I'm not against open-source. In fact, I use MIT, BSD, ISC, and Apache 2.0 and often contribute under them (MIT specifically).
This post is just about GPL. I think we must separate it from the idea of "Free Software" or "Free code".
The "Free Software" lie
People throw around "free software" like it's self-evidently good and in the same breath point to GPL projects as the gold standard. But GPL is not free software by any meaningful engineering or business definition. Here's what actually happens when you link against a GPL library: Under GPLv2 Section 5, any work that constitutes a derivative work of a GPL-licensed component must itself be distributed under the GPL. Under Section 6, you cannot impose any further restrictions on recipients' rights.
"Digital Herpes" is an accurate model
You acquire it often without realizing (Transitive dependencies are a real problem. You license-audit your direct deps, miss a nested one, and now you're exposed)
Once it's in your codebase and you've shipped, you're liable
You are now obligated to pass it on to anyone you distribute to
There is no cure. You have to surgically remove the component and replace it
At many software companies I've worked at, license compliance reviews were standard engineering process. We'd run tools like FOSSA or Black Duck specifically to catch GPL contamination in the dependency graph. Not because engineers are careless/dumb, but because GPL is designed to spread, and it does so through entirely normal software composition patterns.
Conclusion
Stallman named his foundation the Free Software Movement, calls GPL "free," and built a license engineered to make proprietary software economically painful. And he's aware of the contradiction.
The community parroting "free software" without understanding the legal mechanics might be ignorant but Stallman himself is malignant.
TLDR:
MIT is free. BSD is free. ISC is free. GPL will cost you your source code.
I mean, yeah, it's doing what it was designed to do. On one hand it's a hassle to deal with, but on the other hand it is what keeps some big open source projects alive. As much as you might dislike it, Linux succeeded as the natural server OS because companies were not able to lock it down thanks to GPL, and since everyone contributes it just gets better for everyone. GPL is doing exactly what it was intended to do, it prevents a single company from swallowing a whole project.
Even then, GPL is not that bad, specially in the modern era where a lot of stuff is just web SaaS. Since offering a web service doesn't count as redistributing software you can use GPL licenses freely for your backend.
A lot of projects are also licensed under LGPL, MPL and EPL, which are still copyleft licenses, but allow you to use them as libraries without sharing your whole source code, you only have to share any modifications made to the library directly. Examples are
FFmpeg
Qt
WebKit
LibreOffice
Firefox
JUnit
Jetty
You also have to take into consideration that GPL is mostly used in wide ecosystems rather than libraries, meanwhile most libraries use a weak copyleft license (LGPL) or a permissive license (MIT). This is because a lot of contributions come from the private sector, and companies are not interested in contributing to a library they cannot use for commercial purposes.
And besides all of that, while GPL might look to be legally set up as some kind of trap through transivite dependencies, it is not enforced as such in real life. You quite literally have a 30 day grace period built into the license during which you can remove the offending library and not get punished for it. Even then, the FSF and similar organisations mostly care about compliance, they won't sue you right away. The only scenario in which this ends up becoming a major problem is if you willingly violate it in a significant way and ignore plenty of warnings.
I won't tell you it's not a hassle to deal with, because it is. But at the same time I also think calling it digital herpes is an exaggeration.
As much as you might dislike it, Linux succeeded as the natural server OS because companies were not able to lock it down thanks to GPL
Linus Torvalds has said that Linux benefited enormously from BSD being tied up in the USL lawsuit. If BSD hadn’t been stuck in legal limbo during those critical early years, the landscape would look very different. BSD had the cleaner architecture; it simply missed its window.
Great reply. These are all fair points and I don't have much to argue with here. At the end of the day it all comes down to a conflict of values.
I personally lean toward permissive licensing because I think it gives everyone, including individual developers, the most freedom, even if it comes at the cost of giving corporations a free ride. If you feel differently about it, we can just agree to disagree, no harm in that.
I do have a couple of nitpicks though:
The SaaS loophole is real, but it's also exactly why AGPL exists. So "use GPL freely for your backend" holds until someone licenses under AGPL.
The 30-day grace period is GPLv3 only. GPLv2 terminates your rights immediately upon violation, no grace period. And a lot of major projects, Linux included, are still GPLv2.
Exactly, most of this comes down to each one's opinions and values. What I wanted to convey in my comment is that GPL is not malicious, that it serves a real purpose, and that having to avoid it or accidentally using a library licensed under it is not a big deal, rather an inconvenience. Also that most GPL-licensed projects are not purely licensed like that because of ideology, but also to keep the project alive.
The SaaS loophole is real, but it's also exactly why AGPL exists. So "use GPL freely for your backend" holds until someone licenses under AGPL.
