I’m active in circles associated with FSF and I often hear them saying research or academic software or programs must be licensed under GPL to prevent the work from being used in proprietary software.
But as a researcher I think that’s just involving politics in scientific work. I like BSD or MIT for research because it gives more flexibility for the users to use my work in anyway they see fit.
I think restricting my research work removes the point of it if it can’t be used freely by any person for any kind of work.
What do you people think?
I see it this way: by choosing BSD or MIT over GPL, you’re just protecting someone’s freedom to take your work and prevent people from using a continuation of it. They can still use it and change it, they just need to give their version to everyone, making even more tools available to everyone to use however they want. When it comes to science, too much is paywalled and restricted already. I wouldn’t want to let someone paywall any more stuff if I can help it.
Gpl ensures freedom.
You can always sell your code to someone with a different license if he wants to use it. If you just give it to him for free, he uses your code, time, effort, money and makes real money. You don’t see a cent. If you sell your code to him for a small fee under a differene licence than gpl, he can make real money and compensate you for your time. With MIT you just give it away for free, valuing your time at zero.
Gpl just ensures that someone else is working with you and not abusing you.
If you start a project with MIT, someone can fork it, create a billion dollar company with it and you are stuck with nothing.
In the real world, people copy your code anyway even if it is licensed under gpl and since they don’t have to publish it, it’s difficult to detect and sue them.
Gpl was, is and will be free.
As a professional researcher, you are already compensated by someone, e.g. the gov, and you could argue that it is the goal to publish your code for free such that anyone can use it to make a billion dollar company. Ultimately, you are free to choose the license.
With gpl, everyone profits and with MIT someone profits and probably not the author.
How about LGPL
It does not promote freedom as much as gpl.
You can always publish your code under gpl now and add a note that you are open to relicense your work. You can then later add the L to gpl or switch to MIT if you want to.
You can not switch from MIT to GPL.
My first packages were gpl. Then I got to know MIT and thought, wow, that is real freedom! Following that, I published my code under MIT until someone told me that gpl promotes freedom. If a project uses MIT, i may contribute but I won’t be the main author.
MIT is much better than proprietary. sometimes MIT is much more favorable than gpl. E.g. If you are a company and want to collaborate with others, you release your base code under MIT and anyone can just not release their additional contribution but everyone contributes to the base code.
he
This only applies to males buying/using your code?
Please use ‘they’ instead.
No, all beings. But the english language is difficult, sometimes you have to read between the lines and interpet it.
There is he she and it. When talking about someone, you default to he because always using he or she is daunting and does not yield any additional benefit.
Of course we could invent a new word to refer to someone but so far noone has done that. There are attempts to use “they” which dates back centuries but in modern english there is no word for it. Using they introduces another problem because they is plural in modern english.
If you browse my post history, you can see that sometimes I use he and sometimes she. There’s no clear pattern around it.
It’ll take at least another 10 or 20 years until we figured out what to use, if ever. At least english does not suffer from gender word endings like french or german. They have an even bigger problem. At Spanish have an ending for male and one for female but they haven’t solved it either.
If “they” wins, we have to introduce another word for the plural they, otherwise it gets complicated
Maybe we should look into asian languages, I haven’t looked into those too much
I don’t know why you dismiss ‘they’ so easily, as though it’s not a thing people don’t already use when they don’t know someone’s gender
Because they refers in english to more than one person. Using it for a single person is confusing.
Oftentimes, I can deduct the amount of people from the context but not always and oftentimes you need a lot of context to understand if it is plural or singular.
I simply think that, for me, refering to a generic singular person with a singular gender word is more important than using a generic gender word which is plural.
If someone else wants to use they, she can, but currently not me because everyone understands what I am talking about. It’s just a shortcoming of the english language and is far from valuing males more than females.
Btw: when publishing professionally, I always use “she” because that balances someone using he.
It’s not like singular they is a particularly new thing. And you could have the same issue of plurality being ambiguous with the word ‘you’, but people seem to be able to figure it out.
Just because there is already a singular and plural “you” doesn’t justify doing the same mistake again.
