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ants_everywhere 2 days ago

You don't need to re-license permissively licensed software to include it in your code.

Apple, as far as I know, doesn't release the FreeBSD fork they use in Mac OS.

Companies generally use a ton of permissively licensed software and don't release forks of it under any license because the entire point of the license is that you can take the code, make modifications, and you have no obligations to give anything back when doing so.

There was an attempt to rebrand "free software" -- meaning software focused on user freedom -- as "open source" -- referring to software permissively licensed for use by corporations. This was the point of the OSI. [0]

> The “open source” label was created at a strategy session held on February 3rd, 1998 in Palo Alto, California, shortly after the announcement of the release of the Netscape source code....The conferees believed the pragmatic, business-case grounds that had motivated Netscape to release their code illustrated a valuable way to engage with potential software users and developers, and convince them to create and improve source code by participating in an engaged community. The conferees also believed that it would be useful to have a single label that identified this approach and distinguished it from the philosophically- and politically-focused label “free software.” Brainstorming for this new label eventually converged on the term “open source”, originally suggested by Christine Peterson.

So literally a decision by a committee of industry folks to play down the idea of freedoms or giving back and focus instead on the business case.

So they killed the ethical argument that favored copyleft licenses in favor of the business argument that favored permissive ones.

Now people are saying "hey it's unfair that you're not giving back." Fair enough, but that's an ethical argument. That's what the OSI was trying to get rid of.

The OSI approach has its place. We wouldn't have Mac OS or Google or Meta without it. But its place is allowing industry to standardize and to reduce costs. Those benefit consumers indirectly since we have fewer competing standards and reduced development costs can imply reduced end user costs. But that only works because each company can make improvements and exclude others from using those improvements; i.e. they can make proprietary improvements.

[0] https://opensource.org/history

ranger_danger 2 days ago | parent [-]

> You don't need to re-license permissively licensed software to include it in your code.

If the project you include it in does not use the same license, then I think you are technically re-licensing it.

But either way, I don't see how the rest of your comment applies to what I said.