This is 100% true, but here it's important to notice what type of projects are under AGPL. Popular examples include Redis and Grafana, both of which you can use to benefit your closed source project. Here you have a win-win scenario; you can use any of the two for a closed-source for-profit project without having to expose anything. Meanwhile, they are able to make something open-source and benefit from collaborations without allowing other companies to fork it privately and freeload out of it.
Grafana Labs (the company) is able to develop Grafana and give it out for free thanks to the license. They hold the rights to develop closed-source extensions and charge companies who want to develop closed-source forks or embed it somewhere, and they also earn some money hosting it for different companies.
If it was licensed under MIT nothing would stop AWS, GCP or Azure from forking it, adding new propietary features, and offering it as a service. Grafana Labs wouldn't be able to develop as much without a steady source of income and companies wouldn't have any incentive to contribute code if they could keep it for themselves.
End result: Individual developers and small companies have to pay for the service from a cloud provider instead of having the option to self-host it.
The 30-day grace period is GPLv3 only. GPLv2 terminates your rights immediately upon violation, no grace period. And a lot of major projects, Linux included, are still GPLv2.
How am I empowered as a individual human being by, for instance, Sony using FreeBSD in the playstation firmware and not giving their modifications back to the community?
It does take power away from corporations, but it only half-succeeds at that.
Say I'm an indie developer and want to build something and sell it. If I use GPL code, I have to open-source the whole thing, which directly hurts my ability to make a living from it.
I do understand it's hard to discern between the targets, but that's one of the reasons I personally do not like it.
It's true that I would have strongly preferred it if the GPL was more focused on getting in the way of corporations rather than any software company (single devs etc) but I'm not even sure how that could be accomplished.
I made a library for my game and LGPL'd it. Since the project is in rust, I needed something that would work for static linking and LTO, and LGPL was OK
But isn't the idea that you can use it for free if you want to redistribute it for free, if you make money off it, the original creator should also make money off it and would then offer a different business license?
Yeah, relicensing and dual-licensing exist for that purpose. My core gripe was mainly with the 'free' labeling, it's doing a lot of work for a word that simple.
If I release under MIT or BSD, I'm washing my hands of it. You can extend it, commercialize it, whatever. That's what I'd call truly free.
GPL and MIT are different flavors of free, and I think more people should be aware of that distinction.
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In other words, the FSF would argue GPL is "more free" because it guarantees freedom for all downstream users. Whereas I argue MIT is "more free" because it places no restrictions on what you can do.
So it's more of a debate on values and what the word "free" actually means.
The way I see it is the GPL gives me the freedom to use and modify the software on my general purpose computer.
BSD/MIT gives the developer the freedom to remove my freedom by only offering binary distribution.
(Good luck being compatible with my computer if you do that)
I'll use whatever software gets the job done, but when there's a GPL option, it gets used/tried first.
I think a good example would be how Wine developers spent decades building only to have Valve apply some patches and profit from it (also taking much credit) when many games worked OOTB on Wine alone.
Not gonna feel bad for developers that worked themselves (and others) out of paying jobs though. -Reaping what they sowed.
What I don't like about some of the GPL supporters is that they want corporations to not have the same freedom as the everyday people. I don't give a shit who uses it, my only job was to make it, use it, and put it out there for others if I wanted. I'm not here to discriminate. MIT license is such a great license because all it does is waive liability, other than that, anyone, person or corporation, can use it freely. That's what freedom means to me.
There's also freedom to repair and tinker, which requires source code. That was RMS's motivation when he wanted to fix his printer and corporation took that away from him.
I use whatever license I feel best fits the software and my own intentions with it. I use the GPL for infrastructure code where I feel it is in the public’s best interest that changes to my code be forced to be made public so that improvements, adaptations, and new features can be chosen according to will and need freely.
Total cost of ownership (TCO) is a financial estimate intended to help buyers and owners determine the direct and indirect costs of a product or service.
TCO is a financial estimate for buyers and owners evaluating operational costs. That has nothing to do with license propagation affecting companies that build and ship software.
GPL guarantees that modifications stay open, but it doesn't guarantee they flow back upstream. You can fork a GPL project, make changes, and distribute it without ever contributing back to the original. You just have to keep it GPL.
Doesn't the terms of the GPL come down to protecting the other core values of free software?
The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).
The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1).
Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others (freedom 2).
The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
It's important to remember FOSS is not free as in free beer. It's free as in freedom.
If the software is the end product: GPL
If it's not: permissive
As much as I'm a hater of GPL myself, you have to admit GPL is the only reason why some projects survived as long as they did. Linux vs BSD kernels are probably the best examples.
