On open source licenses
26 Feb 2005 
terribly early in the morning 
Matt Winckler
Over the past few weeks/months, I have become increasingly disgruntled with open source software licenses such as the GNU GPL and the Creative Commons deeds. Why is this, you ask? I will tell you.
“Information wants to be free”, they chant relentlessly. Well you know, my mortgage payment wants to be free too, but that hasn’t happened yet either. “Information wants to be free” is a monumental lie. The truth is that information wants to be whatever its owner tells it to be. If its owner deems it good and proper to charge a fee for his information, so be it. That is perfectly acceptable, and “information” will not complain about the situation. If an owner decides to give his work away to the public, so be it! That is fine too. But here lies a problem that I believe many developers overlook: the GPL and Creative Commons licenses actually place some important restrictions on the information they cover. I believe most people look at these licenses as being synonymous with “free software–take it and do whatever you want with it”. I know at one time I did. But this is not what the licenses actually say.
Both the GPL and Creative Commons licenses insist that not only must the licensed piece of software be free, but everything it touches must be free also. You are not permitted to use a piece of GPL’d software in your application and then release your application under anything but the GPL. This includes using modularized systems–I was looking into using some PHP thumbnail software the other day as part of the Red Book. However, even though I wanted to leave the existing thumbnail system totally intact and just call its routines from Red Book, that is not permissable under the GPL because doing so would “combine” the works and mandate that Red Book then be released under GPL.
For people who actually want this to happen, that’s all well and good. If they’re so fanatical about their “free as in freedom” mantra, let them knock themselves out. But I think the danger comes from developers like I was a year ago, who didn’t really look past the surface of the GPL. On the surface it looks like it’s just saying that end users can do whatever they want with your code, but if you look a step further it stipulates that whatever touches your code must be contaminated with the GPL and become “free as in freedom” software.
This is exactly what I do not want. If and when I ever get around to publicly releasing Red Book source, I want people to be able to do whatever they want with it, including incorporating it into a proprietary system and selling it. If you can make money off my code and I can’t figure out how to, that is fine with me–at least one of us can. More power to you! If you want to incorporate my code, in part or in whole, into your own (potentially commercial) projects, go right ahead! I refuse to have some Communistic “open source” license dictating what people can and cannot do with my code.
I do not share the ludicrous “information wants to be free” mentality that most of the open source community holds dear. I live in a capitalist society, not a commune, and if I’m not going to try to capitalize on my own code, I certainly won’t stop someone else from doing so. To stop them would simply be selfish–”if I can’t have any pie, I’ll make sure you can’t have any either.” Stop whining like a three year old and grow up.
Down the GPL and Creative Commons. The Reds have become more subtle, but more pernicious than ever.