I edited the comment to make it clearer.

          • JackbyDevEnglish
            1•5 months ago

            I think you’re putting a lot of faith in people when you say that. When’s the last time you properly obeyed a license when copyijg and pasting from Stack Overflow? When’s the last time you think the average dev did?

            Also, no hard feelings about the presumptuous thing. Idk why I got defensive.

            And as an aside, I think I’ve heard that in some jurisdictions there is no concept of public domain and in others you cannot willfully put things into it. So licenses like CC0 or the awfully named Unlicense are better alternatives. (Bad name because Unlicense and Unlicensed are so close in spelling but wildly different.)