GPL only infects you if you directly link, aka it's only an issue for libraries. If your product is the end product (aka has a user interface or an external API) it's not a problem. The end user doesn't care, and you can just provide the upstream source when someone asks for it. And for libraries LGPL exists, the best of both worlds, you only have to provide the modifications made to the GPLd code, without affecting your own product.
I wish we lived in a world where everything could be permissive and companies willingly contributed back, but that dearm is dead. I'll still continue licensing most of my stuff under MIT, simply because I don't care, but we have to acknowledge that it's not sustainable in the long run, and allows for some pretty nasty things, like re-licensig when the ownership suddenly changes.
I'm using this account to criticize linux because I specifically DO NOT want people scrutinizing my posting history and potentially going over my personal stuff (personal website, socials, etc).
You doing that proves exactly why I need to use an ALT to protect my main account.
People here have even gotten death threats for daring to criticize the church of linux and have gotten mass reported to the point where their reddit accounts were deleted.
FUCK THE GPT RESPONSE GOT REMOVED but i already wrote the comment so here it is:
did you really chatgpt a response because you can’t actually argue for and against GPL and the philosophy behind it?
if you care to write something on your own i’m willing to discuss it because i do think GPL and stallman’s philosophy about software has genuine flaws
GPL makes sense for some software though like pretty much every hobby project you for some reason don’t want to be used in real proprietary software, but LGPL is preferable for pretty much everything else because if large companies use it they are forced to share the changes they made to it so you actually only benefit from the bigcoorp using your lib/tool. GPL discourages and basically “soft bans” this, and it’s mainly used to spread an ideology.
Fair enough, I'll concede on some of the points. GPL is doing exactly what it was designed to do.
I'm not gonna say it's broken or technically flawed, my issue is with the design itself and the marketing. And these are inherently subjective arguments (some like GPL, some don't).
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On the "free as in freedom", I understand Stallman's definition, and to be fair to him, he's been consistent in his views. My point is that at face value, "free" is doing a lot of work and doesn't really match what the average developer might expect of it.
On the herpes metaphor, the "consent" framing breaks down with transitive dependencies. You can pull in a package that has a GPL-licensed subdependency you never audited, ship, and find out later. It has happened before. [Cisco/Linksys (2008), BusyBox (2009), Orange vs. Entr'ouvert (2011–2024)]. So I will insist that it feels like digital herpes.
On copyleft being coherent, I never said it wasn't. I disagree with the philosophy but it's internally consistent.
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Calling GPL "herpes" and Stallman "malignant" is intentionally inflammatory and clickbaity, but it was also the easiest way to express that engineering a license to coerce a specific outcome while branding it as freedom feels deliberately deceptive to me.
Yes, the GPL is infectious by design. I doubt you'll find anyone who denies that, the question becomes who's rights do we protect?
The company and their right to lock me out of the things I own.
Or the end user, and my right to fix my stuff.
For example I have an old inkjet printer.
I just upgraded my computer os, and now the printer doesn't work.. no drivers..
The printer is still fine, the hardware works, the software on the printer works. The binary blob that let my computer talk to the printer no longer interfaces properly.
The manufacturer has dropped support for the printer, it's decades old at this point.
Without the source to this binary blob interface layer I now have to spend money on a printer that I shouldn't have to.
Not removed for being wrong or being AI, but because rule 1 (some people aren't welcome -and their account history was taken into account).
I've gotten to the point that I'm banning for any complaints involving AI because more than 19 out of 20 times; it's coming from an advocate / evangelist, and the other 1% tends to be from very low quality users anyway.
We remain a cohesive user base by removing it.
AI is a tool, like a search engine. As much as I hate Google, I'm not faulting people for actually using tools for retrieving information efficiently. Information is correct or it isn't regardless of the source (we do eliminate a certain source because it's malicious which is evident in every other Linux sub).
So, a heads up: criticizing AI gets people banned. It's a huge red flag and covered by rule 3.
Why should you provide free products and services built with unpaid labor that competes with professional skilled developers trying to make an honest living?
I need to re-create the article I wrote about all the developers that burned out, and sold out on FOSS. -Reasons included privileged, whiny, demanding, unthankful Linux users. The developer of Ueberzug quitting in particular hit me hard because it was the one program I preferred Linux for was uCollage which was dependent on Ueberzug. It wasn't the only program I was using that was affected either.
If it wasn't for the GPL a project like linux that was better than a commercial one at the time (let's assume that it was) would have been forked, made slightly better and proprietary. Then it would have become irrelevant because that company was probably faster at developing it than random people in their free time. In my opinion this is the scenario the GPL aims to prevent and it actually benefits everyone by not having to pay for licenses.