Why do you want to use “they” and not a new term? Something that is not ambiguous
I’m partial to adapting ‘hen’ from Swedish as singular they, or ‘hän’ from Finnish as a singular pronoun for people which doesn’t indicate gender at all, but I use ‘they’ in English as it’s more widely understood.
singular they has been in widespread use for centuries, you are fundamentally incorrect
Just because someone used it in the past, doesn’t justify using it today either. It’s like “we have to do it because it’s our tradition. It’s what our ancestors did”. That’s just not right.
We are (re)defining it nowadays and some people choose they and some do not (yet).
I’m in favor of a new word, I’m not sure why you want me to change. I simply say that it is a process, it is evolution, and we will see what wins in the future.
Why do you want me to change? Just be the example you want to see and either I like it and adapt it in the future, or I don’t.
In the long run the children determine the outcome anyway which means our teachers (or nowadays tiktokers) decide what will stick.
Yes, anyone else don’t bother
How would you feel if Microsoft (for example) took your research code and turned it into a proprietary software product that made them billions of dollars a year, which you could buy and run, but could not modify, inspect its operation, or make use of the modifications that Microsoft made to your work outside of their proprietary product?
Your answer to that question is what determines which license you should use.
I’ve settled on publishing all researxh-related code under AGPL. My reasoning is that academic research is funded by the public, so naturally the code should be public. Taken a step further, by licensing it under AGPL, I am ensuring that companies who may use the code for profit have to keep that code public and cant just privatize it and lock the public out.
Its unlikely anyone would ever even use my code though so 🤷
Ultimately it’s your work so it’s up to you how you want to release it. BSD/MIT aren’t really any more or less free than the GPL because they still guarantee the four freedoms. The GPL just prevents downstream projects from denying those four freedoms further down stream, which is seen as important in the free software movement, but it doesn’t have to be to you.
One thing to keep in mind with these permissive or “pushover” type licenses although they are free software licenses, normalizing them means that the proprietary software industry ultimately gets to choose what is allowed to be released as free software. There is a warning that “business friendly” free software licensing does not ultimately mean business will be friendly back, especially in an age where there is increasing concern over proprietary software companies taking advantage without either giving back nor funding upstream projects.
I personally do cc0 (though i do not have much published). i can not really be bothered to do proper licensing, and my prefered license (wtfpl) is not considered good (by admins, because it has the f word , boo hoo).
It’s your choice; there is no “must”. Yes, licensing your work with a fully free license like BSD means other people can profit off your work, but so does publishing your work in an academic journal. Copyleft licenses like GPL do nothing to prevent others from using your work to draw conclusions or without distribution to make a profit, either (though CC Share-Alike licenses do). You should also recognise that the likelihood of someone taking academic code and actually using it in something else is often (it depends on the field) very slim.
I was surprised by the fediverse obsession with copyleft and insisting that all projects ought to use it otherwise they’re traitors to open source and themselves.
Yeah I find GPL to be ironically non-free because it removes the right for anybody to use the code as they see fit, basically adding a restriction on the developer.
I find it absurd when people force me to use GPL for my research work and they aren’t even in the field to know that adding restrictions on something thats good for the scientific benefit is foolish. RMS isn’t funding research or building any kind of quantum computer, it’s the big corporations that do that. This is just involving politics in science.
Forcing GPL for research is foolish because nobody would be interested in implementing your work. After all, it’s those big corporations that have enough funding to take up on bigger ideas and research.
GPL is fine for basic software for consumers and I’d argue it should be used more but for research, its just a bad license.
Yeah I find GPL to be ironically non-free because it removes the right for anybody to use the code as they see fit, basically adding a restriction on the developer.
Sometimes, in order to protect everyone’s freedom, you have to put some restrictions on freedom. Like ‘you should not stab people’, or ‘don’t drive on the wrong side of the road’. I guess this is similar.
But also check who legally ‘owns’ your work. It could be the government, your university, or whoever funds your work. They might have rules on licencing.
I don’t think it’s a “bad” license for research; I just think a person’s ideals as far as open source licensing is concerned are their own business. It’s not like if you pick one over the other people are gonna die. So let people choose it according to their principles instead of fighting them on it.
But if a researcher wants to use GPL because they want anyone who uses the code to be forced to distribute the source code wherever they distribute the program, then that’s OK too. If the research is impactful enough, it’ll still get used.
I use MIT for all my scientific work. Very happy with it.
MIT allows corporations to legally exploit you, so in his favour - MIT is shot in the foot
