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.

  • TheOubliette
    74·
    6 months ago

    Software licenses don’t change ownership. That requires transfer of copyright, like with contributor agreements.

    Though I am aware that a small set of people seek less copyleft licenses because they think they’re better. They are usually wrong in their thinking, but they do exist.

    I’m not sure what you are referring to about ontologically bad. Has someone said this?

    • wagesj45@kbin.run
      81·
      6 months ago

      I’m not sure what you are referring to about ontologically bad. Has someone said this?

      I’m going by the vibe of the comments of people here who are generally anti-MIT. That the very nature of allowing someone to use your code in a closed-source project without attribution is bad. Phrasing it as “hiding their copyright infringement”, for example, implies that it is copyright infringement per se regardless of the license or the spirit in which it was released.

      • TheOubliette
        7·
        6 months ago

        Oh no I mean that there are companies that just don’t care about licensing and plod ahead hoping it’s never an issue. Like having devs build a “prototype” that they know uses AGPL code and saying, “we will swap this out later” and then 6 months later the “prototype” is in production.

        Personally, I make a lot of my personal projects’ code closed because I specifically don’t want it to be useable by others. Not for jerky reasons, but strategic ones. IMO common licenses don’t achieve what a lot of people hope they do.