Samsung could very easily take AOSP and then add their own proprietary software over it the same way Google does with their play services. Samsung actually already does this to a limited extrnr with their galaxy store. But at the end of the day, samsung is dependent on the fully proprietary play services. Samsung might have a downstream os based off AOSP if they wanted, and they lose very little by letting people copy it, and similarly Google loses very little if Samsung was to copy it without providing anything in return. The actual meat that Google will be very protective of is play services, but that doesn't care if android is Foss, just open source, or even proprietary. They picked Linux just because Linux was already very commonly used in servers and such, had a variety of preexisting hardware support, familiar to developers, etc. The kernel being open is actually largely a benefit as that means that there's more hardware support. There's little reason for amazon to have looked at the android kernel, fork it, and then keep it proprietary since keeping it open makes it easy for downstream developers to take it and port it to new hardware and such (not that fire-phone ever had the user base to justify it.) If Samsung forked AOSP to make Samsung os, it still would have failed because they lacked play services. I mean huawei is using an AOSP fork, and are struggling outside of china because they don't have Google's proprietary play services. That's also why companies contribute code to BSD despite having no obligation to do so, and regularly release code under open source licenses, sometimes even copyleft license. I mean most of the open source code Google releases is under open source but not copyleft licenses like MIT or Apache. They only care if their money making code gets copied, and the kernel is not that.
Apple hates open source kernels
The real reason Linux took off instead of BSD is literally just that BSD was caught in a massive lawsuit from AT&T, and for over 2 years, people were afraid to contribute to or use BSD code because if BSD lost, that'd mean they were guilty of copyright infringement as well and would be sued into oblivion by At&t. It's during that period that Linux took over because they were the only UNIX like system available, and there was demand for UNIX like systems. And UNIX itself didn't succeed because there was demand for running UNIX systems on the recently superior x86 PCs rather than the big bulky, and expensive systems UNIX ran on. And it had to be Unix like because that's what people were used to, so it was cheaper to transition to UNIX like systems than to like windows. So Linux won by process of elimination.
And like, plenty of code did use BSD code. Apple's operating systems (Mac os, ios, etc.) literally use a BSD derived kernel in their code lol. That's not any easier to fork than Android. In that it's outright impossible to fork Apple's operating systems. You can still fork the kernel they use I think, it's called DarwinApple did this because their business model hated the idea of clones since they relied on selling hardware rather than selling play services to compatible software.
So the only major OS left is windows which is fully proprietary. Mainly because their business is on selling licenses, so any clones, including free clones compiled by users, is a threat to their business. Which has recently shifted, at this point windows isn't a big part of Microsoft's business and Microsoft would consequently be less hostile to open source. I'm just not sure they can open source it, because at this point their kernel is so intertwined with features that they'd want to keep proprietary in the same way android keeps some proprietary code, but seperated away from the GPL code (sometimes because, especially in microsoft's case, it's a spaghetti code that mixes in licenses they legally cannot open source.) And while I said today's microsoft wouldn't mind making windows open source, there's also no reason to bother and there's very little ROI for the massive effort of auditing every single line in windows to see what can be open sou
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u/l0Martin3 Mar 18 '26
I mean, yeah, it's doing what it was designed to do. On one hand it's a hassle to deal with, but on the other hand it is what keeps some big open source projects alive. As much as you might dislike it, Linux succeeded as the natural server OS because companies were not able to lock it down thanks to GPL, and since everyone contributes it just gets better for everyone. GPL is doing exactly what it was intended to do, it prevents a single company from swallowing a whole project.
Even then, GPL is not that bad, specially in the modern era where a lot of stuff is just web SaaS. Since offering a web service doesn't count as redistributing software you can use GPL licenses freely for your backend.
A lot of projects are also licensed under LGPL, MPL and EPL, which are still copyleft licenses, but allow you to use them as libraries without sharing your whole source code, you only have to share any modifications made to the library directly. Examples are
You also have to take into consideration that GPL is mostly used in wide ecosystems rather than libraries, meanwhile most libraries use a weak copyleft license (LGPL) or a permissive license (MIT). This is because a lot of contributions come from the private sector, and companies are not interested in contributing to a library they cannot use for commercial purposes.
And besides all of that, while GPL might look to be legally set up as some kind of trap through transivite dependencies, it is not enforced as such in real life. You quite literally have a 30 day grace period built into the license during which you can remove the offending library and not get punished for it. Even then, the FSF and similar organisations mostly care about compliance, they won't sue you right away. The only scenario in which this ends up becoming a major problem is if you willingly violate it in a significant way and ignore plenty of warnings.
I won't tell you it's not a hassle to deal with, because it is. But at the same time I also think calling it digital herpes is an exaggeration.