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submitted 5 months ago by renzev@lemmy.world to c/linuxmemes@lemmy.world

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.

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[-] baatliwala@lemmy.world 51 points 5 months ago

Permissive licenses have their place, a reason Godot engine for games has become appealing is MIT.

[-] ReveredOxygen@sh.itjust.works 4 points 5 months ago

It doesn't need to be MIT, just LGPL

[-] baatliwala@lemmy.world 9 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

I believe that still compels you to reveal your source code if you modify Godot itself and release games with that, don't quote me on that though. There's a chance studios want to create a custom implementation for in-house use.

[-] uis@lemm.ee 2 points 5 months ago

I believe that still compels you to reveal your source code if you modify Godot itself and release games with that, don't quote me on that though.

Well, they modified game engine itself. Makes sense.

There's a chance studios want to create a custom implementation for in-house use.

If game studios wanted to create custom implementation, they can do it instead of changing existing one.

[-] uis@lemm.ee 0 points 5 months ago

Free software licenses have their place, a reason Blender has become appealing is GPL.

[-] baatliwala@lemmy.world 11 points 5 months ago

Wut, you create animation not software using Blender

this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2024
1004 points (88.6% liked)

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